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).

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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).

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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.

A royal priesthood

Preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year A), May 3, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5
15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

Procession, by John August Swanson

There was a time when it was possible to say, “He’s such a gay fellow,” and everyone knew that he was a joyful and fun-loving lad. But as we know today that word possesses a much different meaning, one that is affirmed by some and, sadly, derided by others. There was a time in the nineteenth century when people could say “he fizzled,” meaning he produced flatulence and did so quietly – you know, SBD: Silent But Deadly. But now that odd word means that something has failed, as in “the plan fizzled out.” Indeed, there was a time when the word “bully” actually meant “darling” or “sweetheart” – as noted in a number of Shakespeare’s plays – but now refers to an obnoxious person who intimidates in order to frighten, hurt, and punish others: the bully on the playground; the cyberbully; the bully in the Pentagon. 

This redefinition of words, this transformation of meaning, was not lost on the writers of the New Testament; in fact, it was at the center of the writing. Why, we know that at the time of Jesus, many of his fellow Galileans believed that a militant messiah would arise and forcefully evict the much-hated Roman occupiers from the land the Galileans believed was given to them by God: a king like Solomon who engaged in territorial expansion; a leader who would subdue gentile nations, ushering in a period of peace – but peace won through violent conquest. 

Yet a careful reading of the gospels indicates that Jesus rejected this image of a messiah. What did he say? “The kings of the gentiles lord it over [their people] ... But not so with you [not so with me] ... for I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:25-27) – as one who serves others. Indeed, we know that the service of his life among social outcasts, the poor, the lonely, the sick and dying, the overlooked, and the despairing was completed in his final act of self-giving love on the cross: the manner of his life led to his death. No: among Christians there should be no talk of a “militant” messiah regardless of what the “Secretary of War” says. For you see, we worship a crucified messiah, the one who identifies with human frailty and suffering, with our frailty and suffering. We worship the stone rejected by the builders: for what appears to be weakness in the eyes of the lords and warlords of this world is, for us, the very presence of God who is with you and me and this world: not only in our strength but also in our failures, our questioning, and our doubts. What did Stephen say as he was being stoned to death? “Bring your wrath upon my persecutors, O God, and annihilate their entire civilization?” No, I don’t think so. Rather, he said this: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” No word of retribution, of violence; only this: a word of astonishing and unexpected forgiveness.

We also know that at the time of Jesus, only males who came from the tribe of Levi were eligible to serve as priests in the Jerusalem Temple; individuals who were considered faithful followers of the Law; a priestly caste, as it were, who served as mediators between the people and their God. No women. No males from other tribes. No individuals of questionable sexuality, of questionable ethics, for one’s social status mattered greatly. And yet, to the utter surprise of many, the author of the first letter to Peter, transforms this ancient word, priest, by writing that in the waters of baptism women and men, children and the elderly, moral failures and virtuous folk, the lowliest in society and the overlooked by the lords of this world have become what? A royal priesthood. No wonder the ancient marking of the newly-baptized was done with these words: “You are anointed as a priest in the Body of Christ.” Yes, you and me made priests as scented olive oil was traced on our foreheads in the sign of the cross; made priests, says First Peter, to offer spiritual sacrifices.

But, then, if there is no ancient temple in which we worship, what does it mean that you and I, as priests, are called to offer spiritual sacrifices? After all, we do not lead a human victim to an altar for slaughter; no animals are slain in our midst and offered to God; there is no bloody sacrifice. On the other hand, one might assume that what we do here – our worship – is such a sacrifice, such an offering. But, again, I think not. Rather, the author of First Peter echoes a sentiment found in the writings of St Paul and the gospels: we come to this place to give thanks to God for this good earth, for our lives, and for God’s sustenance of life, and then we ask God to offer life and sustenance to others through us. What, then, might the call to offer spiritual sacrifice mean? Why nothing less than offering our lives as nourishment to those who are hungry for food, for companionship, for strength to carry on. As priests of God, your spiritual sacrifice and mine is enacted outside the doors of this house; it is offered in the home, the workplace, the public square – in all those ordinary places where we discern human need and – yes – human suffering. 

Our Eastern Orthodox friends speak of two liturgies that are linked together: the liturgy we celebrate in this house in which the crucified and risen Christ serves us with his Body and Blood, with the wounds of his love, and then the liturgy you and I enact as God’s priests who serve the spouse, the child, the parent, the friend, the co-worker, the stranger, the victims of the warlords of this world. The Orthodox priest and theologian, Alexander Schmemann, said this of the spiritual sacrifices we offer in daily life: “We hear these word at the end of the liturgy: ‘Let us depart in peace.’ This does not mean, of course, that having worshipped in church, we simply go home and ‘relax,’ having completed our religious duty. We are given this command,” he writes, “and it is precisely as a command that these words must be understood – for the Eucharist leads us into the mission of Christ in the world.” 

The only question is: will it be welcomed by each of us? 

"I AM the gate"

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year A), April 26, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 2:42-47
Psalm 23
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10

The entry to our buildings and grounds from First Avenue North, June 28, 2025.

A couple of years ago, we completed the construction of a fence around our whole property, with one major gap at our driveway on First Avenue North. To fill that gap, we installed a rolling gate, lockable with a combination padlock. We roll the gate open for four hours most days of the week, when our office is open, and we open it many other times, for various events.

Our new gate raises one issue to consider. Our mission primarily focuses on our neighbors in Uptown, many of whom experience housing insecurity. Doesn’t this gate belie our claim that we are advocates and allies of our neighbors? About a year ago, someone said that when we threw a big party with the bishop to bless our renovated buildings, they didn’t want to celebrate with us. The gate was their reason. For them, the gate communicates division and privilege: we are safe inside the gate, and our unhoused neighbors are outsiders. This person wanted to firmly stand with them on the other side of our gate, in solidarity.

But this person did not know what many of us know, and what I am now telling all of you: this gate of ours provides safety to everyone on both sides. When the gate was installed, a person lived in a tent at the edge of our driveway, as he had done for many, many years. Before the gate, there was a disturbing atmosphere of disorder and neglect on this part of the block, and that meant that our neighbor — someone we knew by name, and someone we finally helped to gain permanent shelter and receive medical care — our neighbor was routinely a victim of violence.

Before the gate, people would come into the garden at all hours and start fires, one of which very nearly killed him. Other people would assault him, occasionally leaving him bleeding at the curb. After the gate, these incidents abruptly stopped. But our mission continued: we pulled out our SPiN wagons every Sunday, as we will again today; we stocked our Little Free Pantry every day of the year, as we will again today. Our neighborhood missioners continue to advocate for folks with confidence and skill. The gate helps regulate our mission base so that everyone feels safer, and we can follow the risen Christ more confidently.

I even wonder if drivers on First Avenue North are a little more careful now, unconsciously driving better because they see our soft-green gate, and our soft-green fence, and our green garden, and our renovated buildings; and maybe they occasionally see us going about our mission with our neighbors; and when they see all of these good things, they drive a little more calmly, a little more carefully. I do not know if this is true. But I do know that before the gate, drivers would occasionally strike our neighbor lying at the edge of the driveway, or come very close to doing so. 

And so we have learned that gates are sometimes good, even necessary. They are literal physical boundaries, and what is a boundary in human society? A boundary is a rule or guideline that regulates a relationship, for the health and safety of everyone. As your pastor, I am obliged to observe boundaries with you that regulate what I say to you, how I say it, how and when I respond to your concerns, how and whether I receive your gifts, and much more. When we manage boundaries with one another, everyone is safer and more secure.

All of this draws my attention, focuses my mind, and lives in my heart when I hear Jesus say to us, “I AM the gate.”

You can be sure that when Jesus says this, he is not thinking of a wrought-iron gate on rollers that elegantly opens and closes. Remember that when Jesus says, “I AM the gate,” he is living in the ancient Levant, under imperial occupation, centuries before the industrial revolution. The walls he knew that formed pens for livestock would be little more than low stacks of assembled stones joined by rough masonry, with a rough gap for entrances and exits. And the gate? The gate is the vulnerable body of Jesus himself. Jesus the Gate lays his body down in the gap of the low wall. He sleeps there. If bandits or attackers try to get in, they will have to trample his body first. 

Does he have, I don’t know, a sleeping bag? Some sort of pillow? I doubt it. Maybe a rough blanket. Or maybe, by laying down in the dirt to form a living gate, maybe Jesus is like our ancestor Jacob, who camped on the ground at Bet-El, what we call Bethel, a word that means House of God. Jacob slept there one night and made a stone his pillow. He was in that lowly place when he saw a vision of angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth. That lowly bed, in the dirt, his head on a stone, is the unlikely place where Jacob proclaimed that he was in the House of God, that he was at the Gate of Heaven.

And so we might say that when Jesus tells us, “I AM the gate,” he means this: he is the Human One who sleeps down in the dirt, vulnerable all night, for the life of the flock. He is the stone pillow, the hard rock that forms the rough threshold of God’s House. He is the gate, the Gate of Heaven, the One who raises up the lowly in dignity and honor, the One who feeds the hungry with intimacy and gentleness, the One who risks his own life — the One who loses his own life — so that the vulnerable and the oppressed can live, and rise, and thrive.

All this vulnerability, all this weakness, all this down-in-the-dirt struggle and angst! This is our risen Lord; this is his Way. Last Sunday we proclaimed again the Good News of weary evening hikers recognizing Jesus in broken bread. They gaped in astonished recognition of the Risen One’s body, still gashed with dreadful wounds. Sitting at a rough-hewn table with them, out in the country, he lifted his bruised hands to break the bread, and in that breaking, he bound together a broken — and heartbroken — community of self-giving love. And now, today, we watch as he lays his body down in the gap of our wall, and settles in for our long night.

I think of Dutch, God rest his soul, an old recovering alcoholic who is still famous in the AA rooms around Seattle. Dutch had a beaten-down old truck, and he would drive around skid row looking for drunks. Sometimes he’d find them in the literal gutter. He would pick them up, put them in his truck bed, and take them to meetings. Would he find them in the exact same spot a couple days later, obliterated by booze and incoherent? Oh, sure. But he’d take them to a meeting again. 

When old-timers at AA meetings rhapsodize about Dutch, they often intone that old AA saying, “Never give up on an alcoholic.” I assert that that is the sort of sentiment that Jesus the Gate would endorse. We do not give up on each other. We do not abandon each other. And we know that “each other” is a group that includes our neighbors in extreme need, because if we gave up on them, we would lose some of our own humanity.

And we will find ever more people in our lives, people who, daily and weekly, will be added to our fenced and gated garden of beloved friends. We reach out to people we already know who are lonely or alone. But of course our circle of influence reaches far wider than this community — we have friends, family, and ministry partners around the diocese; we have neighbors on our daily walks; we have neighbors at street corners holding cardboard signs.

And we stretch our vision even wider: we lie down in allegiance with undocumented persons, and with all in mortal peril. We may falter or fail in these efforts, but we must not give up on any of them. 

And then, other times, you lie down in the gap of your own psychological wall, threatened as you are by your own anxious or guilty conscience, worn out by your hard feelings of loneliness and grief; and you protect your lovely, vulnerable self from those invasive thoughts and upsetting feelings. You make camp with the Risen One in the gap of your own wall, so that you yourself can rest, and heal.

You and I are challenged and invited by the Risen One to never give up on all of the people whose lives are closely linked with ours, including our own selves. As we strive, it helps to remember that there are ever more people of the Way, people of the Resurrection, who will never, ever give up on us.

“I AM the Gate,” Jesus says. Sometimes that gate is a literal, physical one: painted bars of iron that make the difference between life and death. Sometimes that gate is a porous but firm relational boundary, tended by you and me to be sure everyone can be healthy and safe. And sometimes that gate is your physical body and mine, down in the dirt, our heads resting uncomfortably on hard stones, our hearts burning with passionate love for the vulnerable people in our tender circle of care.

***

Note: Whenever I preach on the “I AM” statements of Jesus in John’s Gospel, I intentionally capitalize the word “am,” as a small devotional reminder to myself (congregants can’t see my written manuscript, of course) that Jesus is making an ultimate identity statement about himself with a conscious nod to the name of God in the Torah. The capitalization also reminds me to speak the statement a bit more slowly and intentionally.

Stay with us

Preached on the Third Sunday of Easter (Year A), April 19, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Third Station of the Resurrection: The Walk to Emmaus (detail) located in the National Cathedral, by Rowan LeCompte and Irene Matz Le Compte

More than forty years ago, Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich named my father to the new state Court of Appeals. Since it was a newly formed court, the governor got to fill the whole bench. My dad was an intentionally regional choice: the governor needed a judge from the southwest corner of the state.

I remember that there was a long delay in the appointment, until finally my father made clear to the governor’s office his interest in the job. When he met with the governor, he asked about the delay. I don’t know how he broached the topic. “Why the delay?!” he could have blurted, but my father was never forward or direct in that way. He did not strut. But somehow he managed to ask the question. Governor Perpich replied, “Because you hadn’t asked me.”

Sometimes the person we want most to be here, or the person we want most to do something, is absent or reluctant only because we have not asked them to come; or we have not asked them to take action.

We shouldn’t miss this detail in Luke’s marvelous telling of the Walk to Emmaus. The risen Christ appears to his followers, and specifically he becomes recognizable to them in the breaking of the bread (more on that in a moment), but they do not recognize him before they ask him to stay with them: “They urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he went in to stay with them.”

This little detail in the narrative inspires me to moan and cry out with desire: O Risen One, O Lord, O Savior of the World, stay with us! If it’s just a question of being asked — if all we need to do is ask — then please, Jesus, come and stay with us!

How profoundly we need our risen Savior right now! Last week I finished a book by the late Thomas Cahill, an historian who wrote in the popular vein, a book called Heretics and Heroes. Cahill chronicles a busy, restive European age, roughly the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. I never before appreciated how brutal and bloody the Reformation era was.

Here is a passage of Cahill’s book that has me reflecting on how badly we need our Savior, a need we have felt for centuries now, if only to save us Christians from ourselves. Cahill writes:

“[During the Renaissance and Reformation,] the occasional conflict of Christian against Christian progressed swiftly to bloody regional clashes and thence to unforgiving national wars, a state of affairs that Europe would hardly attempt to forsake till the bleak period of unavoidable reflection that would follow the global disaster of World War II. Let’s draw our swords and kill all the Others — all the heretics, all their spouses, all their children, for all [of] these are hopelessly compromised by their invincible wrongheadedness and their perverted commitments. No epitome of the conflicts that wracked Europe from the 1560s to the middle of the seventeenth century could possibly account for the needless suffering that men inflicted on their fellow men and on the women and children trapped in these hostilities. So I shall not try.” (End quote.)

Bloody century after bloody century, we Christians have warred with one another; we have raged against those whose faith is other than Christian; our faith has formed the headwaters of rivers of blood. All of the promises of the Enlightenment and the modern era; the heady post-war decades that gave us the United Nations and a new vision for fundamental human rights; the awesome advances in medical science and technology that extended human life expectancy and improved public safety — none of these has prevented Christians from drawing upon our faith tradition to rationalize brutality that destroys human life, other creatures, the earth, the air, the seas.

O Risen One, O Lord, O Savior of the World, stay with us! If it’s just a question of being asked — if all we need to do is ask, then please, Jesus, come and stay with us! If we but ask, he will come into our lodging place at the edge of town, in the evening, and he will sit at our table.

But we won’t know who he really is, we won’t understand him, we won’t grasp what he is teaching, we won’t have any hope of following him, until he breaks the bread: “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”

This is what so many Christians, millions of Christians, have missed down the ages, and now. This insight is lost on a politician who posts an image of himself as Jesus, with symbols of war unironically hovering around him. This is what we will miss if we don’t stop, breathe, listen, watch, and let it sink in: “He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened.”

The bread breaks, and in the breaking, becomes food for everyone. The bread breaks, and in the breaking, sends fractures through our set assumptions, cracks open our closed minds, breaks into pieces our safe prejudices, rends asunder our proud hearts. To be Christian is to be broken: broken down from the heights of arrogance; broken open to encounter our troubling neighbor; brokenhearted by the fate of all the innocent dead.

Maybe you’ve wondered about the solemn, quiet moment when the priest takes the consecrated bread, holds it aloft, breaks it apart, and stands there quietly, her face averted. (We are not to lock eyes with the priest at this moment: the breaking of the bread is not about her, or us. It is all Christ.) We call this moment in the mass the “Fraction,” as in fracture. An upsetting crack snakes through our solid walls of certitude and confidence. The consecrated bread breaks. And in that crisis, right there, we recognize the Risen One.

Remember that he breaks the bread with wounded hands, with a body torn open by injustice, a body fractured by his solidarity with the oppressed. And so the terrible, atrocious, dreadful, sick irony of Christian violence down the ages is that when we spill human blood, we move away from our Lord, we push him out of our house, we kick him back onto the road, and he walks on.

But all of this is a hard teaching, for all the fact that it is shot through with the breathtaking joy of Easter. If I stay safe from you, and don’t allow my heart to be broken open to you, then I will not recognize the Risen One. If we shut up our doors from human suffering, and refuse to be fractured by the mercy of God, we will never be a haven for the weary, and we will never commune with the One who triumphed over sin and death. The bread must break; we must break; the wounds of the Crucified One must become ours.

And I can tell you, and our many companions here can tell you, this hurts. Four of us went on a SPiN walk last Sunday, and we (like Cleopas and their companion) encountered strangers on the road. Two people in particular were suffering from untreated mental illness, which is all too common on the streets of this wealthy country. We could not save them; we could not fix them; we also could not abandon them. We could only be fractured by them. We bore witness to their pain.

It felt like too little — it was too little — to just hand them soup and a pair of socks. But we try not to stop there. We pray for the courage to be broken open by our encounters with our Uptown neighbors. On these SPiN walks to Emmaus, everyone is greeted as hungry humans, by hungry humans. We receive the painful gift of intimacy and solidarity with companions deeply wounded by our own government, our tax dollars, our national culture. 

These encounters have the power to restore our humanity, if we allow them to do so. And they inspire ever more encounters in our parish life, on our parish mission. Some of us fill our pantry shelves, a ministry that announces Resurrection just as the Risen One does: as Cleopas has taught us, resurrected life is found around a dinner table. Some of us break bread with the sick and the dying. Others tend to our youngest missioners in the children’s chapel. Some of us walk in protest alongside hordes of activists and advocates. You, in your vocations of family life, work life, and civic life: you, too, can be broken open by the bracing news of Resurrection.

In all of these labors of love, our hearts burn within us. And when we cry out for our risen Savior, singing to the sky our desperate plea that he stay with us, we will find him right here, at this Table, recognizable in the broken bread. His presence fires us with hope and floods us with joy, giving us new life in his Name.

But it also breaks us, badly, and that hurts.

It hurts like a grievous wound.

We will never board the starship 'Voyager'

Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter (Year A), April 12, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Psalm 16
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31

Hands of Proof, by Hyatt Moore

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. 

Where was Thomas, the Sunday before, when everything happened? 

Where was he?

A little over a year ago, the new 2025 St. Paul’s vestry met for a long meeting to plan the coming year. Our consultant got things started with an ice-breaker exercise. The prompt: Your name, how long you’ve been at St. Paul’s, and a fantasy world you’d love to live in. There are so many fantasy worlds: the Stars, both Trek and Wars; the dark, intriguing Battlestar Galactica; Middle-earth; the worlds of Anime. Or do you want to be an X-man, or a Marvel avenger, or someone in DC Comics? Ursula LeGuin, Neal Stephenson, Philip Pullman: feel free to choose your favorite fantasy author. Whose world would make you feel at home?

This was my response to the prompt: My name is Stephen Crippen, I’ve been your pastor for [at that time] two years and counting, and my favorite fantasy world is a sub-world in the Star Trek multiverse: the starship Voyager.

Voyager is a home far from home for our heroes. Flung to the other side of the galaxy, they spend seven television seasons working their way back. What I love about this world is how everyone is stuck together. I realize this dream of mine might be your nightmare: we’re all on board a ship together, like it or not, and we have to work together if we want to survive, and accomplish our shared mission. If we argue, we have to make up, because we’re going to see each other in the corridors and mess hall, and it’s just impractical to stay mad. 

Before long, Captain Janeway is talking about her crew as a large family, but this time, it’s not inaccurate or problematic for a boss in a workplace to talk like that: they really do come together as a real kinship network. They have to. Their survival depends on it.

When I shared this preferred world with the vestry early last year, I explained why this is so compelling for me. Like many developer priests, I pay close attention to attendance, to the weekly Sunday head count. (The devil tempts me to compare ours with other churches.) But I watch attendance not because I am competitive, or because I have a high achievement orientation. (I admit those character traits, and even admit that they are also occasional character flaws, but they aren’t the primary reason why I focus on attendance.)

The primary reason is that I truly love to see you all, and be with you all. I often wish this parish church were a closed ship hurtling through space, on a shared mission, or a shared dilemma, that keeps us all together and close. Again, I realize that my wish might be your claustrophobic hellscape. But it’s just a wish; it’s just a feeling; it’s really just the fact that I love you, and want to be with you.

Sadly for me, that has never been how churches work, not even at the very beginning, on the first Easter Day. Was Thomas really not there that first evening, when Jesus appeared to his closest followers? Or is this a literary device of John the Evangelist, whose objective is to create a truthful, compelling narrative that gives new members of the movement — those who never were able to meet Jesus — a way into the Resurrection event? Oh, it’s probably that latter explanation. But it doesn’t matter. The truth remains: never, not once, in all the history of our faith, has a Christian community contained every one of its members in one room.

Even if everyone who pledges to St. Paul’s came into this room today; plus everyone in their households who rarely or never comes here; plus everyone who may or may not pledge but calls St. Paul’s their home; plus every volunteer, every soul anywhere who has some important connection to us: if every one of these people came here today, we still wouldn’t be complete, because we are bound to all Christians everywhere, numbering in the billions; and also, closer to home, our beloved dead have gone before us, and their absence here still tugs at us, still wounds us. Never, not once, in all the history of our faith, has the whole Christian community contained every one of its members in one room.

So my Voyager fantasy will remain just that: a fantasy. And yet, it does touch a truth. Our beloved dead are not sitting here next to us, but the Risen One gathers them at this Table, even if they remain beyond our sight. Those who are homebound or otherwise unable to come here physically can join us on livestream, and we visit them with the sacrament. We are inspired by the Risen One to reach out to people we haven’t seen in a while; the Risen One hallows the graves of our friends, tucking them in; he helps us connect prayerfully with those of us who are traveling, or have moved far away. And ultimately, we share the lectionary readings, the baptismal waters, and the Eucharistic Table with all Christians everywhere.

And so it turns out that my Voyager dream is only a vain fantasy when I attempt to gather people by myself, counting you all as I anxiously work to make the flock ever bigger. That is a fantasy, and also a vanity: I can’t gather you. I can’t ensure that everyone will come. The work of gathering God’s people always belongs to the Risen One. Only he can bring us all into the same community (if not the same room) together.

After all, look again at Thomas: did he rejoin the community because they met his demands, and he touched the wounds of Christ to confirm that what others had told him was true? No, the risen Christ offered Thomas the opportunity to touch the wounds, but Thomas, when presented with exactly what he demanded, found that he didn’t need it after all: the risen Christ had already gathered him back into the fold. “My Lord and my God!” Thomas cries out, gaping at Jesus but not touching him. The risen Christ accomplished it all without Thomas doing what he had planned as the only possible way to fully rejoin his friends.

And so it is with us. As much as I want to see everyone, every Sunday, only the risen Christ can bring you here. And wherever those of us who aren’t here today might be — and wherever Thomas had been that first Easter evening — they are all where they belong right now, and they are all still here with us, joined as they are with us inside the sacred heart of the risen Jesus. He will bring them back in his time, for his reasons, just as he will bring you back, and me back, whenever we journey from here on our various adventures, our vital and diverging missions.

So I don’t need a closed starship that holds everyone close. And even the fictional Voyager couldn’t prevent the occasional death of a crew member.

But this reminds me of something that always bugged me about that show! Voyager continued the long tradition of so-called “red shirts” on Star Trek shows — the unnamed or otherwise minor characters, typically wearing red uniforms, who are killed on a dangerous mission, while the main crew we know and love survives. On Voyager, when a “red shirt” died, they would place them in a torpedo shell and solemnly shoot them out into space. Then the ship would resume its long course back to earth.

Keep the body with you! I would shout at the screen. Build a columbarium! If you make it back to earth, won’t their original families and friends want to bury the remains?? It’s so frustrating!

But even this can inform our reflections on this glad second Sunday of Easter. Even if you are separated from us by an insurmountable distance; even if there’s been a painful estrangement that seems irreparable; even if your own death has painfully placed you beyond our reach; even then, you are still here with us. Never mind the fantasy world of Voyager, in which they accompanied the launching of a coffin into deep space with the bland and underwhelming reassurance that the deceased person will live forever “in their memories.” We have received a greater reassurance.

For us, the people of the Resurrection; for us, the followers of the Risen One; for those among us who would love to lock everyone we care about safely inside one room, forever; for us, we have been given this great news of glad relief and glorious joy: the Risen One binds us all together, close by and far away, reconciled or estranged, living and dead. The Risen One binds us together in spirit and in mission. The Risen One binds us together in identity and shared purpose. The Risen One binds us together in fellowship and love. The Risen One binds us all together as one, no matter where we are, no matter what we’re facing, and no matter what’s gone wrong.

And together, bound as one community in this wondrous but ever-changing world, together, we now gaze upon his shining wounds, terrible wounds that proclaim his self-giving love; passionate wounds marking open hands; loving hands that gather us and embrace us, join us and then send us, forever.

Rejoice

Preached on the Principal Mass of Easter, April 5, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 10:34-43
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

The Myrrh Bearers, by Gracie Morbitzer

On Wednesday, February 28, 2001, this region suffered an earthquake of magnitude 6.8. It lasted about thirty or forty seconds. It was severe. The epicenter was in the Nisqually area northeast of Olympia. Several hundred people were injured, and one person died of a heart attack attributed to the upsetting event.

That particular day in 2001 was Ash Wednesday. I know this because I was working as the organist at Queen Anne Lutheran Church, up the hill, and we were finishing up our morning Ash Wednesday liturgy. I was standing next to a small portable organ — small by the standards of a pipe organ, that is. The hulk of pipes in their casing rose above my head. We were in a little chapel, and everyone had received Communion except me.

I told myself. “Eh, I can just go up for Communion tonight.” I stayed by the organ and did not receive the sacrament.

And then the earth shook.

I am from the Midwest. I did not know how to behave in earthquakes, and this was my first one. Someone later said to me, “You were just standing there, and you were ghostly white.” If this were an earthquake at the tomb of Jesus Christ, I would resemble the devastated guards more than anyone else. I had nothing to say. I was breathless. For a few moments, I felt closer to death than life.

Some animals are aware sooner than humans that an earthquake is coming. Your dog is a prophet, able to perceive approaching calamities: she will start to whine. Birds will suddenly take flight. Nothing seems to be happening. And then the earth shakes. Resurrection is like that. The women rise early, taking flight to see the tomb, to be there well ahead of time. But — it’s a tomb. What’s the hurry? Somehow they sensed more, somehow they knew more, than the sleeping men in their community.

Maybe — like your dog, and like the birds of the air — maybe the women can feel the slightest tremor of good news; maybe they can perceive the tiniest reason for hope. They’re keenly intelligent and highly sensitive. They get to the tomb in time for the earthquake. Then, like native Californians, they are unfazed by the shaking, even as the imperial guards fall to the ground in fear.

I wonder where you enter the scene. Are you among the wise, discerning women, up and alert because you sensed an early sign of trouble? Or are you next to me, slack-jawed and ashen, frozen in fear by everything shaking and collapsing around you? Maybe you’re still home in bed, unaware that the world is about to change, in the space of about thirty or forty seconds.

Of course the most unfazed person of all is the Risen One himself, who comes upon the faithful women and says, in what sounds like a bizarre non sequitur, “Greetings!” The original Greek doesn’t punctuate the word with a chipper exclamation mark, but there’s one in our English version. The earth shakes; the worldly powers and principalities, personified by the guards, fall unconscious to the ground; and the women, as savvy and skillful as they are, need to be told not to be afraid. And then: “Greetings!” 

It seems to be such a flip, hammy, English expression. Did the risen Christ really say something so light and airy, and if so, did he have an absurd smile on his face? No. There is nothing saccharine or silly in this robust word of cheerful exhortation. It’s better to translate the Greek word as Rejoice. And it’s helpful to remember that “Rejoice” shows up in other serious places in our holy book.

Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses the same word when he tells us that we will be reviled and persecuted on his account, and that people will say false things about us because we follow him. “Rejoice and be glad,” Jesus says at that time, “for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” 

“Rejoice,” Jesus says, not because terrible things are going to happen to us, but because the mission will make a difference.

It is definitely odd, this coupling of the encouraging command to “Rejoice” with bracing realism about how hard it will be to be prophets of justice in this world. But then, I doubt you would trust the Risen One if he gave you an uncomplicated announcement of good news, if he barked a glib “Greetings! Everything is great!” at you. His cheerfulness would ring hollow, what with the whole world breaking apart, with war tearing allegiances into pieces, with innocent lives perishing under the boot of injustice and oppression. We need a few answers. We need authentic hope. We need someone to make sense of the earthquakes rocking around us, someone to tell us what’s next, someone to interpret to us the meaning of all this suffering, and the way forward. We need a Savior, not a pollyanna.

That’s the great value of the strange one-word greeting of the risen Christ to the faithful women. There is not the tiniest fiber of silliness in his Easter greeting. “Rejoice” is a world-wise challenge as well as a reassuring encouragement. 

With that in mind, here are a few “Rejoice” greetings to consider on this bright morning:

Rejoice, good people of God: now is when you hear the startling but wondrous news that everything you thought you knew has been disrupted, including your sad despair that all was lost. 

Rejoice, good people of God: you are welcome in this faith community, where children are loved and kept safe, and where young people rise in our midst as our teachers and guides, sending us out to protect so many other children whose lives and safety are under continual threat.

Rejoice, good people of God: you are welcome in this faith community, where elders are affirmed and honored, and where we learn how to notice and care for so many other elders who live at risk of destitution and despair in an economic culture that ignores or even abuses them.

Rejoice, good people of God: now is when you search your hearts for strength to meet this moment, and discover that the Risen One rises to life within you, filling you with confidence to advocate for all in peril.

Rejoice, good people of God: now is when you join the movement that disrupts the powers of sin and death, creating even more prophetic earthquakes that topple thrones and liberate the captives. 

Rejoice, good people of God: you have a mission of mercy, advocacy, and solidarity that refuses to cast aside those at our doorstep who starve for food and healthcare in this nation of preposterous wealth and atrocious inequity.

Rejoice, good people of God: we fiercely advocate for those among us who are undocumented in this time of jingoistic violence, and we are not disillusioned.

Rejoice, good people of God: you know well the sting of death and you yourselves will die, but through Jesus Christ, the firstborn of the dead, in death our lives are changed, not ended, and whether we live or die, we belong to the risen Lord.

Rejoice. Greetings! Take heart. Be of good cheer. Don’t you worry. Do not be afraid. The earthquake of resurrection routs the forces of evil, even if we can’t yet see all ends, even if it takes all of human history. The seismic disruption of our expectations fills us not only with fear, but also with bracing joy, for even now, gathered at this Easter feast, even here, on this very morning, we already have been sent on God’s mission: to proclaim to a world aching for good news that we who care for children are kneeling in service to the vulnerable; that we who honor our elders are drawing alongside all who are lonely or anxious; that we who share food and clothing with our neighbors have good news for those in need; that we who protest government oppression stand in strong solidarity with our undocumented partners in ministry, that we who weep as we bury our friends also know that in dying, Christ destroyed death, and to those in the tombs bestowed life.

In short, Rejoice, for alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Restless all night

Preached at the Great Easter Vigil, April 5, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Nine readings from the Hebrew Bible
Romans 6:3-11
John 20:1-18

Mary Magdelene, by Gracie Morbitzer

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.

Mary was up all night. Was she a “morning lark” up early, or a “night owl” out late? Neither one, I say: She just had a bad night. In this hardship, she is our companion: you’ve surely had some bad nights. You came here this morning while it was still dark: I doubt you slept all that much last night.

Coming to the tomb before dawn; coming to church before dawn; getting up and out of the house when you can’t stop thinking about everything: We all know this. We’re all restless. Mary found her way to the tomb before dawn because she was restless.

She was grieving of course, and this great feast of Resurrection is at least in part about human grief, the kind of grief that wakes you in the night, and haunts you day and night. Mary’s closest friend and beloved teacher had been publicly executed, dashing everyone’s hopes — and profoundly traumatizing all of them, too. It took almost four centuries for Christians to make visual art about the crucifixion. This is generational trauma.

So yes, Mary was overwrought with grief. She returns to the tomb later in the morning to weep some more, after telling the others that the body was gone. Let Mary be your exemplar: You aren’t wrong to bring your grief with you, before dawn, on Easter day. You aren’t wrong to carry your grief all the way up here, to this Table of thanksgiving. And you aren’t wrong to still be weeping hours later, whatever Good News you might discover here.

But there are other things going on today, other ideas and insights, other teachings and exhortations, reasons other than grief why Mary Magdalene was keeping vigil in the night. Resurrection is not only about grief! Consider this: she saw that the stone had been moved, then rushed back to tell the others that his body was gone. How did she know his body was gone? Somehow she knew there was more going on in the shadows of that open cave, but we aren’t told that she went inside to investigate. She just knew.

She knew because she had been thinking it through. Mary was savvy and discerning; Mary was sharper than most of the others, quick to reach correct conclusions. She saw the disturbance at the tomb and quickly sized up the situation, having spent the night contemplating everything in her mind.

Maybe she was dogged in her night-long vigil by nagging questions, continually lobbed at her by her inner voices, questions like, “Didn’t he say he would rise on the third day?!” or “This just can’t be the end of the story, of his story, of our story. He said wondrous things and performed miraculous signs. He went into this awful weekend so serene. How could this be the end?” And the most vexing question: “What now?”

Mary was up pacing, or (if she’s like me when I’m restless) Mary was up cleaning, sweeping, tidying, laundering, organizing. She couldn’t breathe deeply and rest. She couldn’t just leave it alone, let it go.

And so it is with us, the restless nighttime vigil companions of Mary. By day and night, we work in our various vocations. We teach and counsel; we act and sing and play musical instruments; we support complex data systems and file our clients’ taxes; we care for our neighbors and tend to our families; some of us care for this parish in myriad ways, most of them far from spectacular.

So… maybe we’re restless in the night because our daily labors all feel so weak and inadequate, so disappointingly insufficient to the massive task that lies before us, a task that demands our hope and confidence, but like the sleepless Mary, we have a hard time with hope and confidence because we’re just overwhelmed by all the terrible things blowing up everywhere.

And our faith tradition just piles on the pressure. The Gospel of Jesus Christ sends us into the world to liberate the oppressed, to lift up the broken-hearted, to proclaim good news to the poor – and that all sounds so grand. How exactly can our mission be as ordinary as whatever you did last Tuesday afternoon? Whether you’re a lark or an owl, when you pass a bad night, you’re probably worrying about your small part in a tiny corner of this roiling world.

Mary has an encouraging answer for us. She was an unremarkable peasant in a backwater colony of a vast empire. She missed her friend. She fretted about the catastrophe they all just suffered, one of countless catastrophes that happened on the regular in that occupied land. She wondered what went wrong, and worried what was going to happen next. She pondered what she should do next. But be encouraged: When she was up and active while the world slept, she successfully worked out her next steps. She found an answer or two. Then she got up and out, and got started on the most wondrous day of her life.

So take heart. Here at this Table of Thanksgiving, here at this festive wedding banquet with the Risen One, now on this first day of the week, now on this first day of a new creation, you’re an ordinary little person in a big broken world. You need not have it all worked out, and you certainly need not leave your grief at home. Come and gather here.

You’ve been up for hours now, but maybe you’ve been fretting for years about the thousand thousand problems we face in these hard times. Maybe you’ve been pondering how the word “resurrection” has any meaning when so many people are in harm’s way, and the body count just keeps rising. Maybe you’ve been doing your part, pushing past your doubts and discouragement, clearing the clutter of your anxiety and confusion, working out how you’re going to make a tiny difference each morning.

Bring all of that here, up here to this Table. Bring your fears, your dilemmas, your puzzled wonderings. You may find, like Mary, that you’ve already worked out more than you know. And you will find, like Mary, that you will not be the only one who’s here. You will not be the only one who’s been up in the night trying to work everything out. You will not be the only one exhausted by grief. And you will not be the only one who finds your greatest friend and teacher here, living and moving, reconciling us all and sending us back out to announce, to ears aching for good news, that we have seen the Lord.

Empty

Preached on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Job 14:1-14
Psalm 31:1-14, 15-16
1 Peter 4:1-8
John 19:38-42

Long ago I was the organist at a funeral for a small child, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was a dreadful day. I do not recall what the preacher said. I remember the parents, ashen and mute, in the front row. I remember the child’s wrecked grandpa. I remember the open casket, and what looked like a terrible, forlorn, yet serene little doll inside it.

I spoke to the child’s grandfather. He had proudly doted on his grandson, a delight in his sunset years. I don’t remember what I said to him. I probably just said, “I’m so sorry.” But I clearly remember him saying to me, “We’re empty. We’re just empty.”

Millions of children have perished since that day. Millions of families have been shattered, devastated, emptied. There are the terrible accidents of life: a mysterious affliction stops the heart of a toddler; an airplane collides with a fire truck; a tumor slowly grows, undetected; someone steps out into the street at the exact wrong time. Theologians call these unintentional tragedies “ontic evils.”

Then there are intentional, immoral acts of destruction and death: the atrocity of genocide, the careless bombing of schools and hospitals, the sick pride taken by our own government officials in their casual obliteration of human life, as if everything is just a video game. Theologians call these intentional horrors “moral evils.”

It is good, and wise, that we Christians set aside two nights and a day to contemplate the presence of our Savior experiencing and contending with both ontic and moral evil. Jesus of Nazareth, as a human being, experiences ontic evil just like you and me: the ordinary predicaments of vulnerability and mortality, the accidents of circumstance common to all people. He was born into a particular time and place; he hungered and thirsted; he worked and studied; he shared dinners with friends; naturally, he wept at the grave of a friend; he then died. How ordinary, how everyday, how… ontic.

But Jesus also fell victim to moral evil. He was born into a refugee family fleeing persecution; his lower-class parents could only afford common turtledoves for his presentation in the Temple; he was finally executed by the empire in a public ritual of abject humiliation.

And today we recall his descent among the dead, the emptying of life from his body, the emptying of our Savior from the universe, the effects of ontic and moral evil at their worst. Today we contemplate the worst they both can do.

Our tabernacle where we keep the reserve sacrament is empty. It’s just a little box with its door hanging open, but it reminds me of that poor grandpa mourning the terrible, senseless death of a child. We need at least two nights and a day to stand empty before God, to stand in solidarity with those who have been emptied out, to contemplate emptiness, to be empty.

Yet even now, the Crucified One is moving, working, harrowing, hallowing. But maybe you share with the theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar the belief that on Holy Saturday, Christ merely participates fully in human death; that today, Christ is dead, and that is enough for today. This can offer an odd kind of satisfaction for us: if we live in a world of heartbroken grandparents, maybe we need today to be the day on which God joins us under the shadow of death, full stop.

But other Christians read the first letter of Peter and see in those verses the Good News that on Holy Saturday — not just a 24-hour earthly day, but an eternal spiritual reality — on this Day, Jesus is not just emptied out and dead, but he also proclaims the Gospel “even to the dead,” to everyone in Hell. (And “Hell” is any human place or condition or experience in which God is absent. This includes those places where we push God out and lock our prison doors from the inside.)

I am persuaded by this view. Even in death, the Living One rises. Even in despair, the Living One preaches hope. Even in emptiness, aching emptiness, wretched nothingness, even in that most desperate place, the Living One draws alongside us, locked in our grievous prisons.

All of this reminds me that on that most wretched day at that awful funeral for a child, there were dozens of people in the building. Behind the devastated family stood their community, and everyone sang their deepest hopes and prayers for that family. Everyone wept bitterly with them. Everyone held them close. This is what those who follow the Crucified and Risen One do. In the face of ontic evil, there is nothing we can say to the bereaved, but we can be with them.

And in resolute defiance of moral evil, we embrace one another in mighty fellowship, and we embrace all who cry out in lament. We preach hope to them and to one another, even if everything around us is laid waste; even if our hopes and dreams have been reduced almost to ashes.

Even today, on this ashen and empty day, even now, we can just hear, off in the distance, the first glad strains of God’s song of Resurrection.

"I am thirsty."

Preached on Good Friday, April 3, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), "I am thirsty."

Last Friday, four of us were here in the afternoon cleaning the baptismal font. It is a mighty undertaking. There are power plugs, filters, pumps, basins, beeping leak monitors, buckets, wash towels, and hoses. It takes a long time to drain the large font, the smaller pool, the filter mechanism, and the lowest tank. It takes a long time to wipe clean all the surfaces. It takes even longer to fill it all up again. We discovered that a few bugs had met their end in the filters; they are now at rest in our garden. The whole setup of font and machinery exists on two floors of the building. Laura, Barbara, Shimi, and I took this on. 

At one point I stood over the font and took a photograph of the empty basins. It is so rare to see the font bereft of all water. If you tap your knuckle on the dry inside wall, you’ll hear a satisfying clang. I asked Barbara if it would harm the machines for the font to stand empty for a time. (I was thinking it might be powerful for folks to encounter an empty font this week, on this side of Easter.) “It wouldn’t be good for the font system,” she said. The mechanism is meant to continually hold and move water. 

Basins and bays and riverbeds — they are meant to hold and move water. In Tucson, Arizona, where some of my in-laws live, there are “washes,” dry riverbeds that can hold and move water during heavy rains. It is odd, if oddly beautiful, to see them bone dry. I grew up by one of Minnesota’s lakes, and when I was a child, the city of Worthington dredged that lake for many summers to prevent silt from reducing it into a swamp. Now, in this century, Lake Okabena hosts an annual international windsurfing championship. Basins and bays and riverbeds — they are meant to hold and move water.

Water is an essential element in our existence as biological creatures. Without water, we would have only two or three days to live. But water is also an essential element in our spiritual life, in our life of faith, in the Gospels we proclaim, and in the Hebrew bible that records the stories of salvation of our Jewish cousins in faith.

The Spirit broods over chaotic waters; God speaks the Word and separates those waters; God causes water to flood the earth; God ensures that the infant Moses is saved when his mother places him in a papyrus basket and sets it afloat among reeds on the river Nile; God parts the water of the Sea of Reeds to liberate the Israelites; God makes water gush from a dry rock in the wilderness; the prophet Ezekiel sees water flowing from the temple, restoring the people to life; Christians echo that ancient memory in our vision, in the Revelation to John, of water flowing through the New Jerusalem; Jesus is immersed in water by John the Baptizer, and the Spirit descends; Jesus turns dozens of gallons of water into wine at the wedding at Cana; Jesus calms the stormy waters of the Galilee (a deep lake that required no dredging!); Jesus offers the Samaritan woman living water that will forever quench her thirst.

Now, hear again — in the wake of all these watery salvation stories — hear again this remarkable word from the cross: “I am thirsty.” How can the creator of this watery planet be parched? How can the Font of living water be bone dry? How can God the Son, the Living Word who separated the waters at creation, be thirsty? This was the One who said to the Samaritan woman, “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty”! And later in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”

How can he now be thirsty?

The theologian and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge offers us an interpretation. In a Good Friday sermon she preached many years ago, Rutledge said: “The One who gives the calm of lakes and pools, the freshness of brooks and streams, the majestic depths of seas and oceans, the glory of pounding surf, the might of Niagara and the tinkle of the garden fountain, the One from whose being flows the gift of the water of eternal life — this is the One who is dying of a terrible thirst on the Cross for the love of his lost sheep.” (End quote.)

He thirsts by choice. For the love of his lost sheep, he rises between the waves of the Sea of Reeds, forming a wash as dry as Tucson, a safe highway from bondage to freedom.

For the love of his lost sheep, he dwells on the dry mountain where Noah’s ark comes ashore, the dry soil that bears the relieved footprints of Noah and his family.

For the love of his lost sheep, he is the hard rock in the wilderness, water gushing from him so the people may live.

For the love of his lost sheep, he empties himself of water — he becomes thirsty — to invite the Samaritan woman into a thirst-quenching encounter, one that restores her to her community, and evangelizes them all.

For the love of his lost sheep, blood and water gush from his body in death, like the water we can hear right now, cascading into the lower basin of our sparkling-clean baptismal font.

All four of the souls who cleaned that font last Friday have thirsted for water, living and otherwise. I am not authorized to tell you their stories, but I can assure you — like you, all four of us have known thirst. All of you, in your baptismal life, pour out living water in loving service for the lost sheep of Jesus our Good Shepherd. And all of us thirst for answers, for peace, for forgiveness, for courage, for love.

Blessed be the Crucified One, the Thirsty One, who joins us by choice in our thirst, so that he might quench it in a gushing of resurrection water that will soak the whole earth with God’s creative outpouring of love.

No better thing than this to do

Preached on Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend. With gratitude to Dom Gregory Dix.

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17

Divine Mercy, by Gracie Morbitzer

Was ever another command in the history of the world so clearly obeyed as this one: Take and eat; take and drink? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this eating and drinking has been done in every conceivable human circumstance and for every conceivable human need: from infancy and before it, to old age and after it; from the grandeur of cathedrals to the fox hole amid the terror of war to the shanty towns that mark the earth. The Christian people have found no better thing than this to do for the infant newly-born; for the couple uniting in the bonds of marriage; as the sick or injured recover their health; as the dying receive the food and drink of eternal life; at the death of one’s beloved friend, spouse, child, or parent. The strong have found themselves humbled by the self-giving love of the monarch who wears no crown and directs no army; the weak and fearful discover their fragile souls nourished and strengthened by One who says, “Fear not, I am with you.” 

The people of God have no found no better thing than this to do in the midst of famine or war; at the death of a slain president or princess; in the settlement of a strike as workers receive the Body and Blood of the laborer from Nazareth; in the prisoner of war camp among the wounded and the tortured; upon hearing the passage of a law that benefits the downtrodden; with those in the hidden room who must eat and drink in secret for fear of persecution: Christ hidden in a fragment of bread and a sip of wine. 

The members of the Body of Christ have found no better thing than this to do in memory of the martyrs – in memory of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem and the hundreds of school children who have been slain in this land; in memory of Peter and Paul, Stephen and Perpetua, Justin and Agnes, Thomas Becket and Thomas More and the many among us who cherish their union with the Prince of Peace more than their nation, tribe, or race; of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and all those whose love for God’s holy justice has been and continues to be sealed with the shedding of their blood.  Was ever a command in the history of the world so clearly and gratefully obeyed as this one: Take and eat; take and drink? 

Women and men have found no better thing than this to do as the summer breeze floats through the window; as people of good will, in Autumn’s cool days, share bread and cup with those who live on the streets in this wealthiest of nations; as Winter rain and cold herald the land’s death; as Spring marks the increase of the houseless seeking food and shelter; as the monks and nuns of every monastery throughout the Christian world receive each guest as Christ himself and thereupon offer them the most precious Body and Blood of the One who wandered from village to village, proclaiming the coming of God’s kingdom with shared food and drink; as the mother, the father, holds open the hands of their child so that he, so that she, might receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation; as the priest traces the wine, the medicine of immortality, on the lips of the man, the woman, the teenager dying of AIDS, of cancer, of loneliness. 

Week by week, and month by month, on the most ordinary days of the year and on this most Holy Thursday, on a hundred thousand Sundays, faithfully and unfailingly across all the parishes of the world, and in this church whose patron, Paul, was the first to write of this Lord’s Supper, the people and their priests continue to gather at table where heaven meets earth, where God becomes bread, where we are joined with our beloved dead who are alive to God in this sublime communion, where Christ nourishes you and me and then sends you and me into this troubled world as a blessing – as living food and drink for those who yearn for the compassion and justice this world cannot give itself: a blessing and not a curse.