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Last week, I watched a 2022 documentary produced and directed by the comedian W. Kamau Bell called “We Need to Talk about Cosby.” Now, these days, if you say you have deep thoughts and feelings about Bill Cosby, you are revealing that you are probably over the age of forty. My friend and former seminary classmate Josh is just thirty years old. I asked him, “Has Bill Cosby meant a lot to you?” He said, “No, not really.” But for me, as a teenager in the 1980s, I delighted in the many artistic gifts and achievements of Bill Cosby. I adored his sitcom, a colossal mega-hit that at one point attracted more than sixty million viewers. (Hit TV shows these days are lucky to reach twenty million.) But I remember “Fat Albert,” too. And “Picture Pages,” and its catchy theme song. I listened to Cosby’s comedy specials on my Walkman.
Bill Cosby was everywhere. He dominated popular-U.S. culture for decades. He broke barriers as an entertainer of color, even though he caused some controversy within the Black community because he essentially played by the white man’s rules. His consistently positive, disarming affect was criticized for papering over racial injustice. White folks could laugh along with Bill Cosby and go back to sleep. And now, forty years after the height of Cosby’s fame, when section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is under threat, we are painfully reminded every day that the nation is all too far from realizing the dream of Dr. King.
But despite Cosby’s waning popularity, his virtual irrelevance in popular culture now, lots of Black and white folks alike feel a need to assess and wrestle with his legacy. Cosby stressed the importance of education. He focused on the nurturing of children, especially children of color. He was hilarious – and humans need to laugh. His most famous show witnessed to the truth, dignity, and power of Black families, changing forever how Black folk are portrayed in television and films. He was celebrated as “America’s Dad.”
And yet, Cosby was convicted in 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and he has been accused of drugging and assaulting more than sixty women. In the documentary, commentators cringed as they watched old footage of Cosby’s comedy work in which he hinted at his terrible secret. In retrospect, one can’t unsee or unhear the awful truth, as Cosby makes jokes about disarming a woman’s resistance to a man’s advances.
These revelations have been upsetting and confusing for many, many people who grew up loving and admiring Cosby as a cultural icon of racial equity and social justice. But the many dozens of women who survived his abuse have borne the heaviest burden. How can any of us – let alone the survivors of his abuse – reconcile the two Cosbys? Some don’t bother. One of the people on the documentary was asked how she would describe Cosby to the proverbial alien from another planet who asks who Cosby is. “Rapist,” she replied, flatly. “He was a rapist who had a really big TV show once.”
I bring all of this to you today not because you and I need to talk about Cosby, necessarily, but because I believe we need to, I believe we must, talk about the sixty or so women who charged him with criminal conduct. We also need to talk about still more women who did not come forward, despite the trauma they suffered. Why would they not come forward?
You know why.
Those who did speak out were accused of lying, of trying to impugn the character of a good person. They were questioned aggressively: “What were you wearing? Why did you take the drug he offered? Why did you wait so long to come forward?” and so on. Some accused all of the women of being white people tearing down a Black man, even though about a third of the survivors are women of color.
And then, in 2021, three years after Cosby went to prison, his conviction was overturned on a technicality. This was, for many of the survivors, another trauma, a body blow of disappointment and invalidation. Why come forward, many women wondered, when he’ll just get away with it anyway? Many people in the documentary talked about how hard – maybe even impossible – it is to get real justice against a rapist when we all live in a culture that tolerates and even celebrates misogyny and violence against women.
But this is where the Gospel, the Good News, comes in. The Cosby documentary ends on an ambivalent yet somewhat hopeful note: the various people interviewed, including several survivors of Cosby’s abuse, talked about courage – the ultimate, life-saving importance of courage. One of them quoted Susan B. Anthony, the 19th-century white suffragist and abolitionist who died fourteen years before the 19th Amendment extended the voting franchise to women. Susan B. Anthony said this: “Courage is the best protection that a woman can have.” “Courage is the best protection that a woman can have.”
I would only add that those of us with male and cisgender privilege can also don the armor of courage as allies of all who suffer abuse in a misogynist and transphobic culture – in a rape culture. Courage: a word related to the French word coeur, which means heart. Courage is protection: courage protects people from harm. The survivors of Cosby’s abuse who came forward revealed tremendous courage, as did their attorneys, advocates, and allies.
Too often we dismiss the heart as soft: we say someone is either hard-headed or soft-hearted. But the heart is mighty: In today’s parable of the persistent widow, Jesus describes a strong-hearted woman, a courageous woman, a woman who protects herself from injustice by repeatedly entering the arena on her own behalf.
But courage isn’t just an individual practice or gift. For us Christians, courage is communal. On the same trip when I watched the Cosby documentary, I attended a lecture given by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of Washington. Her topic (unsurprisingly, given her recent history) was courage, but this time, courage as a virtue that we all share, together.
Bishop Budde reflected on the massive pushback she experienced after preaching an eloquent but fairly conventional sermon on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. The pushback came because she preached this sermon at the prayer service for the new president, this past January, at Washington National Cathedral; and she directed at him in particular the charge God gives all of us: in Budde’s words, to “have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.”
It takes great courage to preach this Good News in these times, great courage to say something as straightforward and conventional as, “Have mercy on people who are scared now.” It may not be as courageous as coming forward to accuse “America’s Dad” of aggravated assault, but it’s courageous nonetheless. Bishop Budde has received thousands of emails, and countless threats. She has a stout heart, and she must have one to endure the onslaught. But again, for us Christians, Courage is not just an individual practice or gift. Budde didn’t speak truth to power by herself.
I asked her, in the Q&A that followed her talk, how her many years in my home state of Minnesota continue to shape her life and vocation. Minnesota is sometimes called – in jest, but sometimes in sharp critique – a “nice” state. Minnesota Nice: one thinks of docile white Norwegians, ice-fishing their way through a winter afternoon. But Minnesota is also the state where Mr. George Floyd was murdered. Minnesota is also home to many courageous progressive politicians and activists. I wondered how Bishop Budde’s time there as a parish priest shaped her in her courageous life’s work.
She said she learned in Minnesota how to avoid taking personal attacks personally. She also learned – across her career – about the power of communal action, communal courage. She talked about “institutional courage” – the transformative power of a whole congregation, a whole tradition, a whole communion rising up as one to secure justice for survivors (and possible future victims) of violence and oppression. That is our heritage here, gathered around font and table, proclaiming the Gospel, and interceding for the world. With God’s help, we are a people of courage.
And so we do not lose heart. Today, in the little parable of the persistent widow, Jesus frames courage as prayer. Think of it! Prayer is not just – prayer is not only – asking God for things, and then waiting passively to see if God will give us those things. Prayer is an act of courage. Prayer is an act of resistance. Prayer is a prophetic and political intercession – that is, in prayer we intercede for a person in peril, for a survivor of abuse, for ourselves, and even for perpetrators of abuse.
The courage we receive from the risen Christ gives us power to pray for everyone, even Cosby – even the perpetrator. And what is our prayer for him? That he reforms; that he repents. But that power is not just a plea, with us begging God for the bad guy to acknowledge his dreadful wrongdoing and correct the error of his ways. We do ask for that. But we also pray to God for the perpetrator’s reform by standing strong and stout-hearted alongside the survivors, and pushing, prodding, insisting that the whole culture make amends for the crimes committed against them.
But our prayers take other forms, too. Like the persistent widow, we take our SPiN wagons around this neighborhood, every Sunday of the year, drawing alongside our neighbors in solidarity and friendship. Others of us pray in the form of weekly protests at our front doors, shouting our prayers for justice just a few feet from here.
But we have several other forms of prayer! We stock the Little Free Pantry, each item of food a life-saving, prophetic intercession. We go before the unjust judge – before the cynical powers and principalities of the world – by writing letters, joining No Kings protests, supporting arts organizations, plying our trades, caring for our homes and families, strengthening this city one household at a time, one relationship at a time, one vote at a time.
Everything we say and do is a prayer of lament but also jubilation, a prayer of anguish but also hope, a prayer of heartbreak but also courage. Together, encouraging one another – encouraging, another heart word – we are all that persistent widow, and the unjust judge is almost at the end of his rope. Together, by the power of God alone, our courage swells into an unstoppable shout of triumph, a great act of advocacy and solidarity that breaks the grip of death and shatters the spear of the evil one.
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Preached on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24C), October 19, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8