November 1, 2026

Blessed are those who mourn

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

I would like to read a poem by Jane Kenyon, called What Came to Me:

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

I would like to read it for you again.

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

If we are honest, we will admit that we mourn our beloved dead a lot more than we mourn bigger losses or catastrophes like the hell of war or the outrage of systemic violence. Our own personal losses, our own heart-shattering bereavements — these are reliably more important to us. Of course we are personally ethical and morally awake, so we do lament the atrocious absence of justice on earth, and we do nod along as a well-meaning preacher reminds us that when our Savior said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” Jesus wasn’t talking about how I miss my parents, he was talking about big-picture grief — the mourning of those who suffer injustice and oppression. Yes, of course, Jesus. We hear you.

But then, every time, we focus first on personal grief. Surely you know this. Surely you agree.

And so: The world is roiling in crisis and war, but… I miss my daddy. I want my mommy. I am fifty-six years old and I have great strength, and I have gone to therapy for years, but deep in my heart — and honestly, it’s not all that deep, you can find it within moments of searching — in my broken heart, the little boy still living in there just wants his parents, and he cannot be consoled in the terrible absence of their familiar warmth and intensity and delight. The little boy in me would even welcome a hard word from either parent, even though he always hated those words, always hated getting in trouble. If they came back to scold me, I would welcome them. I miss them.

Surely you miss your beloved dead. You want them. How could you not? I expect you also tremble at the thought of losing more people, or losing your own life. We are strong and we are mighty, good people of God, but we are also fragile, and sometimes frail. I have a stout heart and a courageous gut and a creative brain, but one day all of these fleshy organs will cease, they will fall silent, and I will be gone from this good, green earth. And so will you.

Can our faith bear the weight of all this grief? Can our faith take it, hold it, share the burden, hold us firm like a good heavy chair with a straight back, formed of hardwood by a skillful craftsman? Can Jesus take us, hold us, share the burden, hold us firm?

Can Mary Magdalene? When Mary Magdalene bravely walked into the resurrection garden and wept without apology before a mysterious stranger, she hallowed all graveyards, and she hallowed all grief. Surely Mary Magdalene understands that our hearts are more likely to break for our own beloved dead than a mighty saint who dies after a life of wondrous words and prophetic acts. Surely Mary Magdalene, weeping openly — ugly-crying — in the presence of the Risen One will be our faith leader and help us make sense of loss, and find hope. She is so much like us: She cried not because the head of the Jesus Movement was killed. She cried because her friend died.

So she gets it. Mary Magdalene is a person who understands things.

But she is not the only Mary who can come to our aid. Mary the mother of Jesus has a ravaged heart, pierced seven times by stinging sorrow — and it was sorrow she saw coming, sorrow she anticipated.

But the Marys are hardly alone, hardly the only people in the pub who can cry in their beer alongside us.

All the saints know grief. Saint Jude prays to God for all who have hopeless causes, and that finally is all of us, for we are “mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth we shall return.” Saint Paul writes feverishly, letter after letter, counseling and consoling the churches as they battle the dragons of Sin and Death. Saint Peter staggers from the campfire in backbreaking remorse, and comes out of his crisis as a chastened and self-aware apostle, on the road to his own cross of crucifixion. Saint John won’t stop talking about how we should abide with Christ, how salvation is not getting free passage into heaven, no, salvation is abiding in the here and now with the Risen One in painful, grievous intimacy, washing one another’s feet.

The saints get it. The saints are people who understand things.

The saints know that this community, this parish — the saints know that we have a body count, a body count that is ever rising. We just lost our companion Marilynne. Marilynne! She is so lovely, so diligent, so careful, so particular. I love her, and I’m sure every one of you who knows her loves her. Why can’t we see her? Her holy death after a well-lived life may be easier to accept than catastrophic or violent deaths, but her departure is no less grievous to us.

Grief is grief.

Again, the saints come to our aid as we mourn. And here is how they do that. They meet us at the flowing water that is at the edge of our hearing, flowing day and night in the entryway behind you. We turned the heater on yesterday so that when we plunge poor Quinn, another vulnerable mortal, formed of the earth, into the water, she will not shake with cold. And the saints meet us there. The saints crowd the riverbank; they walk up and down the beach; they stand firm at the roaring waterfall. They meet us at the water, in the water, over the water. Maybe they are the water.

When we are baptized — we recall this hard truth every time we do it — when we are baptized, we are baptized into Christ’s death. So we join Mary Magdalene before dawn, as she approaches the tomb, in her strong tears. We join Mary the Mother of God with her sword-riven heart. We stagger from the dying campfire with Peter; we labor with anxiety and determination alongside Paul; we recline with John in the upper room and watch with wonder as Christ himself takes our feet in his hands; we plead to God with Jude for all who go down to the dust. We are deep in the water with all the saints.

And in this washing and swimming and drowning, in this whirl of the rushing water of life, our mourning expands. We still miss Marilynne, and yelp with agony at the senseless deaths of innocents, and cry out for those we love but see no longer; and our mourning expands: whirling in the baptismal waters, we embrace more and more people in need of friendship and compassion and advocacy; we confront more and more injustices that demand our presence and power; we take in the whole universe of struggle and suffering, and heed the call of our Savior to lend everyone our aid.

Like all the saints, our mentors in grieving, we don’t stay stuck in lament and mourning. We get up, and we take Quinn with us, her forehead marked forever with the cross of Christ, and we announce Resurrection to the others. We run to them, frantic with joy as well as grief, and, breathless from our run, still gasping with both sorrow and wonder, we encourage all who are suffering by singing to them, with gladness:

Look upon the Lord and be radiant,
and let not your faces be ashamed.

***

Preached on All Saints’ Day (Year A), November 1, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

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Blessed are those who mourn

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

I would like to read a poem by Jane Kenyon, called What Came to Me:

I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

You have what it takes

Let’s talk about our guts. We’re told often enough to trust our guts, to follow our guts. We do gut checks. We get gut aches. Sometimes we suffer a gut punch.

What’s a gut check? It's when you stop and consider your instinctive feelings or notions about something.

A gut ache? Well, there’s the literal kind, how you feel if you overindulge on pizza, but there’s also the gut ache of agitation, a persistent worry, a burning emotional sensation.

A gut punch? That’s when you’re knocked over by bad news, or sharp conflict, or overwhelming fear. “I was gutted,” people sometimes say, after hearing terrible news.

Christ is our clothing

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.