esus 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

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.

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.

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.”

Go here to watch this sermon on video.

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. 

A short reading from The Doctrine of God, by Katherine Sonderegger:

“Love is the Truth of God, but also the Beauty. God is sublime, a zealous Good. Love alone is as strong as death, its passion fierce as the grave. To know this God, the Living Lord, is to hunger and to delight and to hunger once more. Theology should pant after its God, the Love that is better than wine, for God is beautiful, truly lovely, the One whose Eyes are like doves.”

Love is the Beauty of God.

Love is beautiful.

You’ve been to weddings. You’ve appreciated how carefully couples plan everything, the invitations, flowers, party favors, placecards, dresses, suits. The goal is beauty: on this day the couple and their community celebrate love, and love is beautiful.

To watch this sermon on video, click here.

Some of the Pharisees said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”

The world is exploding, yet again, in ever more horrific ways. In the face of all this chaos, and in response to all this injustice, we remain a progressive, affirming, Christian faith community, sent on a mission to mend this neighborhood, this city, and this world, in any way we can.

Our faith took root and flourished twenty centuries ago, in yet another terrible, apocalyptic time, led by a few dozen courageous souls who responded to the cruelties of war and empire by building a community of joyful yet serious mission in the name of the Risen One. In our own time of violence, fear, division, and discord, what then shall we do?

I’d like to begin our discernment by reflecting on ourselves a bit. This is not a narcissistic exercise. I just want to begin with our community’s identity: who are we, and are we ready to go on this mission?

At first glance, I’d say we have some notable virtues. We support honorable public servants, and many of us contribute to the campaigns of just and good politicians… Well, okay, we have concluded that they are just and good enough.

“Surely we are not blind, are we?”

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

A reading from a (slightly redacted) song by Britney Spears.

You wanna?
You wanna?
You wanna hot body? You wanna Bugatti?
You wanna Maserati?
You better work.
You wanna Lamborghini? Sip martinis?
Look hot in a bikini?
You better work.
You wanna live fancy, live in a big mansion,
party in France?
You better work.
You better work.

Here ends the reading.

Britney did not coin the phrase, “You better work.” RuPaul made it famous, and it is a time-honored expression in queer culture. One day, when the gay comedian Matteo Lane was in a restaurant in Rome and discovered that Oprah Winfrey was also there, he thought carefully about what to say to her, something that would quickly telegraph “I’m gay, I’m American, and she looks great.” He cheerfully snapped, “You better work!”. Oprah, being Oprah, didn’t miss a beat. “You better work!” she shot back, with a smile.

And so, for us, inspired by Britney, Matteo, and Oprah, the holy season of Lent begins. Lent is here: we better work.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see — we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

When he writes these words, Saint Paul is on the defensive. He is on his back foot. (Maybe you can sympathize.) The church he founded in the city of Corinth has lost confidence in him. They think he is ineffective. They even disrespect his physical presence. In the portion of his letter to them that we just heard, he sounds more desperate and plaintive than anywhere else in the letters of his that survived into our own day. 

But Paul, the patron of this parish, never merely wrote letters, defensive or otherwise. No matter what happened, he took every opportunity to think and write theologically. Every disappointment or setback, every triumph or victory, every event in the chaotic, colorful story of his work as a developer of churches was grist for Paul’s theological mill. (He would encourage us to do likewise.)

So… when he’s on his back foot with the Corinthians, Paul reflects on how simply being a Christian is inherently a disadvantageous position. We preach Christ crucified: we will always be one down; we will always be at a disadvantage. You want to build a faith community? You want to lead a movement for justice? Maybe you want to organize a protest, or revitalize this neighborhood, or just make life easier for the people around you who suffer the worst of our unjust socioeconomic society. If you want to do any of these good things, and if you want to do them because you are a Christian, you will struggle at it. You will be choosing an uphill road.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

Click here to hear the Paula Boggs Band song, “We All Fall Down.”

***

A reading from the song lyrics of the Paula Boggs Band. (Paula Boggs is a Seattle-based musician and a member of this congregation.)

When life takes a turn for worse
remember this little verse:
we all fall down.
Let's not make it even worse.
There's more than enough to curse.
We all fall down, don’t you worry.
No matter how high we climb,
life will find a way to kick our behinds.
And so, I am no better than you,
Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew,
we all fall down. 
Even your boss the jerk, chases skirts,
and thinks he's cool as Captain Kirk —
he will fall down, don't you worry,
cuz just when we think we’ve arrived,
something really crappy breaks our stride.
We all fall down, don't you worry.
Guaranteed! We all fall down.
Believe me! We all fall down.

Here ends the reading.

Sometimes it helps to just admit it, just accept it, just come right out and say it: we are all fallible, we all make mistakes, we’ll never measure up, life kicks our behinds, we all fall down. But I’m eager to remind you that this bracing acceptance of reality is cherished in our tradition. We Episcopalians often like to say that we are Catholic but also Protestant, and that we hold both identities together in creative tension. So let’s allow the best of our Protestant tradition to reassure us: Protestants admit freely that humans are error-prone, and that only by God’s grace are we saved from the dreadful future of our own design. 

So… relax. We all fall down. No need to worry about whether it will happen to someone like your skirt-chasing boss: he will fall down. And no need to worry about all the rest of us falling down. We will. It has occurred; it will occur.

I offer all of this as a preamble to the daunting Good News we hear today, news that tells us first how great and lovely we are, and second how high God’s standards are for us. Jesus begins by calling us “salt of the earth” and “light of the world.” This is high praise! As salt, we season the world around us with our insights, with our trustworthiness, with our strong and refreshing presence in the worlds of home, neighborhood, church, and public square.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

Do you like getting things right? Perhaps that is a universal trait, something all humans have in common, but I really wonder sometimes if every one of us is truly wired in this way. I always felt good when an exam or term paper came back with a high grade, and I definitely have felt better about my work over the years when someone said, “That’s right, yes, you did that correctly.” But… I tend to flex about things. Maybe you do, too. Did we mostly get it right? If so, maybe that’s good enough for us. “Progress, not perfection,” goes the bumper sticker. 

But that’s not Robin’s way. Robin gets things right.

Robin comes early on Sundays to practice. You’ll find him swinging the thurible, up and down the main aisle in here, and you’ll check your watch and wonder to yourself, “How — not just why but how — is he here well over an hour early for mass, just to practice something he’s done countless times?!” Or you’ll walk up the short staircase over here and hear Robin singing in the chapel. He’s rehearsing his lines for the Prayers of the People. He has sung them many, many times before. But here he is, practicing them yet again.

Robin is working hard to get things right.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and [he] taught them.

When United States District Judge Fred Biery, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down at his bench he heard the case of Adrian Conejo Arias and L.C.R., a Minor, versus Noem, Bondi, Lyons, Margolin, and Doe. Then Judge Biery’s disciples came to him, and he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and order them deported, but do so by proper legal procedures.”

Judge Biery continued (and yes, I’m reading his ruling in its entirety): 

Prue recently got a new car. She never really got to enjoy it. It is a sad irony that the most unfussy and practical person that any of us has ever known did not have a chance to enjoy a shiny new car in her twilight years.

Prue wore fun t-shirts that played on words. One of our best photographs of our sister in Christ has Prue in a Seattle Aquarium t-shirt with a Star Wars theme, “The Otters Strike Back.” It is a funny irony that one of the most serious and missional Christians that any of us has ever known was famous for her quietly playful, self-effacing silliness.

Prue lay on her deathbed holding the golden gift of self-aware wisdom and the majestic power of love for God and neighbor. It is a lovely irony that the person who has done more ordinary, menial tasks for this community than anyone we have ever known was given a holy death of the kind we read about in the lives of the saints.

The Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil the Great, remembered his older sister Macrina’s holy death with great solemnity and awe. Filled with the Holy Spirit until her last breath, Macrina reflected insightfully on the human soul and on the Resurrection, and then she died in the peace of God.

Such was the death of Prue, who knew every corner of our storage rooms and sacristies, who scrubbed out our stains and ironed wax off our linens, who spread mulch and swept up dirt and stocked our shelves with supplies. She lay in great weakness last month, and when her kidneys began to fail she knew it was time. “Either the kidneys or the tumor will do me in,” she said, on the day before she died, in her straightforward way, in that pragmatic, sensible, cheerful way you all know so well.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

I would like to sit quietly, in a room. That is a New Year’s resolution, I suppose, but more accurately it is a lifelong aspiration. It is a plank in my intentional Rule of Life, my Way of Life. When I see others doing it, I admire their maturity and integrity. I want to be the kind of person who can simply sit quietly in a room. I am glad I have a job that asks me to practice doing exactly that, every week. 

The march of evil and violence overtaking our nation relies on noisy spectacle: decapitate a nation’s leadership with no plan for what to do next, then threaten to violently seize territory from a NATO ally, then terrorize a high school and murder a woman in her car, then gloat with macho bluster in a viral interview, saying, “...We live in… the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” These actions and words are all profoundly unchristian and unethical and even monstrous, but mostly it’s all just noisy spectacle. It’s intended to keep us roiled and riled, exhausted, tense, and finally desperate.