The anti-hero we all need

Preached on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20A), September 20, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Kelly Moody.

Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

Willamette Vineyard, by Erin Hanson

Jonah doesn’t come across as the healthiest leader, does he?  I kept thinking as I read this text this week that I’m glad the prophet Jonah isn’t our rector.¹  

Jonah doesn’t even like the people to whom he is sent. He resists his call to preach repentance at every turn, drawing innocent sailors into the conflict, and then he pouts when God effects what God intends through his reluctant leadership. Throughout the story, God is repeatedly merciful, not only to Jonah, but to the sailors, and to the Ninevites.  But all we can really say about Jonah is that he is cranky. Not even cranky in a characteristically prophetic way, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Amos or the other Hebrew prophets, who engage extreme language and performative actions to persuade their people to turn to God, but particularly cranky, in that Jonah’s objection is not with the people at all. It’s with God. 

God is not following the rules. The Ninevites are wicked and deserve punishment, and it’s God’s job to make that happen. And everyone knows that God does not change God’s mind. It says so in the Torah.² The prophet Samuel said so, too, when he confronted Saul about his wickedness and oversaw the selection of a new king.  But in this story, God’s mind is changed anyway. And aside from the theological problem this presents, it puts Jonah in an impossible situation, calling him to declare that doom will come upon the Ninevites, his enemies…only for God to relent, making Jonah look like a liar and a fool. 

But Jonah is especially upset because he knew God would change God’s mind and wouldn’t follow the rules.  He knew because he was aware that above all, God is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and abounding in kindness and faithfulness to the thousandth generation.³ God said so to Moses at the giving of the law, and Moses remembered it again when they were wandering in the wilderness and the next generation of people were complaining.⁴ Jonah knew because he knew the psalms of David,⁵ like Psalm 86, and 103, and 145, which we sang this morning, all of which repeat the same truth about God: The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. 

This attribute of God perplexes Jonah. He wants a God who is consistent, and follows the rules.  A God who exerts power and gets things done, and doesn’t show mercy to those who don’t deserve it, especially Assyrians in Nineveh. And yet it’s by God’s mercy that Jonah survives a storm, and a whale, and scorching heat. 

Now it’s unlikely that Jonah was a real person, but I think that makes his story all the more interesting.  Why would a scribe write the story of Jonah reluctantly preaching repentance to his enemies and complaining about it, if not to express something important about God, and about humanity?

After all, this merciful attribute of God often perplexes us, too. We want God to be fair, consistent, and on our side, not theirs. We want God’s mercy, but not for everyone.  For those who have bested us or wounded us, we might prefer God’s retribution instead.

Many Christians have concluded that God is retributive and transactional in the Old Testament, while Jesus the merciful, rule-breaking one who preaches love and anti-establishment religion.  And yet, that clearly isn’t the whole story, is it? Just ask Jonah. 

At sunset tonight, Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement begins, and tomorrow afternoon, the book of the prophet Jonah will be read in its entirety. Those present will likely be encouraged to identify not with wayward Jonah, but with the Ninevites, whose repentance demonstrates integrity and amendment of life in response to a God who is gracious and merciful and full of compassion. Ironically, the Ninevites model the behavior people of God should emulate, not Jonah. 

And yet, there is a Jonah that persists in all of us.  A Jonah who needs to make it about him. A Jonah who doesn’t want people he doesn’t like to receive God’s mercy. A Jonah who might prefer a transactional yet fair God who gets things done to a God who exercises compassion.

Jonah is not a fool we can just ignore or marginalize. He’s like the anti-hero of the Hebrew prophets, and his career as a prophet becomes even more pronounced and effective through his literary impact on us all these years later. Because when we really explore Jonah’s theological complaint with God, we begin to see our own. God is not fair, not  limited to who we thought God was… not confined by the rules we thought we wanted God to follow, or the conception of God we liked best. God is gracious and compassionate, even when we wish God would smite the wicked instead. The God of the Old Testament is also the God of the New Testament, revealed to us in Jesus, and to be in relationship with this God is to be humbled over and over again, like Jonah, as we wrestle with our own theological complaints, and surrender to God’s mercy.

Historically, Christians have projected their theological complaints about God on others instead of claiming them, and wrestling with them honestly. It can sound something like this: “The God of the Old Testament was exacting and angry and picked favorites, but Jesus preached love and forgiveness and welcomed everyone.” Or this: “The Jews believed that following the law was the most important thing, but we know that God cares about mercy and justice.” Or even this: At the time, the religious system of the temple was transactional and legalistic, but Jesus came to change that…” 

And ironically, it is not the Ninevites that help us Christians find a different way to tell the story of our salvation, but Jonah. By his theological protest, Jonah calls out our anti-Jewish projections, and invites us into a more honest story about our relationship with God that doesn’t rely on scapegoats.  One that requires us to grapple with our complaints about when and how and to whom God shows mercy instead of projecting them on others. 

As Christians, we believe we are invited into the unfolding story of God’s mercy and grace through our identification with Jesus, who we believe is God. And on this solemn day of Jewish atonement, a Sunday in which we Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, I think it’s worth remembering that God’s favor toward us came by way of one who belonged to a different group of people, with their own story about God.  Their engagement with the God of mercy began long before ours. It’s distinct from ours, just as Nineveh’s story was distinct from Jonah’s, and it isn’t finished yet. 

Jews and Christians share many stories, like this one about Jonah. But we are also fundamentally different, and our texts invite us to see that God is generous across differences in ways that can offend us. So maybe, as the antihero-prophet does his work on us, we Christians can grapple with our offenses more honestly, and learn to tell the stories of God’s mercy without making another group of people the foil in the plot.  Maybe we can allow these stories to destabilize our assumptions, and draw us out of ourselves and our temptation to make it all about us. Maybe we can meet God in Jesus, and step more fully into the unfolding story of God’s abundant mercy.

Jonah may not have been the healthiest leader.  But he turns out to be an excellent and effective prophet in spite of everything, even to us, all these years later. I’m still glad he’s not our rector, but I’m also really thankful that our rector has an image of Jonah tattooed on his arm. Because a little bit of Jonah persists in all of us, and the good news is that there is a God who persists, too. A God whose persistent orientation is toward mercy and grace. A God who will not end the story with our theological complaints and offenses, but will instead keep calling us into a bigger story of redemption and grace. 

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¹ Thanks to The Christian Century for this inspiration: https://www.christiancentury.org/voices/terrible-leaders-bible
² Numbers 23:19, as noted in JPS’s Jewish Study Bible.
³ Exodus 34:6-7
⁴ Numbers 14:18
⁵ Psalm 86:15, 103:8-11, 145:8

You just have to understand this!!

Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19A), September 13, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Painting detail depicting coins in the Ca’Doro palace in Venice

“Bless us with anger,” Bishop Gene Robinson prayed, on Sunday, January 18, 2009, in Washington, D.C. The setting was a “kick-off” concert celebrating the inauguration, two days later, of a new president. 

“Bless us with anger.”

The bishop asked God for the blessing of anger in response to discrimination against “refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.” When we witness this discrimination, may God bless us with anger.

But how can anger be a blessing? Anger so often is destructive. Anger motivates acts of violence. Anger in even small amounts can be corrosive. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you flip them the bird: This is corrosive. It damages, however slightly, our social fabric.

Often enough I feel angry. Often enough I understand the function and value, if not the “blessing,” of anger: we humans evolved this sharp emotion. Anger urges us to fight, to make ourselves bigger, to assert, to overcome. Anger has been described simply as the feeling you have when something is in your way. There’s a barrier in front of you, and anger helps you remove that barrier.

But anger, in the quarter century since 9/11, is running rampant. Anger is now chronic. Anger seizes our social media, driving us all wild with resentment and frustration. We seethe with anger at our enemies, at many, even most, of our political authorities.

This seems to be an era of forever wars, of forever anger: there is no end in sight for the unjust and ridiculous war in Ukraine. There is no end in sight for the atrocious violence committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, armed with weapons purchased with funds from the United States. There is no end in sight for the chaos and appalling violence of the endless civil war in Sudan, a war nearly everyone else in the world ignores. 

There is no end in sight for the churning anger and rage of our polarized political world, where every news cycle offers an answer to this wretched question: who can behave the most reprehensibly? There is a political candidate here, and another there, who rises above the vitriol and runs an ethical, honest campaign. I have donated to one of these candidates, and I hope he wins. But our nation furiously rages against itself, and the wins are few.

How can anger be a blessing?

Let’s begin with the anger Bishop Robinson prayed that we would feel: anger on behalf of survivors of discrimination. That anger is a blessing when it leads to effective action, to powerful allegiance, to the presence of justice. When injustice is in our way, anger shoves it aside.

But we hear about a more straightforward, personal anger in today’s Good News. Of course, anger on behalf of survivors of discrimination can certainly be personal: maybe you’re mad about our culture’s rejection and abuse of trans persons because you yourself are nonbinary, or your spouse is trans, or your child is genderqueer. But the anger in the troubling parable of Jesus is personal in a communal sense: it is the anger of a whole community of faith, outraged that their values were crossed by one of their own members.

This anger is not sparked by outside agents acting badly, by an online culture-war bigot, or an unnamed masked ICE agent. The community is angry because one of their own has misbehaved. He received mercy, but then he turned around and denied that same mercy to his companion. That crossed a line. That was a terrible thing to do.

Of course the characters in the parable are not whole communities, but individuals, so it could hit us as a moral tale about one-to-one injustice, one-to-one anger: there’s a king, and he has some slaves. But the first hearers of this parable were a first-century Christian community, maybe a network of house churches, and the lesson is about all of them, about the values they all share, about the power those values hold over all of their imaginations, about how dead-serious Jesus is that all of them, all of us, should be acting on our deepest beliefs, our deepest convictions.

We must not deny others the mercy we ourselves have received! We must not!

To get this point across, Jesus gets vivid. He gets provocative. He turns up the heat. He already had us squirming with the bit about a king and his slaves: that economic system rightly repels us. It’s worse than even our own unjust capitalist economy. The first listeners of his words were doubtless not wild about kings and slavery, either. They lived in an occupied land. They knew in their bones how powerless and vulnerable most people were in their day.

But Jesus goes further. The king calls the unforgiving slave “wicked” — an extreme take on his character. And even worse, the king hands the slave over to be tortured until he repays his debt, a debt which originally had been forgiven. 

And even worse than that, Jesus wraps up his rant by saying, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” The Father will torture us if we don’t forgive as we have been forgiven! It’s all so extreme, so wildly over the top.

That is how important this teaching is: Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus raging, here. It’s as if the evangelist is pleading with us, “Please, please, you just have to understand this!!”

The king extends mercy to his slave, who is drowning in debt. But hold up: please note that debt here is not just a metaphor: we could read this whole parable as a homily on economic justice and fully understand its true meaning. We are a Christian community, and are taught in general to forgive and be merciful, but that forgiveness and mercy is chiefly about economic justice.

Our values are not just about being kind and gentle neighbors, about doing to others as we want them to do to us, about living life with gratitude and hospitality, about spiritual transformation and warm community celebrations. We do proclaim those values! But closer to the quick, for us, most essential for us, as followers of Jesus, is this: God creates a splendid world that should be bountiful and nourishing for everyone, not just the few. Every human person should rest under a roof, and eat at a dinner table, and learn at a nearby school, and find gainful work that draws on their gifts and skills. Economic justice is the beating heart of Christian ethics.

And so we are taught to be enraged when that value is crossed. We are angry not just to feel a proud sense of righteous outrage, but to then shove that injustice out of the way, so that all are fed, and sheltered, and educated, and employed.

We rightly concern ourselves with welcoming everyone who comes in these doors, for we follow the one who ate with disreputable people and empowered women and other survivors of economic injustice to his abundant table. But we pray for the blessing of anger to go deeper, to work ever harder, to do whatever we can, always with God’s power, to mend this damaged world, so torn asunder by inequality, greed, and selfishness. 

In a few moments we will confess together our sins — the sins for which we share mutual responsibility, common culpability — and then we will embrace in the Lord’s peace. We do not have an anger ritual in our Sunday mass! Be reassured: the lesson today is not that we should rage against one another. No, it’s not that at all.

It is this: Nourished by this abundant Table that groans under the weight of God’s grace, our bellies full and spirits forgiven, we are to rise up in common purpose, and yes, if necessary, in righteous anger, to “forgive our brother or sister from our heart,” that is, to forgive their debts: to shatter the economic vise that presses so mercilessly on our companions, on our neighbors, on our fellow citizens, on children and families in Gaza and Sudan, in Ukraine and Cuba, in south King County, in Uptown, in this room, in your pew.

So yes, Lord, yes — you who trampled death by death, you who ate with outcasts and raged against the forces of oppression — yes: bless us today. Bless us to rise up and right the wrongs of this world. Bless us to thunder out of here on your mission of mercy.

Bless us with anger.

How do we become better, more loving people?

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18A), September 6, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Kelly Moody.

Forgiveness, by Sofiya Inger

How do we become better, more loving people?

Maybe a more churchy way of asking this question is this: how does conversion of life happen? What do we imagine is happening when we say the confession each week, for example?  

I ask because in spite of the beautiful words of our liturgies and prayers, I think we in the church have often struggled to imagine what these prayerfully chosen words actually mean in our everyday lives. 

We suffer from a lack of imagination. 

So take just a moment and try to imagine what repentance looks like in your life… or forgiveness… or conversion. 

What comes to mind? 

Some of us might think of global conflicts that demand our best efforts at peace, or unjust systems we must fight to dismantle.  Certainly, a willingness to persist in these ways is an important aspect of a hearty theological imagination. I think of people like Desmond Tutu, who could imagine a world without apartheid, and worked to make it a reality.  Others might think of ruptures in particular relationships, or personal failings or blind spots that have led to conflicts, and the necessary work of reconciliation and amendment of life. Perhaps the most well-loved depiction of that kind of conversion is Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol; and his  imaginative journey through past, present and future.  

But where is God at work in all of this? How do we imagine that God is involved in our conversion toward better, more loving people?

By the time the prophet Ezekiel was serving as a sentinel for the house of Israel, where God was in all of this was a central question for the exiled people to which he was sent.  The first temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed.  The people  had acknowledged their collective waywardness, and attempted to turn back to the Lord, but they were still suffering the effects of exile, still longing for the legitimacy of a kingdom.  All they could imagine was what they had lost. When would restoration come?  What would it take to change course? 

Despite the many historical and cultural differences between Ezekiel’s time and ours, I don’t think these questions are unfamiliar to us in our own cultural context.  We, too,  lament the waywardness and failure of our political leaders. We, too,  consider what it will take to collectively change course on the climate crisis, for example. We regularly seek God in prayer, and in various ways we ask, “where are you in all of this? What will it take for change to happen? How do we become better, more loving people?”

Now the Bible includes a few different ideas about how humans can change. There’s the conditional, behavior-oriented language of the commandments in Exodus or Deuteronomy: If you do this, then you will live. If you don’t, then you will die.   Then, there’s the somatic language of wisdom literature, like the Psalm from this morning: Incline my heart, turn my eyes, make my feet go in the path of righteousness. Texts like this seem to concede that following God’s commandments requires some divine assistance to get us to do what is required. In the text from Ezekiel today, humans amend their lives by following the advice of God’s chosen prophet. Ezekiel just has to tell the people the words he hears from God, and then the people can choose to turn from their wickedness based on his intervention.  

But in other parts of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, people become better by God’s direct initiative- he will inscribe his law on their hearts¹, create in them a clean heart², give them a new spirit³, like a divine surgeon.   

So there’s a variety of ideas, but in each of them, there is a creative tension that must be held.  We human beings are simultaneously rough around the edges, and radically transformed by our relationship with God. Living into the tension between the two requires a robust theological imagination that can hold both truths at the same time. 

Biblical scholars call this mysterious tension dual agency, or co-agency: a cooperative blend of human and divine action⁴ that enables us to act according to God’s desires.  Christian theology calls it grace. 

Both challenge our modern understanding of the self,  and our western cultural value in acting self-sufficiently to accomplish whatever goals we set our minds to.  Both involve engagement with God

“Self-help is America’s religion,” historian Kate Bowler says.⁵  There is a religious fervor to the self-optimization that pervades our culture. Ourselves, our communities…everything around us becomes a project that can be improved upon if we just lock in, and work a little harder. This is a kind of theological imagination, but it’s a thin one; a transactional, mechanistic understanding of ourselves and others that flattens our humanity into machine-like simplicity, and reduces our capacity to be present to those around us in love, just as they are.    

In contrast, Jesus says to his disciples, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” It is not conditional, or individual. It is communal.He inspires them to imagine themselves in communion, even when they are apart, because they are, and to work together even when they are opposed, because they are yoked together. He echoes the same idea from the Hebrew Bible that God acts in cooperation with human efforts to forgive, restore, and strengthen us. And so, with God’s help, maybe we can imagine becoming people who can tolerate the rough and unfinished edges of others, but can also tell them the truth about those edges. With God’s help, maybe we can imagine becoming people who delight in the sheer gift of grace, and simultaneously lean into the longing for a restoration that is beyond reach in this life. With God’s help, maybe we can imagine becoming loving people who can hold the tension between the two truths that we are both rough around the edges and radically transformed at the same time. It’s in this mysterious sacramental tension between human life and divine life that grace enters in and transforms us. 

I am a native Tennessean, whose ancestors hail from Southern milltowns and Appalachian hollers, and after Dolly Parton died last week, I watched with appreciation and awe as the tributes to her memory poured in from every corner of our divided country.  Her rags-to-riches trajectory could easily be mistaken for a classic American tale of individual self-actualization, and at least a few journalists have depicted it that way. 

But Dolly Parton told a different story about herself- a story that inspired people, whether they were making it big or down on their luck, because it held the tension between the rough edges of her upbringing and her radical rise to fame. She claimed them both. Maybe one of the most captivating things about her was her ability to gently engage with nationally divisive topics, leaving imaginative room for people from opposing camps to enter into dialogue with her. When she sang about sexism in the music business, people who might never have given a feminist the time of day listened. When she wrote songs for Transamerica and Love Rocks, people who did not understand the queer community listened. When she rewrote her musical show, Dixie Stampede, to avoid glorification of the antebellum south,  people paid attention. 

One journalist said it like this:  “In her life, as in so many of her songs, Parton celebrated understanding and forgiveness as a means of transcending rancour and shame.⁶” 

I read that line and I thought, “what would it be like if the church was as well-known for celebrating understanding and forgiveness as Dolly Parton was?  It’s in all of our songs and liturgies, after all. 

What if we could hold the tension as well as she did between the rough edges of humanity and the radical transformation we believe is possible in Christ?  

What if we could claim them both, welcome them both? 

Can you imagine it? 

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¹ Jeremiah 31
² Psalm 51
³ Ezekiel 36
⁴ For more insight about self, agency and the spirit, check out Carol Newsom’s The Spirit Within Me and Reed Carlson’s Unfamiliar Selves.
⁵ Consider Bowler’s thought-provoking work as presented in this brief video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3tZR1ZY1N8
⁶ Read the full article here: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201204-how-dolly-parton-became-the-worlds-best-loved-celebrity

Why aren't we talking about fascism?!

Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17A), August 30, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

Take Up Your Cross, mixed media collage by John Kohan

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?”

That’s what someone was asking, over the past few days. I was working near Columbus, Ohio, as one of the trainers for the College for Congregational Development in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.

We covered lots of topics: congregational identity, Episcopal identity, how to map the neighborhood around your church to discern where God is sending you next on your mission, how to look at your congregation through different lenses to see different things — things like where you are on the organizational life cycle. If you’re wondering, St. Paul’s Seattle is currently in the “healthy stability” stage of our organizational life.

We learned a tool to discover who is coming to our congregations to develop their faith, and how best to nurture and lead them; and another tool to discern how the faithful enter their worlds of family, work, neighborhood, and civic life, and what (if anything) they do in those worlds that’s different or better because they said their prayers with us.

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?” the participant said again. He mentioned this concern in his small group, in our main plenary sessions, and in his written evaluation of the week, which he filled out at the end of our time together. He seemed frustrated because, he reasoned, if we aren’t talking about the crisis of fascism currently threatening not just livelihoods but lives in our nation, a crisis trapping and killing people along the Strait of Hormuz, along our southern border, inside our urban centers and neighborhoods, just outside these doors, everywhere – if we aren’t talking about this global calamity, then, this participant said, we are blessing the status quo. We are going along with all the outrageous things that are happening. We are part of the problem.

He may as well have listened to all of our presentations about congregational development and all things church, and then said, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

I stand by everything we said and taught last week, but I have to concede: this might be a fair hit. Our materials address real and serious problems, problems that persist in 2026, but when a resource is just five years old (and some of ours are ten or more years old), it already feels outdated and insufficient. It’s not enough to lament all that’s going on. It’s not enough to read the headlines and volunteer and vote. Something more seems to be required. It feels insufficient for all of us to move through life, day by day, while these crises explode around us, relentlessly, for more than a decade now.

Yesterday I baked cake for coffee hour, a preoccupation that consumed much of my afternoon. Why wasn’t I talking about fascism?

You may have planned this afternoon to include quiet recreation, maybe some reading, maybe a nap. I’m sure you need the rest, but why aren’t you talking about fascism?

This is a good and just question to ask of ourselves. And yet, it is also more than a little annoying. Matthew the evangelist doesn’t tell us how Peter responds, internally or verbally, to the rebuke Jesus shouts at him. But I imagine he felt startled, confused, maybe ashamed… and maybe also annoyed.

They were in Caesarea Philippi, an important city named after a powerful tetrarch, a worship shrine for the god Pan and other deities, a city by a natural spring that feeds a tributary to the Jordan River. Gushing water flows out of a cave, and people in the time of Jesus imagined that the watery cave was an entrance to the underworld — a “gate of Hades.”

It was there, at that “gate of Hades,” where pilgrims revered powerful men and powerful gods and powerful spiritual forces — it was there that Peter had said that Jesus was the Messiah, the Anointed One, the One who rises above all other human and spiritual authorities. And it was there that Jesus had told Peter that he would be the rock on which Jesus would build his church, a rock against which the gate of Hades could never prevail. 

How iconic, how beautiful, how evocative of power and purpose, was this place; and how powerful these happy praises, given by Jesus to his best lieutenant!

It’s likely that Peter had been giddy with personal satisfaction and pride: he got the answer right! He named Jesus for who Jesus truly is. And now Peter is the Rock, the foundation. 

Imagine, then, Peter’s shock, his dismay, even his outrage when just a moment later Jesus turns on him and says “Get behind me, Satan!” Imagine your own dismay if you came to church so that you can get quiet, open the holy book, pray for the world, receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, and go back to your life of work and family, but here at church you encounter me, or my friend in southern Ohio, or some other scold, tapping your shoulder and snapping, “Why aren’t you talking about fascism?”

I do not think you would thank anyone for yelling that at you. I think you might feel annoyed, irritated, affronted, defensive, exasperated. I confess I didn’t feel persuaded or galvanized by this person’s accusation last week. I didn’t enthusiastically nod in agreement, saying, “Oh, you’re right, we should be talking about harder things, more urgent things! You’re so right!” I just inclined my head. I muttered something noncommittal like, “Yes, mmhm.” And now he and I are back in our different worlds, and he has no idea whether his objection had any effect on anyone.

But it did. It does. Here I am sharing it with you, even running the risk that I will annoy you by pressing us all with his valid concern. We are not free to only come to church, and say our prayers, and sing our hymns, and break bread together, and delight in baked goods and fresh coffee, and go back to our lives, with nothing changed.

More is expected of us.

Jesus makes this plain. “If any want to become my followers,” he says (and I can hear the exasperation in his voice: in my reading of the passage, he is still scolding Peter) – “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?”

We aren’t to come to church and bask in glory, marvel at the majesty of God, and call it good. We must “deny ourselves,” and “take up our cross,” and “follow Jesus.” Follow him where? Well, to his cross, of course: that is where he is headed.

Jesus does not stay north of the Galilee at this natural spring, at this shining monument to divine and human authority. He doesn’t linger there, musing on his own identity as the one who supersedes the human and spiritual authorities worshipped there. No, gets up and goes to Jerusalem, that tinderbox of political upheaval and intrigue, that dangerous city that kills the prophets, that imperial fortress that squelches dissent. Jesus walks right into danger, knowing full well what will happen.

After all, that’s why Peter got in trouble: he balked when Jesus said plainly what was about to happen: He will undergo great suffering, and be killed. “God forbid it, Lord!” Peter blurted. “This must never happen to you!”

But that’s not the way of Jesus. That’s not what church is. We are not a spa, a retreat center, an escape. We do give shelter, literal and spiritual, to everyone who comes here, and to nearby neighbors. We do make marvelous music and swim in soul-restoring silence. But there’s always more. The cross looms. We need to talk about fascism, yes. And we need to confront it. Organize against it. Protest and fight it. Stand firmly alongside its victims. Take up our cross.

But hear this Good News: We do this together, and we are fed and strengthened together, for the struggle. Nobody goes it alone, or does all the work. This Table is laden with food that feeds our deepest spiritual hungers. But that food is also energy for the struggle, electrolytes for the race, protein to help us lift the cross.

I am not sorry I spent an afternoon baking sweets for the sweet; and if you receive the blessing of a nap later today, I commend your good fortune. You need it, of this I’m sure. And I am not sorry our College for Congregational Development kept to its curriculum so that we can support good faith leaders in good congregations. Our life with Christ is not all duty, all drudgery, all battle and no shore leave.

But we do need to talk about fascism, and work against it. We do need to go to Jerusalem, wherever Jerusalem might be in our own time and place: the Jerusalem of our neighborhood mission, the Jerusalem of our advocacy against government oppression, the Jerusalem of our daily resistance to the forces that destroy human freedom and take human lives, the Jerusalem of lifting up members of this faith community in prayer and pastoral care.

For all of this good and hard work, this Table beckons. Come and receive, come and feed. Get nourished. Get ready. Pack whatever provisions you need for the journey. Soon we must be on our way.

The relationship is secure

Preached on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16A), August 23, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Kelly Moody.

Byzantine style mosaic of Christ

Last summer, I had the opportunity to see “the David.”  You know, the famous marble statue in Florence, carved by Michelangelo?  He depicts David just before his battle with Goliath, tense, and turning to aim his slingshot.  It’s a massive work of art, considered a renaissance masterpiece. Michelangelo’s famed precision and attention to detail was clearly apparent as I observed the statue from the gallery floor. But what I didn’t know was that the carrera marble block out of which Michelangelo carved the David was rejected by two other sculptors. The block was darkly veined, and riddled with small holes.  And it was too narrow to accommodate the sort of figure that most sculptors envisioned. These imperfections forced Michelangelo to consider a different approach than he might have otherwise, and that unusual approach is part of what makes Michelangelo’s David such a masterpiece. No other sculptor was able to make anything of it.  In fact, David’s back is missing a muscle because of a previous sculptor’s unsuccessful attempt to carve the stone. Michelangelo’s work has been celebrated for centuries, and it was possible, in part, because he was willing to embrace what others thought was ruined, and work with the imperfections in this difficult piece of stone. 

“On this rock I will build my church,” Jesus says to Peter, who is not known to be the most solid of the disciples.  Scholars have debated what Jesus is referring to when he says “this rock.” Is it Peter, or Peter’s faith in Jesus, or, perhaps the rock is Jesus himself? 

The text is ambiguous.

 In any case, Peter’s recognition that Jesus is the son of the Living God is apparently a foundation strong enough for Jesus to work with, in spite of any imperfections or ambiguities. Their relationship is secure. 

That is not to say that Peter’s understanding of Jesus will not waver when faced with suffering and fear, because it will.  It’s not to say that Peter will not be disappointed when Jesus does not do what Peter expects a messiah to do, because he will be.  Peter struggles to recognize Jesus and what he is doing as often as he succeeds.  But Jesus is willing to embrace it all, and work with the imperfections.

The word Jesus uses to describe what he is building on this rock is translated here as church, but it can also be translated as assembly, or congregation.  So, another way of hearing this verse might be, “upon this relationship, where we recognize one another and work with the imperfections,  I will gather my people, my congregation, into a secure relationship.”  

We get a snapshot of Peter’s relationship with Jesus today in the gospel of Matthew, but what I find more compelling for those of us seeking to follow Jesus all these years later is Paul’s relationship with Jesus, and his recognition of Christ in the gathered body of the faithful in his letter to the Romans.

 After all,  Paul did not know Jesus before he was crucified.  He came to know him after his death, in visions, and dreams, and the goodwill of other Christ followers.  And in this letter to the Romans, Paul is writing to people who he likely never met, either… and identifying with Christ in them.  Because all of them– Peter, Paul, these Romans– all of them are captivated by their belief that this Galilean teacher named Jesus was trustworthy, and was still present, and could be known. They were willing to risk persecution and rejection to meet him. And it’s gatherings of the early church, like this one in Rome, receiving Paul’s letter, that have passed down the words and practices of our faith that we still rely on today:  Baptism. The pattern of our Eucharistic prayers. The laying on of hands. The collecting of scripture, like the phrase we heard today: we who are many are one body in Christ. 

Upon this multi-generational relationship, Christ still gathers his congregation, and is made known to us, too. 

Now throughout the course of history, many have given up on meeting Jesus in the church, because the church has failed to speak up at times… failed to bind worldly powers and loose the chains of injustice. Sometimes the church can appear to be an affinity group a or social club.  Other times, it just fails to articulate the most important thing. 

My friend was visiting a church for the first time, and upon attempting to dip her bread in the communion wine at the altar rail, the minister holding the chalice pulled it back and said rather sharply, “We don’t do that here.”  

It was an impulse, with no intention of harm, but the outcome was startling. My friend’s eyes filled with tears.  She returned to her seat, smarting from the interaction.  At first, she felt shame and rejection. Then she felt anger.  She hadn’t done anything wrong!  How was she supposed to know what they did or didn’t do if it wasn’t explicitly stated?  Then came rage.  Surely this is not how Jesus would treat an outsider who was seeking him.  

I hope you have not had an experience like this, not here or anywhere, but if you have, I am sorry.  It’s worth lamenting when the church misses the mark and falls short of its calling.  And it's important that we, the church, continue to repent when we fail. 

Because Jesus still gathers his people and is made known among us.  He still reveals himself in the words of scripture, read in a community of people earnestly seeking to follow him. Jesus still seeks out those who are looking for him, be they solid disciples or somewhat unreliable characters.  He still reveals himself in bread and wine. Jesus still calls and empowers people in every generation to join him in loving the world, and loosening the chains that restrict our lives. 

And this is the rock-solid foundation for our hope and persistence; that Jesus promised to gather and bless and empower all who come to him, and seek to know him. He was willing to take what others rejected, and work with the imperfections. 

So if you find yourself distracted today by imperfections, doubts and failures, be they yours or someone else’s, take heart. There’s more to the story.  The church is a place where we learn to recognize Christ in one another, and trust that the relationship is secure.  

"Bless us with anger..."

Preached on the (transferred) Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, August 16, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

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

Icon by George Makary

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Our parents bless us. That is to say, our parents hand things down to us. Some of their gifts are conscious: they deliberately try to raise us a certain way, to instill certain values. They teach us how to treat our friends. They teach us what’s important, and what’s not. They teach us who is kin and who is an outsider. Sometimes they teach us how to vote, how to think, how to behave at dinner, even how to feel.

Other things parents give us are unintentional, unconscious… and they’re not all blessings. Sometimes parents let their children down in ways that give them deep-seated anxiety, and make it hard for their children to form strong emotional bonds with people. My parents formed secure emotional attachments with me, but I think they unintentionally taught me to suppress emotions, midwestern-style. I had to learn from somebody else that big feelings are useful, and good; that if I learn to work with them, they help me make better choices about my life.

Today we celebrate — we call “blessed,” we bless — a human being who is many things, as all of us are, but whose identity as a parent perhaps looms largest in our imagination. Saint Mary the Virgin has many titles, but perhaps her chief title, her primary claim to fame, is Mary the mother of Jesus, or Mary the mother of our Lord, or (we Christians came up with this title a bit later on) Mary the Mother of God.

Mary’s identity as a parent concerns us deeply. And as the mother of Jesus, she blesses him with many things. She also hands down to him, as all parents do (even absent or problematic parents) her worldview, her history, her legacy. 

She has the most to do and to say in the Good News according to Luke, where she gets to sing the mighty Magnificat, a triumphant song of praise that echoes her Hebrew forebear Hannah. (Hannah is yet another mother who blesses her child Samuel with powerful and provocative blessings!)

But back to Mary, and Mary in Luke’s Gospel: Mary’s Magnificat is an aria, not a recitative: She takes all the time she needs to sing God’s praises for bringing about the triumph of justice and peace through her, by her inconvenient and potentially scandalous pregnancy, with her own physical body.

We’ve never met Mary as Jesus did: obviously, whatever relationship we may have with Mary the Mother of God, the Queen of Saints, none of us knew her in first-century Nazareth. It is difficult to find the historical Mary behind ages of Marian devotion.

Mary captured the medieval imagination across several centuries, so much so that an ordinary Christian could mistake her for the Holy Spirit, given how powerfully she reigns as a source of consolation, comfort, and inspiration; as the majestic Lady Wisdom; as the divine feminine who pervades the created world with fecundity and beauty.

Mary is often, for us, a Madonna sparkling in a robe of stars, the Queen of Saints, iconic and beautiful, rising above our mundane world in sublime serenity. Think Queen Elizabeth the First, the virgin queen who said she was “married to England” and ruled her people wearing splendid gowns of fine silk, velvet, silver, and pearl. Her noble face was inscrutable, majestic, fierce, and her elaborate white makeup covered all human blemishes.

But Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, most likely looked nothing like that, and had a much more earthy character. She was a brown woman, probably quite short of stature, a survivor in a patriarchal world that routinely ignored or mistreated her. Physically she probably looked more like AOC than Elizabeth the First.

Now, I share the love many of you feel for Mary the Queen of Saints. Marian devotion is part of who we are in this Anglo-Catholic parish. When we revere Saint Mary; when we find her standing triumphantly on the moon; when we contemplate the astonishing mystery of the incarnation in which Mary’s womb contained “heaven and earth in little space” — all of this Marian piety powerfully deepens our understanding of God and humanity, both. We can begin to grasp how we, too, are ordinary human beings who nonetheless shine with God’s glory.

But it is also helpful to reflect on the historical Mary of Nazareth, a human being, born of a human being, who gave birth to a human being. Her son was divine and human. Mary of Nazareth has gifts for us. She inspires good questions for us to consider: What did Mary give to her son? How did she bless him? How did his life, ministry, death, and resurrection reflect her influence?

I have some ideas about all of that.

Mary gave her son the trauma she suffered in her very body as a peasant-class young woman in an occupied land. Just in the last decade or two, we have learned that trauma is not just an emotional (let alone a merely intellectual) experience, or memory. Trauma is experienced by, and remembered by, our bodies. The author Resmaa Menakem, in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, studies the trauma of slavery and white-body supremacy suffered by black and brown bodies, and transmitted by those bodies to their children, and their children’s children.

But Menakem goes back even further in time, prior to the arrival of African people on this continent in 1619, and traces the trauma suffered by white bodies, inflicted by other white bodies, in medieval Europe and then in colonial America. Only generational trauma, held and transmitted in physical bodies, can explain both the invention of whiteness itself — for race is nothing but a social construct — and the ability of white people to oversee the atrocious genocide of red bodies, the destruction of black and brown bodies.

Only body trauma can explain how white people considered lynchings a form of entertainment. Only body trauma can lead white people to stop seeing people of color as human beings, and endorse and perpetuate wretched acts of violence against their bodies.

Menakem leads his readers toward authentic hope that we can — all of us, in different ways — overcome this legacy of trauma. But we can’t do it until we face it, and work with it, and teach our bodies to heal from it.

So: back to Mary of Nazareth, peasant girl, survivor of oppression, inconveniently pregnant in a time when such a pregnancy could mean her early death. (We also arguably live in a time like that.) Mary was the mother of Jesus. She blessed him with her trauma history, among other things, among other blessings.

Given what we know from the Gospels, those other things were lovely: she blessed him with courage, with gumption, with faithfulness. She was not a serene porcelain statue, but rather she bore in her body the kind of strength Michelangelo appreciated when he created the Pietà. Mary held her son’s body with her body, after his death: Mary was mighty. And so, in turn, was he.

But again, she had a hard time of it, given her social location. And so I think we can assert that she blessed him with the identity of an oppressed person, as well as the passion to stand up for other oppressed persons, and give his life away for them. She blessed him with resilience, with a spirit of endurance, perhaps also the spirit of serious engagement with and alongside humans in peril.

In John’s Good News Mary organizes the rescue of a couple and family from the debilitating social shame of running out of wine at their wedding party. That may seem like a trivial problem for us, but in that honor-shame culture, the family was about to be in extremely big trouble. Perhaps they would be ruined by such a serious social faux-pas.

And at that wedding she turns to — who else? — her son, born of her body, and conscripts him into service, blessing him with a sense of urgency and solidarity with his neighbors in need.

And so we praise Saint Mary today, not only because she is the Star of the Sea, but also because Mary the earthy mother blesses us with many of the powerful and provocative blessings she handed down to her son.

I believe Mary’s blessings are named in a prayer written by the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, a bishop who suffered plenty of trauma in his physical body. He led a blessing prayer just before the inauguration of a president whose black body was about to carry into public service an immense amount of courage, insight, and compassion, all of it grounded in generations of trauma suffered by his ancestors, on this land.

Here is Bishop Robinson’s prayer.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon…

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

The sound of silence

Preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14A), August 9, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

Walking on Water, by Alan Reed

I will begin with three little scenes, and one song verse, about silence. Silence in its many forms.

After the fire, [there was] a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

From the works of Simon and Garfunkel:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

From the novel “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger:
You’ve even both been up here on many a weekend [since Seymour killed himself], and though we’ve talked and talked and talked, we’ve all agreed not to say a word.

After Jesus had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone.

Here in this room, we attract an uncommonly large number of people who enjoy silence. They — we — might say that we find God in the silence. Or we hear God (ironically enough) in the silence. But if you don’t hear God in the silence, and especially if you feel anxious about that, as if you’re missing out, well, come sit by me. Often, often in our long liturgical silences, I need at least the first full minute to simply let my mind and heart catch up with my body. In our long silence after the second reading, my body has been in this room for some time — what, about twenty minutes? But my mind and heart are anywhere but here.

They are wandering downstairs, where there is always one thing or another thing to do. Or they are obstinately holed up in my office, fretting about who knows what, and honestly, who cares? The mundane worries and headaches of a working priest. Or my mind and heart haven’t even entered the building yet, because they are hovering in the skies over Minnesota, wondering about a member of my family, or they are poking around in my past, trying to find one of my parents, and tell them something I couldn’t tell them when they were in this mortal arena.

But then they finally catch up, my mind and heart, and they find me sitting over on that bench, in the silence; and they integrate with my body again, usually when I am gazing through those little clear windows at the tree branches in our labyrinth garden, or when I’m trying to breathe a little prayer for whoever is causing the blaring emergency vehicle to tear around the corner of First and Roy.

I wonder (I admit, with some envy) if some of you are masters of silence, old pros, able to gather mind, body, and heart into one cohesive being, right from the moment the silence begins. Maybe you are silence artisans, almost immediately tuning in. (Or is it tuning out? Do you expertly tune out all that is not relevant, all that does not matter, and listen in the silence for the life-giving heartbeat of your companion in the pew?)

I pray that each of us, the silence amateurs and the silence professionals alike, will be blessed by the experience the prophet Elijah enjoyed: he “heard” the sheer silence of God’s ineffable presence. He wasn’t daydreaming, or fretting. He was savvy: Elijah was not shocked that God wasn’t in all the expectable, dramatic places, the hurricane and the earthquake and the fire. Surely the terrible God of the Flaming Thornbush would, or should, thunder down upon us in a deafening and blinding theophany! But Elijah seemed instinctively to know better. He heard God in the sound of sheer silence.

Another translation says God was present in “a still, small voice.”

Then, in the wake of that silence, Elijah repeated his prayer to God, word for word. He may not have been changed or transformed by the divine encounter, but neither was he daunted. He stayed on point. Perhaps the silence gave him fortitude and courage.

I think Simon and Garfunkel would have gotten along with Elijah. In perhaps their most famous song, they do not celebrate silence itself, as if all we need to feel better about the world is some quiet time, but rather they lament how our noisy human world cannot hear the wisdom of the prophets, because that wisdom is whispered in the sound of silence, and we are too disconnected and distracted to hear it. We need to hear important things in the silence.

And as for J.D. Salinger, in his novel about a busy, brilliant, and traumatized family, he notes that they don’t talk about the devastating suicide of their eldest son and brother. Instead they “talk and talk and talk, and agree not to say a word.” They keep a dull and numbing form of silence you and I know well: the silence of idle chatter, the silence of our preoccupation with anything and everything except the thing we should really be talking about. An unconscious silence; a mulish or obstinate silence; an anxious silence. If God’s voice is in that silence, we will have a hard time hearing it over the white noise of our restlessness.

And finally today we step into a tossing boat, buffeted by high winds, and we see coming toward us that greatest master of silence, Jesus himself. Utterly in control, Jesus had dismissed the crowds and compelled his close friends to put out to sea, while he withdrew to pray in silence and solitude. Then, when he heard in his holy silence the cry of his friends, he brought his silence to them. 

Set aside for a moment the wondrous and bizarre part of the experience, when Jesus walks on water. More on that soon. Notice this first: when Jesus rescues Peter and they clamber back into the boat, this happens:

When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.

So: he had been alone on the mountain, where his compassionate ears heard their cry. Then he came to their aid, and brought his lonely mountain into their boat, a penetrating and calming silence. A silence that helped them settle, and listen, and move forward with confidence and purpose.

But he had to carry that silence over terribly rough seas. The bit about walking on water: Let’s consider that part of the Good News now. To our modern, practical ears, walking on water sounds absurd and fanciful, a fairy tale. But I encourage you to get quiet. Listen. Wonder about what’s being said here. Let go of literalism (as if this passage is a news article or a history piece), but also try to let go of your skepticism and cynicism. As you reflect, try to hear and see that Jesus is crossing the stormy seas of their doubts, their fears, their dashed hopes, their despair.

And as for Peter, once again the patron of fools who rush in where angels fear to tread: Peter actually demonstrates not just foolishness, but great courage by stepping onto the water himself, teaching us that even someone Jesus says has “little faith” can do brave and difficult things. This story of silence and storms, then, can reveal our own faith and courage, not just our weaknesses and our doubts. Today’s Good News reassures us that even if we have little faith, even if we feel weak, small, and afraid, with God’s help we will have enough. We will be enough.

Imagine someone crossing over the storms that rage in your anxious heart, and reassuring you that there is hope, and meaning, and a promise of a good future. Imagine him convincing you that your faith is enough, and your courage is enough, to meet and master the high winds of this troubled and traumatic age.

If someone actually got through to you and helped you calm down, and breathe, and dare to hope again, dare to trust yourself again, dare to trust the rest of us again, and dare to trust God again, well, that merciful gift might seem as improbable and miraculous as walking on water. But Jesus does it: he got through to them. He reached them. He sheltered them within his great silence. And today he walks over our own stormy waters, and shelters us.

Many years ago, Mother Catharine said something I remember quite fondly. Her words might illuminate all of this in a helpful way. We were talking about introverts and extraverts, as people in our time and place so often do. I prefer extraversion. Catharine prefers introversion. We were discussing how everyone needs silence for reflection, for balance, for insight, for courage. Not just introverts: we extraverts need the silence too. And Catharine said, “I actually think extraverts need it more, because introverts carry it around with us.” Yes, I like this. I quite agree.

Many of us (whatever our introvert/extravert preferences) have trouble carrying around the holy silence of God. God is with us all the same; I know Jesus loves me; I know the Lord is near. But sometimes we need the Silent One to come to us, and bring his silence with him.

Then, oh great relief, the wind ceases, and we receive all that we need to navigate this windy and storming world.

May the holy silence of God reach you. And may you have the presence of mind and heart to hear it, and wrap your face in your mantle, and stand at the entrance of your cave.

Congregant number 14

Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13A), August 2, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145:8-9, 15-22
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:13-21

Loaves & Fish, 5th century floor mosaic in the town of Tabgha

Last week, during the early mass, someone came into our church for a few moments, took one of the snack packs from the table near the baptismal font, and left. I saw this because I was up here, behind the table, getting our breakfast ready.

My immediate response was to add one to my headcount for that mass. “It’s fourteen now,” I told myself. And so that goes for a working priest who’s developing a Christian congregation in a mostly secularized urban setting: attendance is one of our lagging indicators, a metric that helps us assess the health and vitality of this congregation. I focus on attendance enough that I’ve been rightly teased about it.

But I like counting people, especially people I love. (And that definitely includes you, beloveds!) I’m from a big family, so I count my nieces and nephews, a daunting twenty-three people. I always try to count people and other creatures who matter. When I had a big aquarium in the kitchen during the pandemic years, I loved counting tropical fish. When I see videos of dog litters on the internet, I count the puppies. “That looks like seven,” I say to myself. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. Yep. Oh wait, they’re squashing another one — it’s eight!”

But as far as the risen Christ is concerned, headcount seems unimportant. All four Gospels recount the story of the feeding of a multitude. (Matthew and Mark record two stories of dinner for a crowd.) In these six reports of Jesus as the one who feeds hungry humans, someone evidently does do a rough headcount. (“Oh, this looks like around 4,000 people, wouldn’t you say?” I can imagine a disciple musing during the messy distribution of fish and bread, and somebody saying back, “No, I think it’s 5,000, and that’s just the dudes!”). But Jesus himself makes no mention of numbers. He just insists that everyone have something to eat, and goes on to make that happen.

Jesus focuses on the people.

Jesus focuses on their hunger.

I think this is why, last week, after labeling that passing stranger our 8:00am-mass congregant number 14, I spent a little more time reflecting on him, and even praying for him.

This is always good to do — it’s good to reflect on how (and whether) we take care of our neighbors, and how (and whether) our care for them follows the example of Jesus Christ. Especially on Sundays, the day of Resurrection, the day when the one who fed hungry crowds on the hillside was raised from the dead.

Every Sunday, everything we Christians do is an attempt to re-enact the Resurrection, just as the first Christians did in the first household churches, at their Sunday dinner meetings. For Christians, every new week begins with Resurrection, and our forebears taught us that if, in our Sunday rituals, we are imitating the risen Christ, then we should remember that he appeared to them and shared food.

The risen Christ ate fish with his disciples, in their locked room. The risen Christ invited them to sit down for breakfast by the sea. The risen Christ was made known to two Sunday-evening hikers in the breaking of the bread.

The risen Christ taught his followers – before the crucifixion - that whenever they ate and drank together in a particular way, he would be with them.

And so we follow their lead and do this every Sunday. We break the bread, we pour wine into the chalice. We take care that everyone has enough. We look outward, into the pews, to be sure anyone who came here by wheelchair has been fed. Our table ministry also inspires us to set out more food downstairs, festive food, cheering food, cake and savory treats that improve your mood as well as nourish you. And we invite newcomers among us to join the feast. You all warmly welcome them to a round table and engage them in conversation. And if a neighbor comes down the ramp in search of life-saving food, or a blanket, or socks and other clothes, our neighborhood missioners usually notice and come to their aid.

All of this is encouraging to know, because honestly, I felt a little crestfallen when congregant number 14 stepped quickly into our entryway, took a snack pack, and left. It seemed a far cry from the explosion of wondrous bread and fish on the hillside, with all the crowds pressing in, and Jesus and his followers in the center, hurriedly gathering leftovers into baskets. I wished I hadn’t been so far away from our neighbor at that moment, and I appreciated the bitter irony of the fact that I was cut off from him physically because I was preparing our Sunday Eucharistic meal.

After all, this Table is our hillside, the hillside where we meet Jesus, the hillside where we are astonished by the depth of his compassion for the hungry crowd, the hillside where Jesus dispels scarcity anxiety and sets an abundant table bursting with life-saving food. This Table is where we gather a collection of funds, the funds from your own coffers that we use to purchase the snack packs, and the cans and boxes of food that fill our pantry. This Table is where we break bread that strengthens us for mission, a mission of feeding, clothing, and caring for human beings.

All human beings, mind you. There is only one thing we know about the crowd of 4,000 (or is it 5,000, or can we just set aside patriarchy for one second and count all the people, of all ages and genders, in which case we may be talking about some 15,000 people!) — anyway, there is only one thing we know about this crowd: they are all hungry. They aren’t all members of our clan, or our religion, or our political party. They aren’t all documented citizens of our nation. They aren’t all nice and kind, or smart and skillful. They aren’t all hardworking and virtuous. They don’t all have the same abilities or disabilities. Jesus has compassion on them, no matter who they are, and begins preparing the bread and the fish.

And so I wish I had prepared food for someone last week, not because I am Jesus (come on, now), but because we all are called to follow his lead. I wanted to say, I should have said, “Bring the snack packs to me,” and I should have welcomed congregant number 14 into the pews and made sure he got not just the food he anxiously found on our counter, but anything else he needed.

He might have had a job interview the next day: did he need a shirt or a jacket? He might have needed new socks or underwear: I felt so disappointed on a SPiN walk last month when we ran out of underwear moments before someone came up to us who was in desperate need of that one item. And of course he might have needed what almost all of us – I actually think every one of us – needs whenever we come into this room: he might have just needed to be looked in the eyes and greeted by another human being. 

Often, we Christians, in our effort to truly understand who Jesus is and what he is continually trying to teach us, imagine that Jesus himself is here in the room not just in the bread and wine, the Body and Blood, but also in the gathered assembly itself. “We who are many one Body,” a minister intones, and then we all say the response: “for we all share in the one bread.” The Body in that call and response is the Body of Christ: we who are many are one Body of Christ. And so we are. This is true.

Saint Augustine, when preaching about the Eucharist, says it this way: “Be, then, what you see, and receive what you are.” That is to say, “Be the bread and wine that you see; receive the bread and wine that you are.” Or said even better: “Be the Body of Christ that you see; receive the Body of Christ that you are.”

And so Christ overtakes the whole hillside, teeming with 15,000+ people, so many people we would drive ourselves crazy trying to get an accurate headcount. They all are drawn up into the Body of Christ. They all savor the fish and bread, and slake their thirst, and feel full, and ready to walk home, rescued from the peril of starvation for another night. And in this feast they become Christ himself: a Body broken for the hungry world; a Blood spilled out for the violent world; a sign of God’s abundant mercy in the cruel human arena. 

And so it is that I have found a new label for congregant number 14, who stopped in our building for only a minute or two, and probably felt nervous taking the snack pack. (I think I saw him look up anxiously at one moment, as if we would set food out for anyone else but him, mocking his hunger.) I have found a new identity, a new name, for this neighbor. And I pray that his new name will drive us even more energetically outward from here on the errand of the compassionate chef who founded the feast at this Table.

Congregant number 14 is, of course, the risen Christ himself.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12A), July 26, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Kelly Moody.

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

Jesus and the parable of the mustard seed, artist unknown

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.  

 In the first year of the pandemic, I had a dear friend here in Seattle who took up sourdough bread-making. I imagine you knew someone, or maybe you were someone who took up pandemic baking, too. Journalists suggested that we were drawn to baking bread not only out of necessity, but because it required mindfulness and physical touch, both of which relieved stress in an anxious time. As businesses closed and grocery shelves were emptied,baking bread grounded us in something ordinary and productive that met a need during a season of uncertainty. 

My friend’s sourdough hobby became so grounding for her that she baked nearly every day.  

Cinnamon rolls, delicious breads of every kind, you name it.  

Each day she dropped them on the porches of friends and family, who gratefully received them as the weeks went on. And all of this was possible because of a gooey yeast, a sourdough starter in a jar, shared with her by a neighbor who had gotten it from a friend, whose sister had given it to her.  This sourdough starter with a complex ancestral line sat bubbling on my friend’s counter more often than not.  It was honestly kind of unsightly.  In its gooey, bubbly form, it did not convey what it was capable of becoming.

 Today, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to yeast. Not to the transformed and completed loaf of bread or fine wine that the yeast can produce in time under good conditions, but the yeast itself.  The gooey, messy fungus that a woman ‘mixes’ or ‘hides’ into three measures of flour.

The connotation in the Greek is that no one knows it’s there, except the woman.¹  She plants it in the flour like a seed.  Yeast is a living organism, but it’s not a plant, and it’s not really an animal, either.²  Strains of yeast can travel through air, or grow in a jar like a sourdough starter, or ferment in a barrel of beer or wine.  They permeate and expand and decompose, transforming whatever host they’ve found in ways that scientists are still discovering. 

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast. 

Mycologists, the scientists who study fungi like yeast, admit that they do not yet fully understand all that these organisms are capable of. One evening during the pandemic, while enjoying our sourdough bread in the form of grilled cheese sandwiches, our family watched a documentary called “Fantastic Fungi.” We learned that there are three hundred miles of fungi growing under every footstep we take anywhere in the world.  We marveled at their vast thread-like connections underground, and their role in the endings and beginnings of nearly every living thing. Scientists have discovered that fungi can filter water and heal certain ailments, among other things. 

So if the kingdom of heaven is like a yeast, well, that is a metaphor worth exploring…a mysterious network of connections and processes still surprising scientists today. 

That’s what struck me as I considered this parable about yeast- the mystery is still unfolding. 

Joseph Campbell famously said “if you want to change the world, change the metaphor,³”  and Jesus offers more than one metaphor in today’s rapid-fire series of parables. 

But I think it would be all too easy to hear the parables Jesus tells this morning from the confines of our success-oriented, bigger-is-better culture,and only hear the message that greatness can come from small, humble beginnings.  That’s true, of course, but I think there’s something more nuanced and hopeful to unpack here, something deeper.  

After all, we do not really need a parable to tell us that God’s kingdom is mighty. 

We need parables to hold the mysteries of our faith…We need parables to draw us into stories that disrupt our easy assumptions and surprise us…. We need parables to remind us that the kingdom of heaven is growing in and around us all the time, like a common weed, or a jar of sourdough starter on a friend’s kitchen counter. 

We need parables to work on us, like a yeast works in flour, until there is enough room in our hearts and minds to believe that God’s heavenly reign really is mixed up and hidden in the messy, ordinary details of our common lives…and hidden in the unsightly places in our communities, too.  

Because that can be more difficult to believe, and frankly, more inconvenient. 

Jesus chooses images to describe the kingdom of heaven that point us toward an unfolding mystery rather than a linear progression of constant improvement.  Jesus invites us to see his kingdom working its way into everything, seeding our lives and our city with the presence of God…working toward a holy completion that can look like decomposing gooey yuckiness before it ever resembles a lofty loaf of bread. But when you know it’s there; when you know what it is, you don’t have to avoid it anymore.   

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast.  

Over the next few months, you and I will get to know each other as we pray and serve together in this beloved place, and I’m really looking forward to that.  I hope you’ll share stories about the places you’ve seen God’s kingdom unfolding here. I hope you’ll share about the practices of faith that anchor you in uncertain times. I hope you’ll share stories that are not yet finished, too, stories that may not yet reveal what we are capable of becoming. Because it’s in these messy, unfinished places that I believe Jesus is inviting us to meet him today to catch a glimpse of the unfolding kingdom of heaven. It’s in these vulnerable, uncertain moments that we are leavened with God’s love and sent out to share the good news that God’s reign prevails. 

________________________

¹ See A.J. Levine’s Short Stories by Jesus on the significance of translating the verb as “hides” rather than “mixes.”

² A quote from Fantastic Fungi

³ Quote shared here on StreetPsalms

Tending to the field

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11 A), July 19, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.

Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Sower with Setting Sun, by Vincent van Gogh

I am three generations removed from depending on my own crops. I have never planted a wheat field, I have not gone out to examine it, searching for evidence of ruin, and praying not to find it. Still, my very existence depends on the unseen labor of agricultural workers. Whatever distance we put between ourselves and the field, our shared dependence on agriculture gives us, and the first listeners of this parable, and millions of people in between, a common vocabulary for our most vital concerns. This parable is concerned with the persistent problem of evil, its presence in the world, and its destruction.

As with many parables, we approach it by asking “who is what?” Jesus identifies the field as the Kingdom of Heaven, and Matthew’s interpretation of the parable, following Jesus’ telling of it, casts other roles: The Chosen One, who we understand as Christ, is the farmer sowing good seed, the field is the world, the good seed are citizens of the kingdom, the weeds secretly sown in the field are the children of the evil one, and the enemy is the devil.

Let’s begin with ourselves: In this parable, we are the good seed, the wheat. I want to ground us in that identity because it is the first glimmer of the Good News in this passage, and it communicates the dimensions of the parable. We are wheat! And what does wheat do? Grow! That’s about it. The action in this parable is out of human control, outside of the sphere of our influence.

The good news is this: God has planted this field of good grain, and God is tending the field. Not only is God aware of Evil, it is God’s work to eliminate it. The day of reckoning is coming, and it is not your job.

I don’t think that I shirk responsibility, but I am relieved by this news. I can see that this is an untenable situation. The farmer’s work, if not wasted, has ballooned. The weeds growing among the wheat are horrifying, not only because they threaten the growth of the harvest but because of their indistinguishability. There’s a creepiness to that.

The Psalms and gospels provide us with a number of allegories where we are the sowers of seed. I like these images. They give me a sense of agency and purpose, and strengthen my convictions when the work of discipleship is hard. 

Their application is simpler: in the allegories where we are the sower, we are sowing seeds of the Kingdom when we love each other and God, when we feed and clothe each other, when we prevent or destroy the means of exploitation and abuse. When we do things within human grasp. This invasion of evil is not in our grasp. So it is good to hear: God will tend this field, burning the evil that inhabits the good world God has created.

This spring, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture on Karl Barth and the Problem of Evil at Virginia Theological Seminary, given by Dr. Sonderegger (a theologian who’s spoken at this pulpit, and received a lot of love from our rector). Barth, the subject of her lecture, was a Swiss Reformed theologian and contemporary of Bonhoeffer. One of Barth’s ideas about Creation is to reject a duality of Good and Evil, and consider a third way: there is God our creator who surrounds us and is with us always. There is all of God’s creation, present company included, named as “good” from the beginning of creation, but still fallible and mortal. Then, there is the nothingness of Evil.

In her lecture, Dr. Sonderegger emphasized Barth’s definition of evil: Evil is NOTHING, it is not created by God. Evil does not have the dignity of being created by God.

The weeds in our parable were sown by an enemy, they are not a part of creation. There are weeds in God’s field. Despite their nothingness, they are taking up space. If we consider the King James translation of this passage, these weeds are called “darnel, " a kind of ryegrass that hosts a toxic fungus that in turn infects wheat as well; an un-making of a harvest.

Evil, in its indignity, does not know Imago Dei. Evil does not know what it means to be made in God’s image, so it moves without care. I’m sure you have felt the edges of Evil in your life. It grows next to you and me and each of us. There is nothing you and I can do to stop it. 

Here again, is the Gospel Message: God will work the field and destroy the weeds. Beyond that, as we know and contemplate every Easter season, God has already tended to the field and burned the weeds. Evil has already been defeated. It was not created, but it has been unmade. The day of reckoning has already come. You and I, little stalks of wheat, might not feel that, but this parable assures us that is and will and has happened.

Both the reckoning and the weeds are beyond our perception. As wheat, we are never outside the field where Evil is planted, so it is impossible to have objective knowledge of it. But since many of us have been taught this parable as a way to sort good and evil people, I think we need to consider the identity of the weeds.

We were each created, sown, by the farmer of this field. When we indulge in the idea that some people are just evil, we are denying the work of God’s creation. We are surrounded by evil, we are choked and hindered by evil. We might be poisoned by evil. But you will be wrong every time you turn to a neighbor and name them “weed”.

We can see that Evil has infected the world around us. We witness human decisions that discard human life. We can see Evil so clearly that sometimes we struggle to recognize the humanity of tyrants through the dense growth of their evil choices. But we have failed to recognize evil, and we have misidentified it. Consider all of the times when the Church and her people have failed to discern correctly. We failed to recognize evil in slavery and racial bigotry, in empire and colonialism and a hundred other sources of marginalization and terror. We misidentify it in things that are new to us: Consider how we have challenged the goodness and legitimacy of every new letter added to the LGBTQIA acronym.  We routinely fail to see the harm that can come from our own good intentions, and we misunderstand other people’s motivations. I wonder what else we have misidentified, what we have not seen, or are incapable of seeing. So we continue to confess: We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf. We are not capable of understanding the evil that surrounds us. We are not capable of tending the field that God has sown.

When we respond to our perception of evil, and rely only on our own understanding to destroy it, we will inherently create something too small, and too fallible. We will lose the path to something even more beautiful. If we respond to discord by striving for perfect agreement, we are rejecting Jesus’ invitation to build solidarity with each other. If we respond to violence with retribution, we are rejecting grace.

Even in allegories where we are the sower in the field, God is the one who brings the Kingdom that frees us. Even if you yearn for more or bigger work in this very broken world, I hope you see the liberation in that division of labor. We already have abundant work. 

In Madeline Miller’s novel exploring a female perspective on Greek myth, the titular character, Circe, chooses to become mortal after a truly harrowing life of immortal existence. Her son has died, and she has very few comforts except a loom that Daedalus built for her. In the closing chapter of the novel, Miller’s Circe considers a broken thread in her weaving, and reflects that she will content herself with “the quiet mending of the world”. She chooses a mortal-sized task as a mortal being. 

God will tend the field, now and forever. Thanks be to God. 

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To walk in newness of life

Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10 A), July 12, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 65: (1-8), 9-14
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

Jesus Preaching on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee, by Abraham Willaerts

A few nights ago, my spouse and I watched the 2012 film, “Arbitrage,” a movie starring Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon – a movie in which Gere plays Robert Miller, the CEO of a Manhattan hedge fund, and Sarandon plays Ellen, his wife. [Spoiler alert!] As the film opens, Gere is on the verge of selling his company as he nears retirement; a company in which his daughter, Brooke, works as an accountant. What becomes apparent is this: the character played by Gere lives for one thing above all others, and that is the accumulation of wealth. “What makes you happiest in life?” asks a reporter. “Why, one thing,” says the CEO: “M-O-N-E-Y.” But, then, it becomes apparent that the CEO has engaged in fraud in order to sell his company. His daughter, the accountant, brings to his attention the fact that the firm’s financial books have been cooked – something he ignores to her consternation. He tells his wife and his adult children that he loves them and lives only for their welfare and yet we see that he has a much younger mistress named Julie upon whom he lavishes much wealth. While dozing off while driving Julie to an upstate cottage, his car slams into the railing, killing her, leading him to leave the scene of the accident in order to escape blame. He becomes desperate in his attempt to cover up his complicity in her death. And yet all of this – the fraud, the adultery, the lies, the evasion of responsibility – is treated as simply normal – as if such behavior is to be expected in the world in which we live, a world in which greed, lying, and unfaithfulness are ever present. 

It is this world that St. Paul speaks of when he discusses sin and the flesh, as he does in today’s second reading from his letter to the Romans. That is, when Paul speaks of sin, he is not talking about infractions of law or cultural custom, but rather about an energy field that pervades all cultures, an energy field that can be quite attractive yet one which distorts human life. And when he mentions the flesh, he is not – he is not – speaking about the human body, one of God’s gifts, but rather about the ego: the ego that lives for the self alone as if to live only for oneself were something quite normal, indeed something to seek, to admire. And it is this striving for the self alone – “It’s all about me!” – that permeates the energy field into which you and I have been born. That is, to live in the flesh is to live in the small self, the “self” trapped by the self, the ego that sees only itself. And thus this energy field easily leads one to welcome only that which serves the self alone: a sense of superiority to others; blaming others for one’s mishaps; the lust for wealth; always needing to win. 

Now, it’s not uncommon these days in some churches and in some communities to point to the current federal administration as a singular example of corruption, greed, and lying – and of its whole-hearted complicity in a narcissistic energy field. And perhaps there is truth in that claim. But to do so can lead us to imagine that the problem is “out there” and – if we only had another administration – all would be well. But Paul wants us to recognize that we are affected by this energy field that draws people into believing that they, that you and I, need nothing but the self – no real need for others much less for God – and that whatever serves the self – legal or illegal, ethical or unethical – is worthy of our attention and energy. 

I have a university colleague who is quick to say, and say far too frequently in my hearing – “It’s All Good; It’s All Good” – as if life is really a breeze, as if all we need is a good dose of “positivity” and everything will be well. And yet I wonder: Is it all good for the immigrant or person with brown skin who is persecuted by agents of the state? Is it all good for the millions of people in our nation, caught in poverty, who cannot pay both medical bills and food bills? Is it really all good for the 20% of children in our state who live daily with food insecurity, not knowing if they will have any food tomorrow? Is it really all good for the environment that continues to suffer from human arrogance? Is it really all good for those who live daily with racial or gender injustices? Is it really all good for women who continue to earn less than men though they are equally or better qualified? Is it really all good for the majority of Americans – over 60% - who experience chronic loneliness and a sense of isolation? 

In the midst of this not-so-good energy field and the temptation to care only for oneself, we are not alone, writes Paul. For there is another energy field available to us and the name of that energy is Jesus Christ, the One who divests himself of privilege, of being at the top, so to speak, in order to become one with us in his birth, public life, death, and resurrection. For you see, he does not ride above this world marked by outsized and even predatory egos to shower it with the fairy dust of “It’s All Good.” Rather he offers a far more life-giving yet challenging way of living, what Paul calls “walking in newness of life.” Well, that’s a lovely phrase, a compelling promise: to walk in newness of life. But what might that actually mean for you and me? 

Paul writes that to “set one’s mind on the flesh is death,” that is, to live in the small world of one’s ego robs one of that essential dimension of life which is relationship. To set the mind on the Spirit, he writes, is to be guided by the Spirit’s energy which is filled with life and peace: peace with one’s limitations, with one’s losses, with one’s mortality; peace with others – even the troublesome others; and certainly, peace with God. Thus Paul, our patron, sets before us the opportunity to live as the children of God: not with aggressive competition in which someone always loses but with mutual responsibility; not blaming others for our mistakes but admitting them honestly and seeking forgiveness; not hoarding our gifts and talents as if we alone created them but rather using them for the good of others.

The truth of the matter is this: we can never fully escape or transcend the energy field of the small self who serves the self alone and yet we can live into that energy which frees us from the toxic individualism so alive in our culture. Indeed, we can taste that life-giving and soul-expanding energy on our lips as we receive the Body and the Blood of the One in whom your large and generous self comes to life. 

We need help

Preached on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9A), July 5, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Zechariah 9:9-12
Psalm 145:8-15
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Heavy Burdens, by Larry Poncho Brown

I recall several experiences across my life, especially in the early years, when I had most of my needs met, but I really just needed a little more help. That’s all — I needed more help. Can you relate?

When I was a small child, I needed significantly more attention than my overwhelmed parents could give me. When I was a confused and scared junior in college, I had one strong helper when I came out as gay, but I needed much more guidance than that one person could possibly give.

Across the decades of early adulthood and early midlife, I needed help with career discernment, several times. Without that help, every step was slower, every transition more difficult. I finally found my true vocation, but not until a couple of months before my fiftieth birthday.

Now, please be assured that I am well aware that I am just fine. Much more than fine. By any reasonable human or historical standard, I luxuriate in embarrassing opulence with physical health, housing, and income in my fifties that would have been unimaginable for my prairie-farmer ancestors. When I was in seminary, my favorite priest and theologian lived in a small house just off campus, and she remarked that her little two-bedroom rambler was a vast palace.

This humble faith leader knows her bible. She is acquainted with the problems of poverty and injustice, and she is gratefully aware that by any reasonable metric of human experience, she is living in grand style, as are most of us gathered here. 

But – wealthy or not, privileged or not, each of us and all of us need help. The writer Anne Lamott wrote a book called Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. Those three words really do encompass all of our prayers. Whether we pray to God in a shout or a whisper, we reliably say variations on the themes of “Help!”, or “Thanks!”, or “Wow!”.

In a few moments we will do what we always do, Sunday by Sunday: having opened the Word of God, and having reflected on what we encountered there, our reflections will drive us to our feet to pray for help: help for all people in need, help for ourselves, help for those who are sick, help for those who have died and those who mourn, help for the nations of the world – and, especially today, help for our troubled nation, celebrating its semiquincentennial in a time of widespread traumatic injustice.

Later on this morning, as usual, we will then happily sing our “Thanks” and “Wow” prayers around this Table.

So: you need help. We all do. I expect you are here, consciously or not, because you need help in some form. Maybe you feel like one of the prophet Zechariah’s poor ones, one of the people of God who feel imprisoned in a “waterless pit.” That’s a fairly dramatic, maybe melodramatic, image for those of us who are caught up on our mortgages and certain that we will have dinner tonight. But there are all sorts of “waterless pits” that we may occupy.

Maybe you’re parched by grief, or thirsty for friendship, or dehydrated by regret and remorse. All of us together might be in a waterless pit, and in fact the prophet Zechariah would assume so: he addresses his words of reassurance to a whole people, not to an individual. What waterless pit might be rising around all of us right now? Whatever it might be, Zechariah says it is a kind of prison.

We may not feel imprisoned by warfare and violence, but if we call ourselves allies of citizens of Ukraine, or Gaza, or South Sudan, to name just three places of massive insecurity and atrocity, then their suffering is somehow ours, too, and we cannot, or at the very least we should not, rest until their lives and futures are secured. We — they — need massive amounts of help to accomplish this. “Help!”, we cry out to God. “Help them. Help us. Help us to help them.”

But we need help for the liberation of our own nation, for justice and then peace to prevail in this land. This is the Fourth of July weekend, and it’s our 250th Fourth of July since our nation’s founding. This milestone birthday finds a nation torn asunder. Our trusted institutions have crumbled. Our hold on authentic democratic government has slipped. Just this past week, justices cosseted in the wealth of privacy and privilege handed down decisions that compromise the safety — and threaten the lives — of countless of our fellow citizens and undocumented companions. It’s bad out there. “Help them!”, we pray to God. “Help us. Help us to help them.”

And here is the strong, bracing, reassuring answer to our prayers for help. This is what our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ says to us today: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

I think that these may be the most beautiful words in the Christian scriptures. We are encouraged to proclaim these good words of Jesus at the end of every day, at Compline, a fancy word for our “help, thanks, wow” nighttime prayers.

Jesus comes to us as we cry out for help, and he reassures us: help is here. Come to him, you that are weary, and he will give you rest. If your cry for help is made on behalf of those half a world away who cower in cellars while drones buzz overhead, or those half a world away facing famine and threats of civil war, then be reassured: you will have help in your effort to draw alongside them as an ally.

If your cry for help is made on behalf of those much closer to home, those who are unhoused just outside these doors, those who face endless student-loan debt and a terrible job market, those who can’t rest because they’re at grave and continual risk of deportation, those who fear they will suffer an impoverished retirement, those who are not far from death, those whose hearts are riven by grief, then be reassured: Jesus is helping them, and Jesus will help you be a strong companion for them.

If your cry for help is made on behalf of this community of faith, that we will feel less anxious, that we will share our wealth more generously, that God will wipe the tears of grief from our faces, then be reassured: Jesus is helping us, here in this place, and giving himself as our food for both nourishment and mission.

And if your cry for help is made on behalf of you yourself, know that this is valid, this is okay: it is not selfish to pray for your own needs. And know also that the rest of us are praying for you, too. If you are praying for personal help, help with your grief, help with your anxiety; help with your depression, help with your physical hardships; help with your doubt, help with your anger; help with your confusion, help with your despair; then be reassured: Jesus invites you to come to him, you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and he will give you rest.

But then, then, Jesus lays upon you, and upon me, and upon everyone gathered here, his yoke. A yoke is an ancient farm implement, a device that locks two beasts of burden together so that they can plow the field in tandem. The great reassurance of this image is, of course, that Jesus is the other beast of burden: this is his yoke, so when he lays it upon us, he occupies the other half of the device. He is right by our side. And he teaches us in this work to do this for one another: we never do anything alone around this parish, if we can ever avoid it. We help each other. We wear the yoke together.

But there is much to do. We can’t be good allies for people sleeping outside half a block away, let alone the multitudes who are suffering half a world away, if we do not come together in conscious labor for them, and for the planet we share with them. I can pray for the relief of your deep grief, but my prayer falls flat if I am not willing to be your companion in that grief. 

Something from us is required. 

But again: the yoke is easy; the burden is light. The work is always shared, and our tasks are set to us by the Gracious One, the Loving One, the Prince of Peace who came among us as one who serves, all the way down into the waterless pit, and will be right there alongside us as we all come up and out into a land of abundant shade and fresh, life-giving water.

I bid your prayers for help, and your prayers of thanksgiving; and I will sing by your side our joyful prayer that praises our Lord for all of these good gifts: 

Wow.

Breakfast with Jesus

Preached on the (transferred) Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, June 28, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

A tattoo of the breakfast scene in John 21, on my right arm.

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”

Perhaps you are frightened right now. There is plenty to be frightened about. Climate change is causing heat waves in Europe, and hurricane season is coming: terrifying. But it isn’t just natural ecosystems that are changing or getting worse. Our political world roils in chaos, making Pride weekend all the more relevant and urgent, particularly for our trans companions. War ravages the land in West Asia, Africa, Europe, and along our borders. There was another mass shooting the other day, in Chico, California. A double earthquake has killed at least 1,400 people in Venezuela.

As we struggle through these crises, and (at our best) advocate for others in more extreme need, our chronic and intense anxiety could damage our health. Your fears about the world could finally generate a fear of their own: that your health and well-being will finally begin to break down under the relentless emotional strain.

Or perhaps your fear is closer to home. Maybe you are in a phase of life that daunts you: you are on the brink of adulthood, or you are a parent with a thousand fears about your child, or you are drawing close to the end of your life. Maybe you’re in one of the generations that can’t afford the basics, and you fear you’ll never pay your student loans; or you’re worried that your careful, reasonable plan for a comfortable and safe retirement is unraveling. Or you’re in midlife, and you’re wondering with nagging worry about the meaning of your life, worry about the health of your relationships, worry about the purpose of your career. Maybe you’re coping with addiction: no matter whether you or someone you love is the actual substance user, addiction is a social disease that damages the health of everyone involved, and locks whole families in excruciating fear.

Are you frightened right now? Jesus said to them — Jesus says to you — “Come and have breakfast.”

Perhaps you are angry right now. There is plenty to be angry about. Perhaps you are gripped by remorse or regret. Or maybe it is loneliness that strikes the most unnerving bell in the depths of your spirit. Jesus says to you, “Come and have breakfast.”

But it is quite a breakfast. You might want to pause before you sit down and tuck in. First, Jesus invites you, and me, and all of us, to bring forward some of our catch of fish. We may have fished in vain all night long, but suddenly, thanks to the risen Stranger by the sea, we have such a great catch, full to bursting, such a full load, that our boat nearly capsizes under its weight. And there’s such a variety of fish! One hundred fifty-three different kinds.

Why one hundred fifty-three? Honestly, we Christians have lost a clear memory of the reason. Maybe St. Jerome had it right, that in the Greek world at the time of Jesus, folks thought there were one hundred fifty-three species of fish, and it symbolized the Gospel being brought to every culture and language and people and nation. But we can’t be sure that that’s what John the Evangelist meant. 

I would like to offer an interpretation, which rests only on my own tiny, historically insignificant authority. (You are free to reject this interpretation, and I offer it with as much humility as I can muster.) I say the one hundred fifty-three different kinds of fish means that Jesus brings forth from our labor every kind of gift, every challenge, every grief, every joy, every regret, every triumph, every insight, every quandary, every hope, every disappointment, every possible blessing, and even a curse or two. Throwing our briny net over the other side of the boat — for that is what the risen Stranger suggested we do — the net fills with the fruits of our labor, with all of these valuable but also difficult and even upsetting things.

And then Jesus chooses from our catch a few particular fish to grill for our breakfast. Another biblical scholar suggested that this breakfast of grilled fish in John is an allusion to the great sea beast that swims through the Hebrew bible, the same awesome creature who obeyed when God told it to swallow up Jonah. The great sea beast becomes for Jonah a tomb, but also a womb, and then, when Jonah, still trapped in the wet and pitch-dark guts of the beast, finally faces his fears and acknowledges his errors, the great fish obeys God again and vomits Jonah out onto dry land.

As much as I admire that fish for doing as it was told (something that Jonah mightily struggled against), I know that the sea beast is most often a symbol of chaos and destruction, in both testaments of our bible. The sea beast can represent all that is rebelling against God, or all the forces that rage against the Holy Spirit. So Jonah went into chaos, realized his grave errors, repented, and was spit back out. And now, that beast of chaos is sizzling on the grill, devoured by the anxious, angry, remorseful, lamenting disciples of the risen Stranger.

Maybe the fish Jesus grills is the sea beast. Or maybe the sea beast is just one of the fishes to which he has access, and he’ll need more if he’s going to feed all of us. 

So Jesus then asks us for our fish, the ones we caught as we labored in the pre-dawn twilight. Some of the fish we caught are as dreadful as the sea beast. Here are some of the fish we give to Jesus, to be grilled for our breakfast:

We give Jesus our fears, for him to gut, clean, and lay flat on the gridiron. “Do not be afraid,” we are told, again and again, by Jesus and also by God’s messengers, the Angels.

We give Jesus our angers and hatreds, our resentments and mulish resistance, our reluctance to commend the faith that is in us, the fish of contempt that we clutch in our sweaty hands. Jesus takes it and slices it open, readies it to feed and nourish us as fuel for the mission.

We give Jesus the fish of remorse, of gut-wrenching regret, our sorrow about how we’ve fallen short, our shame for how we chose the low road, our anguish that we failed to stand bravely next to the oppressed, or work confidently alongside those who are lonely, hungry, sick, and afraid. Jesus cooks that fish into tender fillets that fill and warm us with forgiveness and reconciliation — with reconciliation not only with our neighbor and one another, but with ourselves. 

And of course we readily — eagerly — hand Jesus the fish of grief. Heartsick and homesick, worn out by our weeping at the graves of our friends, Jesus is (impossibly, incredibly) wiping his wounded hands on a chef’s apron, asking us if we’d like a second helping.

There is joyous and splendid mercy at this seaside breakfast, words of comfort, healing food, the warmth of the fire when the morning is still clinging to the chill of a long night. Hear this Good News; hear these glad tidings. Hear them and rejoice. For this — this Eucharistic Table — this is the location of our seaside breakfast with Jesus, who finally offers himself in place of the dreaded sea beast as the fish we frantically consume with our ravenous bodies and our broken hearts. “Come and have breakfast,” he says, and we find in the end that Jesus himself is our nourishment, Jesus himself is our food.

But, this being Jesus, there is a calling, a correction, a command: nourished by (and on) the Risen One, the Good Shepherd, we are sent to feed his lambs, to tend his sheep, to feed his sheep. His breakfast will hardly nourish us if we don’t share it with everyone else we meet, everyone else we serve, even those we dislike, those we fear, those we find abhorrent. 

And there will be enough fish for them all. One hundred fifty-three: a strangely specific number and an unsolvable biblical riddle, but it’s easy enough to see it as a sign of both abundance and diversity, a throng of companions, some of them marching downtown today in defiant advocacy for queer human beings who bear God’s image just like every other human person in this existential age. But there’s no litmus test for who deserves the grilled fish, the grilled Body of Christ, the toasted Bread of Heaven. That wretched enemy of yours: Jesus calls out “Come and have breakfast” to them, as surely as he calls it out to someone you may have harmed, and to you. 

For everyone to get close enough to the bright and warming campfire, we will have to make room in our company for all of them. And we will have to accept some awkward discomfort as we get awfully snug on this beach.

After all, remember the words of the prophet Ezekiel, through whom God says, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.” It’s going to be a big and crowded breakfast around this Table.

Will you join us?

These Are (Some of) the Names

Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6A), June 14, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Exodus 19:2-8a
Psalm 100
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:23

Wall of names at the Alex Pretti Memorial in Minneapolis, MN; photo by Mark Taylor

Last month, Debra and I traveled to Minnesota for a family gathering around our grandson’s high school graduation. On the airplane, I started reading Florence Knapp’s recent novel The Names, although I didn’t finish it until I got back home to Seattle. I’m a slow reader! For me, a most intriguing, thought-provoking and heart-enkindling book. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so let me just sketch the core of what you would read in the brief “Prologue” with which the novel opens (pp. 1-7).

A date: “October 1987.” Then these first words of the first sentence: “Cora’s mother always used to say….” A person’s name: Cora. A family relationship: Cora’s mother. And immediately a story. One stormy day in London, England, Cora leaves her house with her nine-year-old daughter to go to the government office and register the name of her newborn son. Cora’s abusive husband wants, no, demands that the boy be given his name: Gordon, the same name as his father and father’s father. But Cora doesn’t like the name Gordon – let alone the state of her marriage – and, instead, considers naming their son Julian, which means “sky father,” in hopes the boy might be freed from generations of domineering men to follow his own path in life. The baby’s sister Maia wants to name him Bear, “bear” as in the animal, because, she says: “It sounds all soft and cuddly and kind…. But also brave and strong.” Cora and her daughter have a conversation about the names as they walk down the street. Deferring to her husband, Cora says: “Tradition is just important to some people.” To which nine-year-old Maia replies: “Having your own name is too, though. Sometimes?” Cora again: “Wise girl.” And the reader is left outside the door of the government registry as the prologue ends.

The rest of book tells not one but three alternate, parallel stories of these characters over thirty-five years. In seven-year increments from 1987 to 2022; all anchored by what might have happened if Cora’s newborn son had been named “Bear.” Or “Julian,” instead. Or “Gordon.”

Three different names. Different life paths. Relationships between parents and children; between siblings. Grandparents. Friends and spouses and partners. Men. Men and women. Women safe in the company of other women. Places called home. Different occupations. Forms of artistic creativity. Defining choices and actions. Sickness and health. Life and death. Derision. Rejection. Love and liberation.

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With Florence Knapp’s storytelling in the air, hear again the core sentence of our gospel reading from Matthew this morning (10:2-4).

These are the names of the twelve apostles:
first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew;
James son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew;
Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;
James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;
Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed [Jesus].

A list of names to be sure. But so much more. Birth names and those by which people came to be known. Family relationships and roles within community. Places called home. Hints about life paths.

Alternate stories, parallel even. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all name twelve apostles. But their lists are not identical. Was the tax collector named Matthew or Levi? Simon the Cananaean or Simon the Zealot? Thaddaeus, or was it another Judas – not Iscariot, but the son of James? John’s gospel never counts to twelve, but instead features seven or nine or ten disciples and tells some of their stories more fully. In a different order. Andrew first and then Simon Peter. Philip who finds Nathanael and brings him to Jesus. Thomas; several stories about Thomas in the gospel of John. The sons of Zebedee, two others, and that mysterious unnamed person described as “the disciple Jesus loved.” Oh, and don’t forget that all four gospels make it crystal clear that in addition to seven or twelve male apostles, women followed Jesus, providing for his ministry out of their own resources: first and foremost, Mary Magdalene, original witness to the risen Christ and apostle to the apostles; Jesus’ own mother and his mother’s sister; Mary the mother of James and Joses; Mary the wife of Clopas; the mother of the sons of Zebedee; Joanna, Susanna, Salome, and many other women, named and unnamed, each with her own story.

But back to Matthew’s account of the twelve apostles. Why did Jesus call them? Because Jesus needed help, needed companions in order to do his work, to become himself in his fullness. Jesus was making the rounds of the cities and villages of Galilee. Teaching in synagogues, proclaiming the good news, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus the Good Shepherd needed to bring other shepherds alongside. The harvest was plentiful, but the laborers few.

So, Jesus gathered the twelve and sent them out. “Apostled” them, for the word apostle just means sent. Sent to support and extend Jesus’ own mission. He gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to cure every disease and every sickness. Exactly what Jesus was already doing. Jesus sends his twelve apostles with these instructions. As you go, proclaim the good news: God’s kingdom has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. But also with warnings. Beware! I am sending you out into the midst of dangerous predators. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The same innocent wisdom and wise innocence Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry. You will be handed over to councils and flogged even in religious institutions and by their leaders. You will be dragged before governors and kings. Just as Jesus was. You will be hated because of my name. Another name. As if Peter and Andrew, James and John, and all the rest can, should, must be known by a new name: the name of Jesus. Because the twelve did not go out in their own names to enrich themselves. “You received without payment,” Jesus says; “give without payment” (10:8).

Not just the twelve men Matthew names, but also those mentioned in the lists and stories of the gospels of Mark, Luke, and John. Including the many women: Mary Magdalene, the other Marys, Joanna, Susanna, and more. All sent. All “apostled” in the one name of Jesus. And it doesn’t stop there. We can, we should, we must add our own names, because we too, each and every one of us, is called by Jesus through baptism and sent out to support and extend Jesus’ mission in this world. Father Stephen [at 8:00am] / Mother Catharine [at 10:30am] prayed earlier on our behalf that through “grace we might proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister God’s justice with compassion; for the sake of…Jesus Christ” (BCP, 230). Bold compassion and compassionate boldness. Proclaim the good news of God’s beloved community liberated from racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Cure those sick in body, mind, and spirit. Raise structures of social/political/economic justice that have become as good as dead. Cleanse those, welcome those, who like the lepers of Jesus’ day have been shoved outside the bounds of human dignity. Cast out the demons of addiction to alcohol and drugs, but also to power and selfish pleasure. Peter and Andrew. Philip and Nathanael. Mary Magdalene and Salome. Stephen and Catharine. Carol and Esme. Phelps and Jenny. BJ and Chris. Add your name to the list. Your birth name or the name you adopted later. Add all our names, knowing these are just some of the names of Jesus’ apostles.

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A few of our many companion apostles have come to be known with a title added to their names: Saint. Saint Peter, Saint Mary Magdalene, and so on. Originally in Christian scripture, the word “saint” referred to all members of a Christian community. But within a few hundred years, “saint” takes on the narrower meaning of an exemplary follower of Christ. The saints are given an annual feast day on the liturgical calendar: Saint Brigid on February 1, Saint Andrew on November 30. Churches are dedicated in their names: St. Luke’s Church in Ballard, Saints Hilda and Patrick in Edmonds, Saint Clare of Assisi in Snoqualmie. The saints did not emblazon their own names on buildings or arches or promenades. Nor did they celebrate their birthdays with shows of ritualized violence against others. In fact, the first Christ followers singled out and honored as saints were those we would call the “martyrs” – those who, as Jesus warned, were hated and hunted and killed because of Jesus’ name. And the places where they died came to be lovingly attended as holy – where heaven and earth, the divine and the human, come together. Even though in both Hebrew and Roman culture the remains of the dead were considered ritually unclean, early Christians set up memorial shrines at these places, with relics of the saints in or under their altars, where the meal of Christ’s body and blood was shared.

With this in mind, on our last full day in the Twin Cities, Debra and I made a pilgrimage to the memorials of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and George Floyd, all located within the same seven-square-block neighborhood in Minneapolis. The places where they had been killed by agents of our own government in the name of our would-be kings. We visited the three shrines on “Memorial Day,” May 25, the day after Pentecost, which also happened to be the sixth anniversary of George Floyd’s death. These holy places were lovingly tended. With photographs and drawings. Written tributes. Flowers. Ribbons. All sorts of physical mementos. But at each specific place of death of each of these three specific persons: Renee, Alex, and George, other names besides theirs were visibly present. A fence of names at Renee Good’s shrine. A two-block long street of names painted on the asphalt leading to George Floyd’s. And at the Alex Pretti memorial, a log-cabin-style wall with names inscribed on the wood. A wall of names. Alex Pretti and Renee Good near the top. George Floyd in the middle. Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin toward the bottom, with many others in between. Above these names, however, another wooden log reads: Long Live. Is this a prayer? A confession of faith? An echo of the angel’s announcement to Mary Magdalene and the other women at Jesus’ tomb? “He is not here, for he has been raised” (Matthew 28:6).

+++

Florence Knapp’s The Names ends with an “Epilogue” in which we rejoin Cora and Maia inside the government registry office with the newborn baby boy. When asked by the registrar what Cora wants to call him, another name, a fourth name suddenly occurs to her. Not Gordon. Not Julian. Not Bear. A new name, one I will leave unsaid for you to discover. And with that name, an untold story beyond the pages of the novel.

This epilogue is dated July 29, 2022 – after the thirty-five-year span of the three alternate, parallel life stories anchored by the original three names. Now this is my observation, not Florence Knapp’s, but July 29 in our liturgical calendar is the feast day of Saints Mary and Martha of Bethany who grieved the death of their brother Lazarus and lovingly tended his remains, only to have Jesus call him forth from the tomb to new life. July 29 is also the anniversary of the first ordinations of women to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church in 1974, a group of women known as the Philadelphia Eleven. Proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom. Cure the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse the lepers. Cast out demons. Or, to bring a few last words from The Names here, today, into this holy place – St. Paul’s Church: “the air quivers with unspent possibilities of how else [our] fates might become untied, what other paths [our] lives might [now take]” (p. 314).

________________________

Resource

The Names is Florence Knapp’s debut novel (New York: Penguin Press, 2025).

What are we even doing in this room?

Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 5A), June 7, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Hosea 5:15-6:6
Psalm 50:7-15
Romans 4:13-25
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Talitha Koum (Little girl, I say to you, get up), by Jen Norton

The woman touched the fringe of his cloak, and she was healed. But this was not a magical fringe: her faith made her well.

The fringe was and is a religious artifact. In Hebrew it’s called a tzitzit. It’s a series of knotted tassels, worn to remind the wearer of the mitzvot, the commandments of God in the Torah — commandments about welcoming the stranger, about sustaining a healthy community, about living ethically and peacefully in God’s presence. A rough (a very rough) Christian equivalent might be the stole of a priest or deacon. When I wear my stole, it becomes a colorful, physical reminder of the baptismal identity we all share.

The woman summons her courage and faith, and rushes up to touch the tzitzit of a Judean rabbi. Jesus is immediately aware of her action, turns and sees her, and quickly grasps the situation. He praises her for summoning her own faith to approach him and to touch his clothing — clothing powerfully laden with religious meaning. Her healing is not only physical: her faith, and the savvy, compassionate response of Jesus, restore her spiritually and socially to her people.

Now, imagine that woman in need of healing coming into this room, among all of us, next to you, next to me. A twelve-year hemorrhage: this ambiguous ailment is meant to signify an utter outcast. Twelve years: twelve is a biblical number representing fullness, completeness: her illness is comprehensive. It has fully overtaken her life. And the hemorrhage is likely related to her female anatomy, and so, in that patriarchal culture, she is as ritually unclean as a person can be.

It might be hard for us to imagine that woman in this room, because we might not believe that anyone is an outcast here. All are welcome, remember? “All are welcome” is one of our most treasured beliefs about ourselves, about our church. But are all people really welcome? When an unhoused neighbor comes into church during one of our liturgies, we can feel tension rising. The person looks unpredictable, risky, scary. Maybe they smell terrible. Maybe they talk out of turn, and talk loudly. They might be high. (Of course if they are high, they’re not all that different from wealthier people who come here on Christmas Eve with a strong buzz from the wine at dinner.) We want to welcome these neighbors, and often enough we do offer them some amount of hospitality, but I think if we are really honest with ourselves, we will concede that we feel relieved when they walk back out the door.

Meanwhile, it took a long time for us to improve the accessibility to our buildings. Even shortening a few pews necessitated several discussions. We needed to shorten them so that people who come here by wheelchair can truly join the assembly and not be blocking aisles and walkways, as if their presence here was an afterthought. We welcome people here in defiance of the ableism that pervades our dominant culture. But we don’t have a perfect record on this. We don’t have a long history of responding to accessibility needs with urgency and skill.

Meanwhile, I hope it has not escaped your notice that St. Paul’s is whiter than the Uptown neighborhood that surrounds us. We are wealthier, too. We say we want to participate in the splendid diversity of God’s creation, but we always have more to learn about all the ways that patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy have damaged and distorted our own humanity, and sapped God’s beautiful rainbow of its vivid colors, even here in our beloved parish church.

And then there are other needs, other differences, other personal problems, other ways to “other” people, other ways to be “othering.” I have a little personal enemies list, I confess, just a handful of people in my life who have (from my perspective at least) mistreated me, disrespected me, even (in a couple of cases) emotionally abused me. Do I really welcome them here? Would I really want to walk into this room, lustily singing the entrance hymn, and see them turning to face me from the pews? I want to say yes. I want to say they’re welcome here, even by me. But is that so?

Anyone and everyone you can think of whose presence in this room might make you uncomfortable, for any reason, has as their forebear the woman with the hemorrhage who touched the tzitzit of the Judean rabbi Jesus.

Here is how it works:

Right now I am thinking of someone whose presence in this room would make me uncomfortable. I am certain you do not know this person. The person is not a member of the parish, and to my knowledge has never even been on campus. The person does not live at or near Seattle. Now, if this community is functioning the way Jesus wants it to function, it works like this: This person I know would come in here and touch my stole. The healing this person would seek is the repair of our relationship. The person would ask for and receive my forgiveness, and I would ask for theirs.

By touching my stole, the person would be reminding me of my obligations, my vocation, and my identity. “You are a baptized Christian” — that’s what the person says when they touch my stole. Meanwhile, someone else might come in here and touch your white robe, if you’re a lay altar server, or if you sing in the choir. Another person might come in here and touch your skirt, or your blue jeans, or your jacket. “You are a baptized Christian” — that’s what these unwelcome folks are saying when they touch the fringes of our garments.

If we are baptized Christians, we have obligations to one another, to our neighbor, to the stranger. Our vocation compels us to allow the outcasts of our day to come close, close enough to touch us. Our identity moves our gazes outward and away from ourselves, away from our favorite people, and toward the last people we would expect to come in here, the last people we would want to come in here.

But then, you might be that other person: not the person whose garment fringe gets touched, but one of the people who claim the woman with the hemorrhage as your companion, your patron. Maybe you are coming into this room because you need healing, physically, socially, spiritually. You have been, or you are, an outcast of one sort or another. If so, I am glad you are here. And I hope our community is even half as clever as Jesus, half as quick to perceive your need, and respond to your courageous touch.

Friends, I can think of no better news for this raging and war-torn world than this Good News of truly radical welcome, truly life-changing encounters, truly healing conversations. I can think of nothing else the world needs more than this. “Go and learn what this means,” Jesus says, and then he quotes the prophet Hosea: “God desires mercy, not sacrifice.” Mercy: a dangerous and risky vulnerability to an enemy, so that everyone can lay down their arms and bring justice back to the land. Mercy: a brave and prophetic choice to look into the eyes of people who are routinely ignored, people literally kicked to the curb. Mercy: a new yet ancient way to mend the world, one restored relationship at a time.

If the person you like the very least, or the person who startles and scares you, or the person whose needs make you anxious comes up to you and touches the fringe of your garment, will you be able to recognize their faith? Will you allow them to draw close to you, knowing how costly and painful that encounter could be? And if you are that person for some or all of us here, will you summon your courage and faith to assert for the healing you need?

I pray that God will bless us with these troubling and costly encounters. After all, if not for these terrible connections and vulnerable conversations, what in the world is any one of us even doing in this room?

Our diverse and loving God

Preached on The First Sunday after Pentecost: Feast of the Holy Trinity (Year A), May 31, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

The adult child of a former parishioner who had died sat across from me as we began to review the selections of hymns and biblical readings she and her sister had made for the funeral Mass. “Well,” she said, “we don’t want to start with any Christian hymn or the resurrection anthems in the prayerbook. We want a good friend, who is a talented musician, to sing Frank Sinatra’s ‘I did it my way.’” I took a deep breath and said, “Your friend would be most welcome to sing Sinatra at the reception but as this is a Christian funeral in the Anglican tradition, we sing only Christian texts during the Mass. But I’m wondering: why ‘I did it my way’?” “Our father,” she said, “did everything on his own, did it his way, and was an enormous success because he did it his way.” 

At that moment, I thought to myself: I don’t think that’s true. None of us have “done it on our own.” I mean I don’t think about it much but my parents had to have sexy time for me to enter the world. I mention the simple fact of my conception because I reject the notion that I am a self-made person, a mythology largely embraced by middle and upper class Americans. No, I did not create myself and when I think about my life a good many decades after my birth, I know that I continue to bear not only the genetic imprint of my parents but also the values and practices with which I was raised. I am not alone. You see me standing here but I am a community of more than me. I did not do it my way, but rather our way. I was and still am shaped and supported – as I hope you are – by many people.

In my first year of teaching at PLU, an earnest student from a conservative  evangelical background stopped me after the first day of class and asked me if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. For a moment I was startled by his question since I was hired for my expertise, not my religious beliefs or practices. In response, I said to him, “I appreciate your concern - but I have to say your question is just too small for me.” “Too small?” he asked with an equally startled look on his face. “Yes,” I said. “For you need to know that the God I worship is larger than one person; that the God I worship is a community - you might say, a communal God.” Well, that brief exchange led to a lengthy discussion, one that invited this student to stay with the course and enter, for the first time in his life, the mystery of the Holy Trinity and how that core Christian conviction could actually expand one’s understanding and experience of life on this earth with other human beings. 

You see, the temptation is ever-present in American culture to simplify, to reduce to easily-digestible terms just about everything, a practice largely shaped by the advertising industry in which a commercial for a product or a service runs on average 20 seconds. Week after week, and month after month, and year after year of exposure to short and simplistic ads as well as news broadcasts geared toward a fifth grader’s level of comprehension will shape one’s understanding and expectations of just about anything, including religion. 

It should not surprise us, then, that a simplistic form of faith is quite popular among a good number of Americans. The problem is this: the desire for an uncomplicated form of faith usually goes hand-in-hand with a desire for absolute certainty - and the desire for absolute certainty can easily lead people to seek an unquestioned authority. My student wanted absolute certainty from me; he did not want questions that just might expand his thinking about life. Here’s the point: Christian faith and life are more interesting and so much richer than simplistic formulas and easily-digestible slogans. Honestly, if that’s what you seek, there are plenty of churches who will provide it. But not here. For at the heart of Anglican spirituality is a willingness to engage the complications and the richness of our lives lived with God, refusing to reduce God and our lives to saccharine stories and safe sound bites.

Which leads us to the feast of the Holy Trinity and why a host of people - from feminist theologians to Black preachers - find in our communal God a helpful way of expanding, rather than diminishing, our experience of life on this earth with other human beings. As a child, our Sunday School teacher used a triangle within a circle to teach us that “the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not the Father and yet they are united in mutual love for each other.” Little did we know that such a fairly simple proposition would develop into the far richer notion that there is diversity in our communal God and that such diversity is witnessed everywhere in the creation and that such diversity is the norm, not the exception in life. 

Well, we’re on the eve of Pride Month: indeed it would be hard to miss the Pride flag hanging on the exterior of our office wall, indicating that this is a safe and welcoming space for a minority in American life. A newcomer to St Paul’s recently asked me why Episcopalians make such a big deal of inclusion, of welcoming people from different identities and backgrounds. “Aren’t you just trying to be politically-correct?” he asked with a hint of skepticism in his voice. Uh, no, I said. We aspire to welcome the diversity of human experience because we are baptized and communed in the life of a communal God marked by difference: the Son is not the Spirit and yet they live with love for each other. And that is who we hope to be as a parish community: a visible, breathing, and tangible image of our diverse and loving God.

Now that sounds like nice greeting card sentiment - “We’re diverse and loving” - except for this: there are powerful voices and equally powerful legislatures in our nation that are working diligently to divide and exclude people from each other, censoring the literature available for reading, and demonizing people who don’t conform to one particular identity. So let me say this as clearly as possible: it is no small thing, dear friends, to celebrate this feast of the Holy Trinity and what it suggests for how we live with each other, especially those others who may be different from you and me. For in the communal God who is the creator of various and wondrous lives, there is no demonization, no exclusion; there is only love. And so I wonder: Can it be any different for you and me? 

I say: All praise be the holy and life-giving Trinity, now and forever. AMEN.

Strife closed in the sod

Preached on the Day of Pentecost (Year A), May 24, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
John 20:19-23

Jesus breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

We church-going folk sure love to be nice. We love to be warm. We love to be welcoming. When we talk about spiritual concepts like “grace,” we focus on the happy part of the term: the good gladness that washes over us when the Creator fashions us from clay and breathes life into us and sets us on this green earth to live, to laugh, to love.

When we talk about the Holy Spirit, we like to focus on the loveliness of that Spirit, who blows through this community like a warm and invigorating breeze. We might imagine the Spirit’s fire brightening our nights with cozy amber colors, all of us gathered around a snug campfire. Maybe we could toast marshmallows over the Spirit’s golden flame.

“I’m not that into Jesus,” someone once told me, years ago. “I’m more about the Spirit,” they said. It’s easy to see Jesus as off-putting, complicated, and historically problematic; and isn’t it the evangelicals who focus on him so much? Meanwhile it’s easy to see the Spirit in any way that suits us, a kind of divine blank screen onto which we can project our happy dreams, our escapist fantasies.

“There’s a real spirit to this place,” people will say. “Do you feel it?” And when they say that, they usually mean that we’re extraverted and enthusiastic, or we’re loving and generous. And often enough they are right: we are those things, at least some of the time, and the Spirit makes it all possible. Unlike the provocative and vexing Jesus, whose miracle stories beggar belief and whose story of suffering can just, well, bum us out, the Spirit seems easy, breezy.

But even if we just glance at the Gospels, particularly the Resurrection appearance that we just heard, we see that Jesus, who came from the Father and is going back to the Father, breathes the Spirit into his followers, reminding us of the creation story when God breathes life into Adam, the first human. Once again we are reminded that it is impossible to speak truthfully or meaningfully about one Person of the Holy Trinity without speaking about the other two.

If we domesticate or soften the Holy Spirit, we not only misunderstand the nature of God, we also miss out on the deeper grace, and the more profound glory, that we receive from the Holy Three. When we praise them, and pray to them, together, that is when we are challenged, and changed. That’s when our faith pierces us like a strong wind. That’s when our hearts are set on fire.

Let’s spend a bit more time with wind and fire, the Holy Spirit metaphors that on the surface seem so gentle and benign. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself teaches us to imagine the Spirit as a “wind that blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” But wind can be destructive, even catastrophic. The Spirit’s wind doesn’t just gently flow around us. Her tornado strips us of our easy defenses and facile explanations. She blows away the flimsy tarps of defensive denial that we anxiously wrap over hard truths, like the fact that we routinely participate in systemic evil that harms other people. Her north wind can blow cold, biting cold, driving us out of our places of comfort and safe retreat.

And the Spirit’s fire — it’s not just the quiet flicker of a lit candle. The Spirit’s volcano can and will sear us painfully, burn us badly, refine us bracingly so that we repent, reform, and get stronger.

Now, listen again to what Jesus says after he breathes the Spirit into his followers: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

That is a lot to say. The Spirit gives us power, control. She authorizes us to forgive sins, and not forgive them — we are now gatekeepers in this community. We are called and qualified to make judgments about one another, and about other people. But before we take up this task, we should know more about what, exactly, the “sins” are that we are forgiving, or not forgiving.

In the Good News according to John, “sin” is understood in a particular way. For John, to “sin” is not to do something immoral or against the rules; it is not a mistake or a bad choice; sin is not simple wrongdoing. For the community that gave us John’s Gospel, sin is defined as a failure of relationship.

Some context will be helpful. The people who created John’s Gospel were thrown out of their synagogues because of their belief in Jesus. This deeply traumatized and isolated them. They banded tightly together, and focused keenly on the importance of group cohesion, togetherness, unity. This led them to reflect theologically on sin not as a simple bad behavior (I stole your lunch money, shame on me), but as a willingness to break relationship, to break the community, because of an important disagreement (I stole your lunch money because I am not in community with you).

And so, if you “believe in Jesus” or “believe the Good News” in John’s community, you’re not just affirming an intellectual belief. You are bonding with them forever in love. And if you reject the Gospel, then, well, you have sinned, but not because you hold to a taboo idea. You have sinned because you have broken your membership in Christ’s Body.

We aren’t all that different from John’s community. Sure, we are 21st-century people trained to understand religious belief as an intellectual exercise, a cognitive thing. “What do you think?” we will often ask each other, in a discussion about faith, or God, or evil, or the notion of life after death. But this faith community — our faith community, here in present-day Seattle but descending from the very first Christian communities that grew up around the Mediterranean twenty centuries ago — this faith community does not hand newcomers a faith statement and ask them to sign it. We don’t have you check boxes next to belief statements and commit to full agreement. “Belief” is always more than that. Belief is relational: to believe means to break bread with us, to abide with us, and to follow Jesus with us.

So now let’s look again at the words of Jesus: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Understanding what John’s community means by the word “sin,” we see that the Holy Spirit, breathed into us by the Risen One, gives us authority and power to forgive the sin of a broken relationship. We don’t just say, “I forgive you for stealing my lunch money.” We repair the breach; we mend what is torn; we work with one another and with people who have left our Body to come back together, to embrace, to abide, to be one.

And — we can also say No to that. (This part of today’s Good News isn’t easy and breezy, and maybe not very pretty.) Sometimes the painful breach needs to stay in place. Just ask anyone who escaped an abusive or otherwise death-dealing marriage, and now has an ex in their life who does not behave ethically or safely. For that person, “retaining the sin” of the other person means keeping them out of their life, for good reasons. 

And finally, if we step back and reflect on the wind and the fire of the Spirit, it all begins to come together. Jesus breathes the Spirit into us, the Spirit wind who blows away the structures and systems that damage human beings, including the structures and systems that you and I have grown fond of because they keep us comfortable, or wealthy, or safe, no matter that our neighbor is cast aside, thrown outside. Jesus fires the Spirit into us, the scorching flame that sears our consciences and drives us into crucial conversations with those we too easily call our enemies. 

Jesus breathes the Spirit into us, and we are strong now, even frighteningly strong. We are conscious now, keenly aware of what we’re up against, what we want in the world, and who we follow: we follow the crucified and risen Christ, the Friend of friends who binds our community together and forms us into apostles so that we can keep doing the work of binding and bonding; keep doing the work of conversation, confession, and reconciliation; keep doing the work of repairing the breach.

I will close with words from the poet William Alexander Percy. One of his poems begins with the famous phrase, “They cast their nets in Galilee,” and you can find it in our hymnal at hymn number 661. Percy speaks of God’s peace, which on the surface sounds pleasant, soothing, lovely, like the gentle breeze or flickering flame of the Spirit. But God’s peace is hard won; the Gospel demands the hard labor of love; the Spirit-led peace breathed into us by the Risen One is not an easy peace, but rather a conscious and painful engagement with strife. We won’t always make peace with everyone. Our faith demands great maturity and forbearance from us. 

Here is the final stanza of Percy’s poem:

The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.
Yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God.

Lynette is loved for eternal life

Preached at the Requiem Mass for Lynette Douglass, May 23, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Jonah 2:1-10
Psalm 27:10-18
Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39
John 15:1-17

Lynette Jennifer Douglass abides for eternal life in the love of the risen Christ. Lynette herself preaches this Gospel.

Across my scant fifty-six years of life, from early childhood through a sacred-music career and onward into ordained life, I have said my prayers and served God’s people in seventeen congregations, some Lutheran, some Episcopal, and I have not known a member of any of these communities who has pressed this point as enthusiastically as Lynette: She is loved, as all of us are loved; she belongs, as all of us belong; we all abide for eternal life in the love of the risen Christ.

Lynette’s evangelism about the love of Jesus Christ is particularly poignant and powerful because Lynette has faced a lifetime of rejection and marginalization due to her physical differences. She survived the emotional abuse of religious people whose ableist religious beliefs tormented Lynette with guilt and despair: surely if she loved God enough, or prayed to God hard enough, God would heal her palsy in a wondrous sign of grace and power.

Of course this is an obscene theological idea, foreign to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a shameful twisting of our faith into a weapon to torment a member of Christ’s body, a branch on Christ’s vine, a lamb of his own flock, a sinner of his own redeeming. This noxious notion turns God into a monster who demands that we believe something, or else God will refuse us physical health or physical abilities. I have felt the anger rise in me as I listened to Lynette’s stories of rejection and judgment.

And I have marveled at her brave choice to keep coming back to Christian congregational life until she found a place where she would be embraced fully as a member of the Body of Christ, no improvements needed, no notes. She found that place here, at this ordinary street corner.

Now, as a former therapist, and as a priest who values personal transformation highly among the many gifts we receive from God through Christ, I can’t resist reiterating one thing that Lynette preached somewhat less often. Christian life changes us, and challenges us. Peter and Paul both offer personal stories of radical improvement: by following Jesus, they were significantly changed, and often this change was painful.

But Lynette’s teaching holds; it stands up; it is valid: God loves you no matter what, and this community accepts and embraces you just as you are. You need not grow or change to be accepted and embraced here. We affirm your dignity as one who was made in the image of God, and we affirm that God is talking about you, along with countless others, when on the sixth day of creation God looks at all the life that is flourishing on this green and good earth, and God proclaims that all living creatures — again, that includes you! — all creatures are not just good but “very good.” 

Lynette chose as our first reading today the hymn of praise sung by the prophet Jonah. At a glance, Jonah’s song is beautiful but standard fare: God saved him from his own self-destruction, and Jonah is gushing with gratitude. But be sure you notice that Jonah sings this song not from the safety of the dry and warm beach, but from the innards of the great fish. “You brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God,” Jonah sings, except God did not yet do that! How does this make sense?

Lynette could tell you how. From within the struggle of her life, from inside her many hardships and challenges, with her voice clouded by her physical struggle, Lynette sang (often she literally sang!) about her blessed rest in God’s everlasting arms. She did not wait for liberation from her physical disability. She did not proclaim the Good News with an asterisk, saying that apart from her challenges she is confident of God’s grace and mercy. No, God was — God is — fully present and powerful upon Lynette’s kind and enthusiastic heart. No changes needed. No notes.

And then, finally, at the very end of her life, Lynette shared with me, her pastor, some insights and ideas about her journey of personal growth and transformation, insights and ideas that of course I am not at liberty to share. As dogged as Lynette was to proclaim God’s unconditional love, she understood, as we all do, that life as a branch on Christ the True Vine will change us, goad us, prod us, push us, prune us, so that we bear more fruit. 

After all, a vine is a living thing, a growing thing. Jesus says to us, “I am the true Vine,” and right away we can perceive that our eternal abiding in his love will mean that we branches of his will grow and change. So Lynette joins you and me today in the proclamation of this bracing truth: eternal life with Christ will have a powerful transforming effect on us all. 

Eternal life with Christ will turn our hearts outward toward our neighbors in need. Eternal life with Christ will train our ears to hear the cry of the oppressed. Eternal life with Christ will demand from all of us a great many acts of self-giving love, because without them, we can hardly begin to sustain this community of faith.

But again, I say to you: Lynette is right to begin the proclamation of the Gospel with this Good News: God loves you no matter what, and this community accepts and embraces you just as you are. You need not grow or change to be accepted and embraced here. We affirm your dignity as one who was made in the image of God, and we affirm that God is talking about you, along with countless others, when on the sixth day of creation God looks at all the life that is flourishing on this green and good earth, and God proclaims that all living creatures — again, that includes you! — all creatures are not just good but “very good.”

And finally Lynette encourages us to sing one more song, after we’re done joining Jonah in his song of praise from the dark belly of the great fish. After a lifetime of learning from wicked people that something is fundamentally wrong with her, that she doesn’t measure up, that she is less valid or less loved because she struggled to speak clearly, Lynette belts out alongside us this great chorus written by Paul our patron:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

That'll do

Preached on the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A), May 17, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen

Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

This photo was featured in this article.

Lately I have spent considerable time watching videos posted by Sean Hannah, a sheep and cattle farmer in Scotland. His handle is “Sean the Sheepman.” I won’t attempt his accent but it is a reliably charming Scottish burr.

My nervous system regulates and calms down as I watch videos of Sean and his border collies, Kate, Storm, Echo, and Copper, herding sheep. The dogs rocket away from their boss, hearing his commands from hundreds of yards away. Their speed is astonishing. “Come bye,” he calls, and they know to run clockwise. “Away!” means counter-clockwise. “Walk on,” he says to encourage them to keep going. And of course, “That’ll do,” the signal that they’re done, at which point they zoom back to him and hop on their rough plastic mesh perch on his truckbed. Look him up — Sean the Sheepman. Your nervous system will thank you.

Sean posted a ten-minute video some years ago, recounting his personal history and how he came into this line of work. In the video he mentioned Haig, his first border collie, and of course I immediately wondered what happened to Haig: Sean looks quite young; he hasn’t been at this for a whole lifetime of a dog, has he? No. Haig ate something toxic and died suddenly. Sean said — in a graphic on the screen, not verbally — that he still has a hard time talking about it. Of course he does. I know this feeling well.

You can watch Sean as he goes about all the chores of a working farm, like the video where he shears the hind ends of the sheep at a certain point in the season. Their backsides need early shearing to prevent flies from laying eggs there, which would grow into maggots. This detail, along with the countless absurd bare tails of the sheep, make for a fairly ridiculous (and somewhat disgusting) video.

This past week I watched one of Sean’s particularly poignant videos. He was attempting to convince a cow to accept a calf that was not her own. The calf’s birth mother had rejected it for some reason, and the calf was slowly starving. The (hopefully) new mother, meanwhile, had suffered the death of her own calf, but hadn’t accepted the loss. She kept the lifeless body near her. The cow with a healthy calf didn’t seem to want one. The cow who wanted a calf was bereft.

Sean’s solution was, well, a little intense. A graphic on the video popped up, saying, “I’m sorry if this is upsetting.” Off camera, Sean had skinned the dead calf and made a little jacket with its hide, and fitted the jacket onto the starving calf. Then he introduced the calf to its new mother. She sniffed the jacket, made some calm movements, and went back to eating hay.

Three hours later, Sean returned to the pair, and to his delight the calf was nursing vigorously: it worked. All was well.

I watched this video, as it happens, on Mother’s Day. I realized that for every creature on that farm — the sheep and their bleating lambs who need dogs to scare them into their pens; the bemused cows and their helpless calves; the hardworking border collies — for every creature on that farm, including the mother cow who rejected her healthy calf, Sean was the über-mother. They all depend on him. He keeps them together. He looks out for their safety. He trains them, feeds them, shears them, serves as their midwife, grieves their deaths, leads and follows them in their rhythms of life and loss.

I suspect that life on a rural Scottish farm is mostly foreign to everyone in this room, though I can still remember the smell of livestock, having grown up in a small Midwestern town. But I sometimes worry that the bonds of love on that farm might also be foreign to us.

Ours is a segmented, complicated, hectic world. We do not always live as Jesus Christ expected, or instructed, us to live. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine,” Jesus prays to God the Father. “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” These solemn and even majestic words come from the great prayer of Jesus in John, often called his High Priestly Prayer. But it’s a prayer for powerful intimacy.

Listen more closely. I wonder if you can hear in his prayer the profound and poignant identity of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Listen to these particular phrases:

While I was with them, I protected them.

I guarded them.

Protect them from the evil one.

As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.

…I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one…

…that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

These are just a few of the lines in this lengthy, dense, and wondrous prayer, but can you hear the bracing intimacy? I hope you can hear the passion, the compassion, the all-consuming love that draws the Holy Three so astonishingly close to the beloved human community.

Their love pulls us into dreadful but unspeakably joyful places: Like Sean Hannah grieving the sudden death of his dog, we are torn in two by grief when we love one another as Christ loves us.

Like Sean calling out to his tireless dogs as they zoom around the impossibly green Scottish landscape, we are in tune with one another, responsive to one another, our ears and eyes alert to one another; and we energetically respond to one another with alacrity and speed.

Like Sean shearing the smelly bottoms of his sheep, we love one another even when we are at our most unlovable, and we craft wedding vows that remind couples that their bond holds them in sickness and health, in poverty and wealth, they don’t get to pick and choose.

Like Sean rejoicing over a nursing calf, we rejoice over the triumphs and glories of our ordinary lives, the parent glowing with pride about her kid’s third-place ribbon at a high-school track meet. Our little victories and achievements delight us, and brighten God’s good world.

But also — like Sean skinning the poor body of a dead calf, we are covered in mud and blood as we grapple with the hardest tasks of life in community. We stay close to those who are staggering under incomprehensible grief. We stay at our posts when the world is raging and we are trembling with fear. We take our faith seriously, and we take one another seriously, and we know well that loving one another as Christ loved us puts us on his Via Dolorosa, his Way of Sorrows.

And don’t forget Sean’s lesson about the cow who rejected her calf. Why did she do this? I am not bovine: I have no idea. It was not a moral failing (this is a cow, after all). It probably was just instincts and scent, the ordinary chances and accidents of life on a farm. But Sean was that poor cow’s mother, too. He cared for her, no matter that she forced him to solve a hard problem. Life in community is often inexplicable, frustrating, shocking, sad, hard. Sean teaches us to care for the imperfect creatures around us.

This is the great insight, the dreadful, majestic teaching, of Jesus in the Gospel according to John: The Father, Son, and Spirit descend all the way down into our proverbial cattle stalls and sheep pens, the places of messy struggle where we live, where we work, where we hope, and where we sometimes feel despair. Down here on this “livestock farm” of ours, this Christian community, The Holy Three dwell. They turn our hearts. They open our minds. They guide our hands. They form us to look outward with rough and sometimes wretched love for one another, for our neighbor, for the stranger.

And then the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit raise us in bright glory as beacons of tender mercy in this lovely world. “Away,” Sean says to his dogs, and they lurch counter-clockwise to bring the sheep to safety. “Away,” God calls to us, and we lurch ever outward to seek and save the lost on this holy and green livestock farm.

Finally, one day, each of us will hear the call home, and follow the arc of incarnation traced by the risen Jesus himself, our Great High Priest who came down to our muck, and then rose up to glory. Working together, living together, loving one another even (and especially) when that love is difficult, we will all hear that blessed shepherd call —

That’ll do.

Jesus went away

Preached on Ascension Day (Year A), May 14, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

Stained glass detail Ascension from Saint James the Greater Catholic Church, Concord, NC

Jesus went away. Long ago. No one has seen Jesus of Nazareth, face to face, for about twenty centuries. He has been gone so long that there is a reasonable debate about whether he actually existed in the first place. (Let me hurry to say this: I hold strongly to the belief that he did exist in ancient Palestine, and if you like, I could discuss with you how the many accounts of his life, death, and resurrection have an uncanny way of describing the same person — an actual, living person — even as they remember him saying and doing quite different things.)

But anyway: he went away. This was an experience suffered by his very first followers, not just those of us who arrived on the scene about eighty generations later. The first record of his Ascension that we heard today — the one Luke records in his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles — gives us a hint that the first followers had some trouble accepting this loss. Two men in white robes appear (as they had done at Luke’s account of the empty tomb), and they ask the disciples, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” The disciples should answer for themselves, but I can understand why I would stand there looking up. That’s where I last saw him. I would want to keep seeing him. I expect they wanted that too.

But they come down the mountain, finally, and return to the city, as he had instructed them to do. Back in Luke’s Gospel, volume one of his great work, we hear Jesus himself tell his followers to stay in the city, where they will be “clothed with power from on high.” Stay in the city: that is also our instruction. You want to see Jesus? You want to see the one who went away? You will find him right here, in the city.

But you will find him even closer than that. In a few moments you will find him in a morsel of bread, a chunk of starchy calories that you can clasp in your own hand. How is he found there? Well, the bread will be broken, as you well know, broken and shared. Before that, the bread was lovingly mixed and kneaded and baked by one of our companions. (The word “companion” means “with bread,” or “together by sharing bread”.) Jesus is found in that bit of bread you’re anxiously clutching because it is an outward and visible sign of the inward, spiritual grace we share as companions of Christ. Said more simply: the family that breaks bread together encounters the risen Christ together.

The bread quickens our bodies and focuses our minds, bending us toward one another, to our neighbor, and to the stranger, driving us all into a holy (and sometimes daunting) embrace. When I draw closer to you and you draw closer to me, and when together we come to this Table and eat the broken bread, we are bonded in love, we are united in mission; we are many becoming one, we were once lonely but now are held, hugged, healed. In all of this holy (and startling!) intimacy, we see the Risen One.

So — he went away, but he is in this bread. 

And yet, he is elsewhere, too. Jesus Christ has ascended into the desperate and frightened bodies of refugees, into the bodies of human beings held and tortured in our government’s detention centers, into the bodies of our unhoused neighbors and all who are denied basic mental health care even as they are surrounded by immense wealth and prosperity. Jesus Christ has ascended into the Emergency Department of Harborview, at two o’clock in the morning, when the staff and patients are at the end of their ropes. Jesus Christ has ascended into the shelters and tunnels of Gaza, into the villages of South Sudan, along the fraught and explosive Strait of Hormuz, among the anxious citizens yearning for freedom on the island of Taiwan.

But he is elsewhere, too. Jesus Christ has ascended into your broken heart and your anxious mind. He has ascended into the quarrels and anxieties of a troubled married couple, alongside the sickbeds of our beloved friends, into the dreadful nightmare of anguished parents who lost their baby. He has ascended into the repentant heart of a person with white privilege encountering for the first time their lifelong complicity in white supremacy. He is ascending into the contemptuous heart of a transphobic activist who is determined to harm trans persons for no reason other than his reckless denial of their basic humanity.

Jesus Christ is ascending into the contentious conflicts in our court systems, into our federal executive branch as it commits war crimes, into our sclerotic and deadlocked Congress, into the judicial chambers of Supreme Court justices who are actively working to disenfranchise voters of color.

And what does he do in all of those places, so many of them so desolate and dreadful? Well — that good question defies easy and pat answers. It is obvious that the presence of Jesus Christ does not make it impossible for human beings to misbehave. His presence does not insulate us from injury, illness, discord, or heartbreak.

Jesus Christ doesn’t ascend into all times and places as a kind of magical talisman or amulet. He ascended alongside the deathbeds of both of my parents, and yet they both died. Looking outward, much more broadly, the risen and ascended Christ has not ended “forever” wars, or mitigated anthropogenic climate change, or deposed wealthy sovereigns from their thrones. Mary the mother of God sings that God has sent the rich empty away. Has God done this? If so, it doesn’t seem to have happened in an obvious way.

I have preached before about the great insight that Kate Sonderegger, my favorite theologian, offers about the nature of God. This insight can help us understand how Christ dwells in all times and places, and what Christ is doing here, and everywhere. Dr. Sonderegger reminds us that when God created the heavens and the earth, God did so in a jussive way. Jussive: this is a grammar term, a grammar mood. God said, “Let there be light” — this is a jussive way of commanding that light come into existence. In other words, it is more invitational than imperative. God did not say, “Light! You must appear now!”. God said, humbly if powerfully, “Let there be light.”

Jesus Christ, in turn, ascends into all times and places — ascends into our very bodies — not in order to take command of everything, but to invite goodness and justice to emerge, to grow, to finally overcome. 

This means that if you and I are in a terrible argument, we are not under orders to behave ourselves. We could say and do awful things to one another. We could allow our conflict to damage the people around us. But Christ has ascended into us, and into our relationship, and so we are continually — if quietly, if humbly! — invited to choose the better part, to listen to the better angels of our nature.

Christ ascends into all times and places, but he does so in the same way he became incarnate. As the Word made flesh, Christ took on our weakness, our frailty, even our finitude: he submitted to death, even death on a cross. And now, even as the ascended Son who sits at the Father’s right hand, he still does not lord over us with aggression. He is never an autocrat.

This sometimes means that his presence, particularly at grievous places like deathbeds, is not as a wonderworker but as a caring, soothing companion. His caregiving finds its way to the dying person through our own patient hands, our own open hearts, our own sensitive minds.

And then there are other ways, moral and ethical ways, in which Christ ascends into us, and rises within us. But because his ascent is always jussive, always invitational, we can say No. We can always say No. If we do say No to the ascended Jesus, in our selves and in all our affairs, we could feel more in control, at least for a while. We could feel powerful. We might win a dirty fight. We might prevail in a mean-spirited argument. We might get everything we think we want.

And if we say Yes? Well, that could hurt. We would have to be honest; we would have to be the better person. Or we would have to draw closer to a scary or unpleasant neighbor. Or we would simply have to release control over the outcome of our efforts — that alone is uncomfortable and often unpleasant. Sometimes people say, with wry humor, “Jesus, take the wheel.” We could say just that. We could let the risen and ascended Jesus take over, make the next call in our affairs.

If we do, we are promised great gladness and wondrous transformation.

But always at great cost.