Preached on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (Year C), June 15, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
Icon Trinity, by Kelly Latimore
Jesus said to the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Ten years ago, my uncle was dying of cancer. One of my sisters was his primary family supporter, making trips with him to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, about an hour from his home, to see doctors. The day came when they had an ultimate appointment, a moment of truth in his care: going forward, he would either keep up the treatments, or switch to hospice care. Because of his condition, it would likely not be – and, finally, it was not – a lengthy term of care.
My sister recalls asking him, “Do you understand what this means?” He nodded and said, “Yes.”
Uncle Ray was able to bear that truth.
The loss of life, particularly one’s own life, is a hard truth to bear. But there are other things we sometimes can’t bear to know. We naturally think of bad news, terrible news: a diagnosis – the brief rap of the doctor’s knock on the door, as you wait in the treatment room; a painful betrayal – you finally learn what that person did, and that your life with them will be different now; or a loss that strikes you hard enough that you remember exactly where you were when the call came.
But there are other unbearable things, beyond the various losses every human being faces. We suffer unbearable disillusionment: “Don’t meet your heroes,” goes the saying, because if you do, the real person behind the hero mirage could break your heart. Or we discover that something we took for granted, something we unquestioningly held as a core belief, has been upended. And that category of unbearable truth is more likely what Jesus is talking about when he tells his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
This is certainly how former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold understood these words of Jesus. Bishop Griswold was our Presiding Bishop from 1998 to 2006, three presiding bishops ago. He oversaw a tumultuous time for the Episcopal Church. In 2003, Gene Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire, the first openly gay and partnered bishop in our communion. This election caused a massive eruption and schism, with congregations and dioceses quarreling and then breaking apart. The Church wouldn’t approve blessing rites for same-sex couples until nine years after Presiding Bishop Griswold left office. Both Presiding Bishop Griswold and his successor, Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, had hard jobs through those years.
As he made sense of his many challenges, Bishop Griswold turned with some frequency to these words of Jesus, about how there are truths that the people of God can’t yet bear. He recalled his own instinctive opposition, early in his ministry career, to the ordination of women. At a women’s bible study, when someone asked whether women could be ordained, the younger Frank Griswold quickly and simply said, “Of course not.” Years later, when he could confidently, enthusiastically bear the truth, he closed his time as Presiding Bishop by warmly welcoming a woman as his successor.
Griswold also spoke about the Church’s task of wrestling with our outrageous history of white supremacy and our shameful participation in chattel slavery. The truth of these atrocities was too much to bear for many generations of Episcopal Christians, and many (perhaps most?) white Episcopalians today still struggle against the transformation we must experience to become white allies. Griswold again preached that Jesus always has more to teach his followers, and that our task is to find the strength to bear it.
Following the upheaval of Bishop Robinson’s election, Griswold spoke with compassion about how many of us in the Church can’t bear the truth that God affirms the beautiful identity of all persons, including queer Christians. “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.” Some of us still can’t bear that truth.
The atrocity of slavery, the cruel and misogynistic subjugation of women, the atrocious rejection of people across the splendid rainbow of human diversity: these are truths that we bear now; these are outrageous sins that we confess now; these are cautionary tales that fire our compassion now.
But there is one more truth that we might find hard to bear: as followers of Jesus, our compassion should extend to those who continue to struggle, those who continue to oppose full inclusion and affirmation, those who stand against the Good News.
We bring our compassion – compassion given to us by the Risen Christ – first and foremost to those who have been harmed by the Church, those who continue to be harmed by many churches. But the compassion of Christ extends broadly to include even the perpetrators, the offenders.
But before I reflect on that, I will say this clearly: if you are oppressed by racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia, it is not your job to educate or reform your oppressor. I have white privilege and cisgender-male privilege: it is not okay for me to depend on those I know who don’t enjoy those privileges to take care of me, to make me a more ethical person, to work for me until I am strong enough to be their ally. That only perpetuates injustice.
However, all of us gathered here, this whole faith community, this parish: it is our shared, collective task to practice ruthless compassion in our relationships with people who do harm. “Ruthless compassion” is a term created by Leticia Nieto, a poet, dramatist, psychotherapist, and trainer in anti-oppression practices.
My friend Laura Eberly, a deacon in the Diocese of California, studied Nieto’s work and explains “ruthless compassion” this way. Laura says, “[The word] ‘ruthless’ modifies [the word] ‘compassion’... [Our compassion is] disciplined, relentless. [Nieto isn’t] talking about [a compassionate] intervention so much as an approach – a clear, consistent understanding that [those who do harm] are also suffering; [they are also] dehumanized from their socialization [as offenders], even as they dehumanize [others].”
Racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia: these are social evils that dehumanize everyone. We see this in the lack of basic human empathy of many federal leaders who turn the military against civilians. We see this in the political violence that took the lives of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband. We see this in the callous and violent political culture of our time, a lethal culture that claims countless innocent lives.
The lives of the innocent are our first concern. We are baptized and sent to proclaim the Good News that the Holy Spirit still broods over the waters of chaos; that the Father still sees the suffering of those in bondage, and sends us to liberate them; that the Risen Christ tramples death by his own death, and defeats the Powers and Principalities that destroy all who are made in the image of God.
But we number the oppressors among those made in the image of God, and like Jesus himself, “we make intercession for the transgressors.” That’s how the prophet Isaiah puts it. We praise the Crucified One who prayed for the forgiveness of those who handed him over to condemnation and death. We learn from Jesus himself the sometimes unbearable mission of ruthless compassion.
And so we do not give up on even the worst offenders of our time. We are relentless in this compassionate work. They have been dehumanized. Everyone has. Sometimes we direct our ruthless compassion on ourselves, for surely many of us here have failed to commend the faith that is in us, and have fallen far short of the call to discipleship extended to us when we were baptized in the name of the Holy Three.
But Jesus does not stop speaking to us after telling us these hard truths. He says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” but then he says this: “When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth.” We are never, ever alone in mission. In a few moments we will embrace one another in the peace of Christ. And a few moments after that we will share food and drink that strengthen and sustain us to bear with confidence the ruthless compassion of the Holy Three.
And the Holy Three will never, ever stop creating and recreating this good and glorious world.