Christ is our clothing

Saint Julian of Norwich, by Gracie Morbitzer, who visited St. Paul’s earlier this year. Prints of Morbitzer’s Julian and several other saints are on the walls of our offices.

Alright. Here’s how I see things. We could do this the easy way, or we could do this the hard way.

Saint Paul is the good cop. He offers us a carrot; he kills us with kindness. He invites us to join the challenging mission and ministry of Jesus Christ with warm greetings and sanguine encouragement. He says that we are his “joy and crown,” that he “loves and longs for” us. He wants us to “stand firm” and he encourages us to “think about” good things like “whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable.” These are bracing exhortations! But he challenges us to do all of that while blanketing us with his gentle affection.

And he sings us a song that has sounded down the ages:

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

My mother loved this passage of Scripture. She stressed two words in particular: “with thanksgiving.” “Do not worry about anything,” she would say, “but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” She loved that “thanksgiving” bit. We pray for things with thanksgiving, as if our prayers have already been answered. She believed this. She encouraged it. She did not survive her affliction with ovarian cancer, and yet I believe she thought her prayers were nonetheless answered. She received the healing she truly needed. And she gave thanks for that.

So that’s the “good-cop” version of today’s Good News. Paul certainly loses his cool in other places in his letters, but in his letter to the Philippians, our patron is a cozy down comforter, stirring our souls to go from here to love and serve the Lord, all of it with tenderness and kindness and compassion. It’s a lovely vision, an encouraging approach, a good way to proclaim the Gospel.

But then there’s the bad cop.

“But when the king came in to see the [wedding] guests,” Jesus thunders in his dark parable, “[the king] noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

How harsh! How unnerving. How rude. How can this be Good News? We will have to unpack it. We will have to spend some time with the hard words of Jesus if we want to understand what he is saying, and saying with such passionate urgency.

First, the wedding robe. We need to know what the wedding robe might be, what it might represent. And Saint Julian of Norwich offers us an answer. Many of you know about Julian, but in case you aren’t quite sure, she was a fourteenth-century woman whose actual name is unknown to us. She lived alone in a hut attached to Saint Julian’s Church, and so, without knowing her actual name, we call this nameless solitary woman Julian.

I think you would love her. She appears in icons with a cat on her lap. Legend says she would stick her hand through a small hole in the wall to receive Eucharist from the priest in the adjoining chancel. She had visions, and her ecstasy in the presence of God was intense and joyful.

Julian wrote with feverish excitement about God as our clothing, and about us as God’s clothing. The Lutheran scholar Gail Ramshaw, a contemporary of ours who visited St. Paul’s Seattle earlier this year, says that “Julian wrote of Christ as having taken on our human tunic.” He put on our humanity, a rough tunic “‘dyed with the sweat of his body, close-fitting and short and threadbare.’” Julian then wrote that we have “received, in a merciful exchange, the cloak of Christ, that wraps us round with endless love.” 

Ramshaw then writes that “Julian… moves one step more with her image of clothing. Not only do we enjoy wearing Christ, but ‘we are his crown’; that is, Christ is wearing us. Not only are we wrapped round with the cloak of Christ, but Christ is arrayed with us.” And finally Ramshaw shares this lovely quotation from Julian: “‘Our good Lord is our clothing that, for love, wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.’”

Imagine Christ as a terrycloth robe enveloping you in soft warmth. Or Christ as your favorite sweatshirt, cozy and comfortable, inspiring you to stretch out under a blanket (the blanket: that’s Christ, too) for a quiet afternoon nap. Christ as our clothing, “embracing us, all beclosing us and hanging about us, for tender love.”

Now take one more imaginative step. Christ is your wedding garment, your best outfit, the dress that makes you look healthy and lovely, and sets off your eyes; the suit that subtly complements your earrings or your necklace… or if your tastes run masculine, your boutonnière or your pocket square. Oh, you look so good in this wedding outfit! You’re dashing; you’re dazzling; you’re a knockout.

We Christians have, for centuries now, proclaimed the theological idea of Christ as our clothing in the baptismal garment, the white robe. The insider word for this robe is alb. Your altar servers wear albs, a word that simply means “white.” The alb is a sign of our baptismal identity. When we hold the cup to your lips, our white albs are our Christ-clothing, our Christ-robe, our Christ-sweatshirt, our Christ-blanket. But I hope you also take notice of this: the work we do in our Christ-clothing is the work of a servant.

And now we’re ready to return to the hard words of Jesus in today’s Good News. He scolds the wedding guest for not wearing the wedding robe, casting him out to the place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It sounds harsh! It sounds mean and angry, not very “Jesus-y.” But this is the insight; this is the meaning of the harsh words: this wedding guest was rejecting the servant identity we share in Christ. His refusal to wear the robe rejects the challenging mission and ministry of the Risen One. 

“‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’” Jesus quotes the enraged king saying, and you can just hear how dangerous and ironic he sounds when he utters that word ‘friend’. (Matthew uses the very same Greek word for ‘friend’ later on when Jesus says to Judas, who is about to betray him, “Friend, do what you are here to do.”)

Confronted by the angry king, the underdressed wedding guest is rendered “speechless.” He has nothing to say to explain his refusal, or his rejection, of the Gospel. He is no better than the first people to be invited to the banquet who “made light” of the invitation, and even attacked the king’s slaves when they went to them to call them to the feast.

Clearly, the community that gave us Matthew’s Gospel is struggling with people who rejected the movement, who belittled the call to discipleship, who “made light” of the Good News. So the “bad cop” approach of Jesus today, as off-putting and even upsetting as it might be in our hearing, starts to make a little more sense. The mission matters. The Gospel is urgently needed. Jesus — and the community behind this Gospel passage — they are passionate that the Good News be proclaimed far and wide. There was so much to do. There was injustice across the land. The mission was critical.

And this remains true today. We need not wear the clothing of Christ, as lovely as it might be, and as lovely as it might make us. We might want to RSVP to this invitation with a “No, thanks.” But the world is crying out for servants richly clad in the mercy of Christ. The world is desperate for the Good News, proclaimed by people who bear on their bodies the garments of salvation, the clothing of justice, the crown of peace.

Wearing Christ as our clothing: this is a serious thing to do. The robe of Christ will change us, shape us, form us. The cloak of Christ will draw our shoulders back so that we can see and serve a person in extreme need, rather than gazing ever inward at our own needs and worries. The shoes of Christ will clasp our feet and carry us into the valleys of human suffering.

And the crown of Christ — well, I suppose if we follow Julian’s guidance carefully, the crown of Christ will be not what we wear, but what we become. We will rest on that wounded head, torn bloody with thorns. We will be worn by him. 

Nothing is more urgently needed in this world right now. This is why the king is so animated and incensed by his blasé wedding guest, a poor sod who didn’t bother to don this lovely but daunting robe of righteousness. Paul and Julian sing the Good News to us in lovely tones of reassuring encouragement. Jesus in Matthew takes a much harder tack. But I believe all three would agree that our choice to put on the clothing of Christ, versus our choice to set it aside, is a choice of immense importance. 

Will we wear this lovely but heavy garment? Will we become, in our own lives of prayer and service, the crown of Christ?

Even now this invitation is being extended to us by the Risen One, who “took on our human tunic, dyed with the sweat of his body, close-fitting and short and threadbare.”

To clarify and further extend this gracious invitation, I want to reframe the enraged king’s response to the underdressed wedding guest he sarcastically called “friend.”  I want to soften the king’s words, in the spirit of those honey-tongued saints, Paul and Julian.

I want to soften them into this: Wear the colorful, beautiful cloak of Christ, or understandably set its daunting, difficult heaviness aside. What will we choose, my good friends?

***

Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23A), October 11, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

I'm just this kid from Worthington

“I’m just this kid from Worthington.” That’s something I like to say in text messages with a certain friend of mine, signaling real (if playful) modesty after I say something highfalutin or pompous. I’m not uppity. I don’t have a big ego. I’m just this kid from Worthington.

My friend was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and for a time lived in Rock Island, Illinois. He’s married to someone who grew up in Davenport, Iowa. I’m married to someone born in San Jose who lived in Tucson. I know very few native New Yorkers, and even fewer – nearly zero – native Parisians or Londoners or Tokyoites. 

Maybe you come from somewhere famous, a top-tier city. Or you hail from a blue-blood family line. Are you the scion of a dynastic clan? My father was interested in genealogy and discovered a thin but durable connection between our family and a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620. But that is now a dubious distinction, given what we’ve learned, all too recently, about the impact of English colonists on this continent.

I am not the son of a royal house. I am not a Windsor or a Kennedy or a Bush or a Kardashian or a Hilton. I did not attend an Ivy League school.

I’m just this kid from Worthington.

You just have to understand this!!

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

“Bless us with anger.”

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

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

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

Why aren't we talking about fascism?!

“Why aren’t we talking about fascism?”

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

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

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

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

"Bless us with anger..."

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

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

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

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

The sound of silence

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

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

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

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

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

Congregant number 14

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

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

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

We need help

Watch this sermon on video here.

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.

Breakfast with Jesus

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.”

What are we even doing in this room?

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.

Strife closed in the sod

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.

Lynette is loved for eternal life

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.

That'll do

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.

He had compassion for them

Click here to watch this sermon on video, at minute 24:50.

A rage prayer by the Reverend Elizabeth Riley.

Let us pray.

Despite the excess and abundance of the world,
So many go without, so many hunger and yearn
For the basic dignity of food.
For the disparities that sweep our world
Where children of God starve
While other children of God waste in excess,
We repent.
For greed, for our lack of humanity,
For every time we look away,
We repent.
For bellies that hunger,
We pray.
For caregivers desperate to provide,
We pray.

May we make no peace with a world that
hungers,
God forgive us.

Amen.

"I AM the gate"

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.

Stay with us

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!

We will never board the starship 'Voyager'

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.

Rejoice

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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.

Restless all night

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

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 lastnight.

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.

Empty

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.”