Hope isn’t just for Easter Sunday—it’s a rhythm we’re invited to live into every day. But in times like these, how do we hold onto hope—and bring it to our congregations and communities?
In the first episode of our new season of Transforming Engagement: the Podcast, host Rev. Dr. Seth Thomas sits down with Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor, author of So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year in Preaching, to explore what it truly means to preach hope.
Together, they explore the paradox of hope: while we may not always see it, we are called to be it. Dr. Taylor connects this to the Episcopal baptismal covenant, emphasizing commitments to justice, service, and stewardship. A recent addition to the covenant—caring for God’s creation—highlights the importance of concrete action in our faith.
Dr. Taylor shares how the Godly Play early childhood education method can inspire a more interactive and imaginative approach to preaching. He offers practical ways to invite your congregation into the process—not just through words, but through visuals and the physical space around you.
Whether you preach from the pulpit or live your faith in everyday moments, this conversation will inspire you to cultivate attentiveness, deepen your engagement, and bring hope to the communities you serve.
About This Season, “Reimagining Preaching:”
This season, we’re exploring how the church can proclaim the good news in our time by reimagining preaching. Host Seth Thomas is joined by experts in the preaching craft—leaders who think deeply and dream boldly about how we can bring a liberated witness to the pulpit and the world. As you listen to this season, please let us know what you think. We value your feedback and questions!
About Our Guest:
Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor is Professor Emeritus at Seattle University, having taught theology, worship, and preaching there for twenty-five years. He has served St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (Seattle, WA) in many roles, including Senior Warden, Associate for Liturgy, and Godly Play teacher, and is a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia. Taylor’s scholarship addresses: the love of God; body, gender, and Jesus Christ; feminist, womanist, and process theologies; Melville and Kierkegaard; emergent worship; and child theology. You can connect with Mark on Facebook at Mark Lloyd Taylor and The Work and Play of Preaching.
Listener Resources:
- Each episode of this season, our guest spotlights an organization making a positive impact, In this episode, Dr. Taylor shares the work of St. Elizabeth Episcopal Church, which houses the Neighborhood House, an early learning center, in Burien, Washington.
- Check out Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor’s book, So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching (Wipf & Stock, 2022), available here.
- Don’t miss an episode: Subscribe to Transforming Engagement: the Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Amazon Music (Audible).
Continue the Conversation at the Reimagining Preaching Conference: May 3, 2025
Join the Center for Transforming Engagement in Shoreline, Washington, for this skills-based conference equipping clergy, church staff, and lay preachers to bring the Word to life in Cascadia. Learn more and register at: https://transformingengagement.org/preaching-conference/.
Episode Transcript
Seth: Welcome to Transforming Engagement, the podcast where we hold conversations about changes that serve the common good and the higher good. Hi, I am the Rev. Dr. Seth Thomas, and I am so excited to host this season of the Center for Transforming Engagement Podcast. The season we are hosting conversations about how the church can proclaim the good news in our time as we explore reimagining preaching. I’m joined by experts in the preaching craft, folks who think deeply and dream boldly about how we can bring a liberated witness to the pulpit and the world. And today I’m joined by Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor. Mark is Professor Emeritus at Seattle University, having taught theology, worship, and preaching there for 25 years. He has served St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle in many roles, including senior warden, associate of liturgy and Godly Play teacher, and is a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia. Taylor’s scholarship addresses the love of God, body, gender, and Jesus Christ, feminist, womanist and process theologies, Mehlville and Kierkegaard, emergent worship and child theology. Mark, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here. I’m excited for our conversation. We’re going to talk about your book, So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching, and talk about what it looks like to preach even in this season as we see Easter on the horizon. How do we speak a message of hope this Easter? So, welcome.
Mark: Thank you. So my first thought when I received the invitation from The Seattle School to be part of this conversation was preaching hope this Easter? Honestly, I don’t have a clue. If you come up with anything, please let me know. And that’s personal, not just academic. My wife has been begging me for a month to give her hope as she put it, what’s your hope for the world? What’s your hope for the country? And then just the day before yesterday, I was talking to one of my daughters and she made exactly the same request begging me for hope. I’m not sure I’ve been much help to them yet. So I’m hoping that maybe this conversation and what we work through will equip me to better answer the question about hope. So thanks, glad to come alongside you, Seth, and our listeners. There is no one way to preach, so all I can do is invite folk alongside, for me to share some of my thoughts.
Seth: Yeah, love it. And I loved working through your book and the way you talk about how the sermon is crafted through a year and the cycle of the lectionary. And yet I also, it really resonated with me because 2017 was the first year I preached full time. So I looked through these sermons that you’ve shared and I’m like, oh, I remember that Sunday. I remember when we were dealing with news in this way and the cycle and how it was to speak in those times. So thank you for that. And I think it feels really resonant for where we are today too. So let’s talk about Easter first. I mean, if we’re going to talk about hope as preachers, how do we even begin to grab at a thread that is bringing life right now when we even ourselves feel hopeless, despair, struggle as well as we listen to the stories that our congregants and our family tell us? Where do we begin? How can we do this?
Mark: So let’s talk about Easter. Let me talk about Easter for a minute and then talk about this particular Easter. So interesting. Easter. We all know Easter is a Sunday. It happens to be April 20th, 2025. But in the traditional Western Christian calendar, Easter is also a seven week season and it doesn’t end until Pentecost. So is it a day? Yes, it’s a day. Is it a whole seven week season, a tithe maybe of the whole year, a seventh of the whole year. I mean, kind of a sabbath of a whole year. But the early church also talked about the entire seven week season of Easter as the singular great Sunday. So it’s as if that seven week season is a single occasion on the calendar.
And then I hope we all know that every Sunday is a little Easter, so every Sunday we’re preaching the resurrection of Christ. So I don’t know, it’s just helpful for me to think about that. I call myself an occasional preacher because I’m not ordained. I’m not a deacon, I’m not a priest. I’m not a bishop in my Episcopal church. I have never preached on Easter Sunday, but I’ve preached once or twice for years in that longer seven week Easter season. So whatever else preaching is about, it’s about, it’s part of a larger whole. As you already mentioned, Seth, it’s part of some sort of a service of Christian prayer and worship. And one of the things I would say about both Christian worship and even all human ritual behavior is it’s about at least three things. Keeping time, making space and nurturing community through symbol and story.
So here we’re talking a little bit about that keeping. So how is my preaching different in the Easter season than it is during the advent season? In one way, it’s still proclaiming the good news of Christ crucified and risen. But on the other hand, as a preacher, I need to know what time is it in the same way that I need to know where am I? Oh, I’m in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, what’s that building? Where am I as preacher in relationship to the listeners? And then what are our foundational symbols and stories that nurture it? So that’s Easter. A couple things about this Easter.
Here we are, listeners, recording these remarks in the middle of February. I understand that the podcast may drop in the middle of March a month ahead of Easter in the middle of April, right? I want to say I don’t know what this Easter is going to be. I won’t know what this Easter is going to be until maybe early in the morning on April the 20th or late at night on Saturday April the 19th. There is so much news out there of happenings in the world. It’s coming so fast, it’s so overwhelming. It’s a little hard here in the middle of February to even to know what Easter in 2025 is going to be. But I’ve got a couple of clues. I think I can hazard a guess.
So it was 2018, it was a year into the first Trump administration. I was the senior warden, the lay leader of my Episcopal parish, and I had to give a report at the annual meeting. I had also preached that morning, so I thought, I don’t want people listening to my words for another half an hour. So I did my senior warden’s retreat in the form of a word cloud with a whole bunch of words sort of in the shape of the roof line of the church. And some of the words were about life in the parish, departures, shelter, reach, resilience. Some were specifically about the Queen Anne neighborhood where St. Paul’s is in Seattle, upzoning encampments, dislocation. But two of ’em were about the world situation. One of them was resistance, one of them was dumbfounded. And what I meant by dumbfounded was Isis, Iraq, Syria, refugees and displaced people around the globe, immigrants at the southern border of the US, sexual violence against women, race in America, disparities of wealth and privilege and power. If I were to redo that word cloud today, I might add Gaza and Ukraine to Syria and Iraq. I might add words like antisocial media, disinformation, the rich get richer, something like that. And that’s personal too for me. My immediate family is relatively small. I’ve got two daughters. I’ve got three teenage grandsons and I’ve got two sons-in-law. All four of those adults have been directly impacted in their livelihoods and in their vocations over the past month. One grandson is a Spanish speaking Episcopal priest. He’s originally from Columbia, although he is an American citizen. He works in his Hispanic ministry and for a decade he’s been used to showing up on Sunday to his church and finding a whole family gone because they were undocumented and felt like they had to move on. My other son-in-law works for National Public Radio who’s been called before, Marjorie Taylor Green’s government efficiency committee. One daughter works for Save the Children around the world, which gets most of its funding through USAID. And the other daughter is a hospice social worker, and she had a dying patient last week and she called up the food bank that they usually get meals on wheels from. They didn’t get their funding yet this month from the federal grant they have. So I guess the first thing I want to say is let’s not kid ourselves about how dark these days are. Whatever preaching hope this Easter will mean. We have to take seriously the situation in which we are. I have some good news later, but…
Seth: I actually so appreciate you naming that because I immediately go to the Easter text and I think about the ways that the disciples and followers are so downtrodden, so hurting and so dumbfounded. Was that one of your words? Yeah, dumbfounded. Where do we go now?
Mark: So yeah, that’s really helpful. I really do in a minute want to dive into those stories of the appearances of the risen Christ from the gospels in just a few minutes. Lemme just say one thing about hope upfront. There’s actually been a lot written about hope. If you compare hope to the other two of Paul’s triad of faith, hope and love. There’s probably more been written on faith and love than hope, but there’s a lot on hope out there and we probably all might think first about Paul’s words in Romans eight. Now, hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what is seen. We hope for what we do not see. And I think that rings true of our experience here and now in 2025 and our dumbfoundedness and lostness. But I looked that passage up this week and noticed, I think for the first time, the larger context. We don’t hope for what is seen, we hope for what is not seen. What comes immediately before that is Paul describing the whole creation, groaning in labor, pains to be delivered, to be redeemed from futility and bondage.
Wow. So in that situation, we can’t hope for what is seen because it’s bondage and futility. And then what comes immediately after is Paul’s confession. We don’t even know how to pray. What a gift that the spirit of God intercedes for us, intercedes for us with size or groanings too deep for words. So that puts hope in a different context for me a little bit. There are secular writers, writers not from the Christian tradition who write about hope. You may know Rebecca Solnit who wrote a book called Hope in the Dark. She doesn’t write from a Christian perspective. She writes from the perspective of an advocate, a feminist advocate, an environmental advocate. She wrote the book after Hurricane Katrina after 9/11, after the wars that 9/11 inaugurated. She says, this: ‘Hope is not a lottery ticket. You can sit on the couch and clutch feeling lucky. It’s an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door. To hope is to give yourself to the future.’
And then the other thing I did over the last couple of weeks was I revisited for the first time, I think since graduate school, one of the most important theology books of the 20th century, Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope, which was published 51 years ago in 19 or 61 years ago. Just one little paragraph from Moltmann, because I really think for me this talks about the kind of hope that I want to preach that Easter and that I need to hear preached this Easter and it sort of opens the door to, so how do we take action as Christians on the Easter preaching? We’re going to hear. So here are a few words from Jurgen Moltmann: ‘The person who hopes will never be able to reconcile themselves with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly bears further evil. Hope finds in the raising of Christ, not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the last enemy, then the opposite is also true; that the risen Christ and with him the resurrection hope must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death. Hope causes not rest, but unrest. Not patience, but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in humans.’ And then here’s his last sentence that I’ll quote: ‘Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it to contradict it.’
So that helps me kind of frame what this Easter hope might look like.
Seth: Yeah, so powerful and that subversive the hope rising from underneath. Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for bringing Moltmann into this conversation because he speaks to similar times in his own way, and I think we’re fortunate to have his words to resonate now.
Mark: Can I connect that to another little project I’ll be working on over the next few months?
Seth: Please.
Mark: So Jurgen Moltmann was a young, I think Calvinist, Protestant, German. He was drafted into the Nazi army at the beginning, early in World War II, shipped off to the front lines, got captured, spent a year, year and a half, two years in a prison camp, prisoner of war camp in the United Kingdom, then was released. There was another theologian, a guy named Johann Baptist Metz, who happens to be Catholic, and he eventually became a Jesuit. He was also drafted into the army in the early forties and sent off to the front lines and captured. He was shipped to the United States. I didn’t know we had prisoner of war camps during World War II for Germans in the United States. We did, and he was there. I think that experience of the Second World War and their trauma as soldiers captured soldiers in that war shapes both of their theologies.
Here’s the connection Metz went on to write about the dangerous memory of Jesus, and he meant both, if you remember the stories of Jesus in the gospel, you’re putting yourself in danger because the memory of Jesus, the memory of his words and his deeds put us in conflict with the powers that be sometimes. I’m working on a project over the next few months with a couple of colleagues on the notion of dangerous, can I use a Greek word, epiclesis, which means to invoke the Holy Spirit? And it’s used specifically in connection with the Eucharist, but we’re going to talk about it as the dangerous hope of Jesus. So yeah, it was good to reconnect with Moltmann while thinking about, so dangerous hope as well as dangerous memory. One of the things I’m working on.
Seth: Wow. Can you say a little more about that project? I’m curious to see what do you hope will emerge from that?
Mark: So I’m a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy, which is a smallish academic organization of people who teach mostly Christian worship, although there are some Jewish folk and a couple of Muslim folk in the group. And I’m part of a smaller subgroup called the liturgical theology section or seminar, and we had our annual meeting about six weeks ago. I was virtual, but a lot of people were in person at Valparaiso University. And we always spend the last hour together in our seminar just doing some planning for the next year. Typically it’s a pretty typical academic setting where people, individuals give papers, at least in our case, we get to read them ahead of time, they’re not given cold, which is a great thing. So we went around the circle and people talked about their individual projects they might want to present next year, and then the woman who convenes the seminar said, I have an idea, let’s do a group project next January about dangerous hope, or epiclesis, as dangerous hope, calling on the Holy Spirit over the gifts of bread and wine and over the people receiving it. So I’m working with a woman named Julie Canlis who has a book called Theology of the Ordinary, which you might want to look up, amazing little book. And what we’re going to do and what we’re going to do is create, okay, so another little sidebar. Godly Play is a Montessori based program of Christian formation for children, and both Julie and I are trained Godly Play instructors. So we’re going to create, try to create, we hope to create a Godly Play lesson on what does it mean to invoke this Holy Spirit? What does it mean to pray that the Holy Spirit come down, whether it’s on the waters of baptism or the bread and wine and community of Eucharist. So that’s the project. And then what we haven’t decided yet is are we actually going to present this to a whole bunch of 40, 50, 60, 70-year-old professors probably, or will we present it to children and then in a sense report on it? So that’s the project on dangerous, dangerous hope, epiclesis dangerous hope.
Seth: Very, very cool. My congregation uses Godly Play as well and so fortunate to have that program and the way that it helps us encounter, and I mean I can picture leading kids into that kind of conversation with the Godly Play structure.
Mark: Yeah, how do you do it? And that’s sort of my question at the very end, maybe about hope. How do you, Godly Play is so visual and so tactile. How do you visualize what you can’t see? How do you play with what you can’t see? How do we invoke that holy spirit of God? I can see the bread and the wine. I can see my pastor Steven, I can see the people. How do you depict the invocation of the Holy Spirit? Well, maybe we talk about fire and dove and anyway, that’s the challenge of the project is how do you make visual and tactile something that in one sense is invisible and beyond our normal senses, and yet how do you do that without denying our bodies and the bodily incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and how that feeds us.
Seth: Wow. So Mark, as we look forward to this season of Easter, what are some of the scriptural resources you’re pulling from? How are you beginning to fill your imagination with hope and with these stories that we have and we know so well what’s calling at you?
Mark: Yeah, great question. Thanks. So just want to say that as an Episcopalian and as some of the listeners, I’m sure our churches use what’s called lectionary, which is ahead of time set out list of scripture readings for every Sunday in the church year and lots of other festivals. I’m sure that other listeners to us, Seth don’t, their churches don’t use lectionary. So what I want to say is I will be sort of speaking out of what I know the readings are on this three year cycle in the Episcopal church during that seven week season of Easter. But I just encourage people who are in non lectionary churches just to know that these stories that we’re about to talk about are yours too. They’re in the gospels, they’re in the acts of the apostles. So don’t let the fact that some of us sort of have a pre-established list of readings throw you off track, use them for all their worth this Easter.
So yeah, by my count there are 10 or 11 or 12, depending, stories of appearances of the risen Christ across the four gospels. All four gospels tell a story of what we tend to call the empty tomb. And I guess the first, and maybe you mentioned this earlier, Seth, the first thing to say about those four stories is the women who came to the tomb were not expecting the risen Christ. They had no expectation that they would meet the risen Christ. Now, the Jewish tradition that they were formed in believes in hope. They may have had all kinds of other hopes, but they were not expecting to meet Jesus raised from the dead. Huh. And so they truly are stories of an empty tomb. Godly Play, again, has a series of seven lessons for Easter called Knowing Jesus in a new way and known in the breaking of the bread and known in being known and known in the Holy Spirit. The first of those seven lessons is known in absence. Wow. I think that’s closer to where I am headed to this Easter is how do I know Jesus in Jesus’ absence?
Anyway, so these women come to the tomb, Mary Magdalene, maybe another woman, maybe several. Each of the four gospels tells that story slightly differently. I’m particularly intrigued this year in Matthew’s version, you’ve got an earthquake and an angel. Wow. And then immediately an appearance of the risen Christ. In Luke, you’ve got a man, two men in dazzling clothes in Mark. You’ve got a young man in a white linen cloth and the way, probably the original ending of Mark’s gospel, and the women fled from the tomb in terror and said nothing to no one. Now obviously at some point somebody said something to someone, and as most of you may know, there are additional endings to Mark’s gospel that make it conform more to the others. But for me, there’s something intriguing about that absence. So all four gospels do that then I’m not going to talk about all of these, but just a few.
Then John’s gospel tells a more extended story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus outside that empty tomb. Then John’s gospel tells the story of Thomas who was absent when Jesus appeared to the other 10 of the 11. And then a week later, Thomas gets his encounter, his encounter with Jesus in Luke’s gospel, the great story of the row to Emmaus, where two despondent dumbfounded followers of Jesus are on the way to this outlying village and a stranger joins them and they talk about the goings on of the past few days and the death of Jesus, this person they hoped would be the redeemer. Good. The stranger acts like he’s going to go on the two, compel him to stay with them and share a meal together. And of course, in the breaking of the bread he’s known, he’s known to them. And then finally I’d mention the story in John 21 of Peter out in the boat fishing, and he sees a figure on the beach and doesn’t recognize him as first as Jesus, but then they share a conversation. So I would argue the kind of the seven critical, critical appearance stories. There are a few others that are, so I just invite all of us as preachers whether we’re following a lectionary or not. And not all of these stories ever appear on Sundays, even in the lectionary, but some of them do again on this three year, on this three year cycle.
So a couple of things about those stories occur to me. First of all, the risen Christ is unexpected beyond all hope, against all hope. This is not what they were hoping for. They were hoping they were hoping to properly anoint his dead body for burial and instead through these stories, find that he has been raised from the dead and is living and lives among ’em. So all of these appearance stories begin with non-recognition or surprise. Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus, she thinks he’s the gardener. Peter doesn’t recognize this figure on the beach as Jesus, the two on the way to Emmaus, don’t recognize who this stranger is until he breaks, until he breaks the bread. In each of the stories, then secondly, Jesus has to do something very physical, very embodied, very intimate, very personal that allows himself to be revealed. He calls Mary by name and she recognizes him. He invites Thomas to touch not his beautiful face but his wounds. He invites Thomas to place himself into Jesus’ woundedness. Wow. He invites Peter to come and eat breakfast with him. He invites the two on the road he’s known to them in the breaking and the bread.
So that’s encouraging to me. That gives me some hope that when we look at these stories, I think we’re being encouraged. Where does the risen Jesus surprise me? Where unexpectedly do I meet the presence of the risen Christ in my life? And then the third thing, each of the stories ends with the recipient of the risen Christ’s appearance being given a mission. Go tell others, follow me. So that leads to something we’ll talk about on the minute in terms of what do we do in terms of action to live out these stories. So those are the appearance stories. Let’s really use them for all their worth. I just mentioned really briefly in the lectionary that many of our churches use, along with those gospel stories, we tend to read some stories from the first half of the Acts of the apostles. We hear some of Peter’s first preaching about the resurrection. Wow, that might be of use to us today, right?
What did Peter have to say on that first or after that first Easter? But there’s also the story of Philip on the road through Gaza of all places where he meets Philip the Ethiopian eunuch, can I say a queer person? And he ends up asking, they talk about the prophet Isaiah and the eunuch is already wondering about what this means. And there’s the story of Peter going to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and there’s the story of the apostle, Saul on the road to Damascus. So I guess all of those unexpected places where we encounter the risen Christ.
Seth: Those are unexpected people, too. You lay out the folks who go to the tomb and they are part of generally the inner circle of Jesus’s disciples and followers. But then what you’ve just explained with the additional texts, there is these unexpected encounters with people who don’t fit that mold or who don’t fit where the story was supposed to go and how people, places and actions are these moments of revelation of that unexpected God, that unexpected hope and resurrection.
Mark: Yeah, one of my friends and spiritual mentors, Edward, talks a lot about, he’s a Black Pentecostal bishop. He talks about ‘otherwise and elsewhere,’ and I like to play with that a little bit with his permission. Just what you’re saying, Seth, otherwise wise, because of the inclusion of the unexpected other, elsewhere: or else where if not in this queer, marginal kind of ‘unclean’ space, do we find our Lord? Otherwise, otherwise and elsewhere wise because of the other? And if not, or else where.
Seth: I love that. Oh, I’m going to have to sit with that for a while. That’s great, that’s great. And we see Jesus take steps to come closer. I love that you speak about that intimate interaction because that confirms their suspicion that something else is going on and there’s this real encounter with him. We are looking for real encounters with the risen Christ even today. And these texts are opportunities for us to enter those. But we are also looking for meaningful hope in the world here and now.
Mark: Yeah, there’s so many little paradoxes in all of this, aren’t there? So what do we do? Okay, so hopefully we hear those stories, we preach on those stories, we take them to heart, but what do we do in our bodies and in our neighborhoods and in our world and in our churches? So my first thought there is hope: We can’t see it, but we have to be it. We can’t see it if Paul is right, we don’t hope for what we see. We hope for something in the future that is not yet fully seen. Hope we can’t see it, but we have to be it. We have to be the hope. We cannot see or fully see. I want to use a couple of just a few words about that and then I’ve got a story to tell about that if that works. So one place I would go, so Mark, what does it mean to, we can’t see it, but we have to be it. What does that mean? What does that look like concretely? How do we live that out? For me, the baptismal promises that my Episcopal church uses whenever new people are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, or when the rest of us who are already baptized renew our baptismal covenant with God, with Jesus.
There have been since 1979, five questions asked of candidates for baptism and the whole congregation in the Episcopal church and just in the last year or two, a sixth one has been added. So what is meaningful action going to be like this Easter? This is the best I can do. Will you continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers? I will with God’s help, or I hope to hope in our conversation.
Seth: Yes.
Mark: Will you persevere in resisting evil? And whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? Will you proclaim? Moltmann talks about that. When you talk about hope, you’re pro-claiming, you’re saying something ahead of time. Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ? I will with God’s help. Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons? Not some. Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being? I will with God’s help. And then the new question, do you promise to be a steward of God’s creation, protecting and restoring the beauty of the earth, living sustainably and advocating for its wellbeing? I hope so, with God’s help.
Seth: With God’s help.
Mark: So then here’s a very, very concrete example from my own life. And one of the things I wanted to say somewhere in this podcast about preaching for Easter is: the best way to prepare a sermon is just by living your life attentively. Be in your relationships, be in your neighborhood, be in your community, read books, watch movies, listen to music, go to plays, go to sports event. I mean, live your life attentively. So about a week after I was invited to have this conversation about preaching hope this Easter, I had coffee with a friend of mine. He’s a former student at Seattle University. He’s a priest in the Episcopal church. He’s probably only eight years younger than me. So when I say he’s my student, he’s my peer. But I was in the professor role, he was in the seminary student role. He pastors the Episcopal church called St. Elizabeth’s down in Burien, which is down by the Seattle Tacoma Airport. So we had coffee together just because we hadn’t been together in probably since before the COVID lockdown. And so we caught up with each other and he asked me, what am I doing? And guess what I told him among other things, John, I’m supposed to be part of a podcast about preaching hope this Easter. You got any ideas? I need them.
And then as the conversation went on, he’s been at St. Elizabeth’s for a decade or so, and I never heard, never visited him there. I never heard about the congregation much. He told me a little bit about how it’s a congregation, an Episcopal congregation that so many others in the 1950s and 60s, suburban-ish, way, way, way overbuilt and built this huge building that they thought was going to be this thriving Episcopal day school with hundreds of kids coming to this Episcopal school with chapel every day. Never happened. And so it’s almost been like this millstone just kind of hanging around this congregation like so many white suburban congregations, aging. And people used to say, John said, we need to attract more families with young children. What’s going to help us revitalize ourselves? There were no such people in the neighborhood of what they were thinking of.
But the neighborhood they’re in in Burien, south King County, is a place nowadays that is heavily populated by immigrant communities and by African-American communities that have been pushed out of the city of Seattle by aggressive gentrification. So what St. Elizabeth’s ended up deciding to do was to partner with an organization and provide a kind of Head Start program for the children and preschool children of immigrants, particularly from Ethiopia. If you go on their website, here are the languages spoken in their program of early childhood education: Amharic, Romo, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tigrinya, and Vietnamese. Many of those are Ethiopian languages and most of the immigrant children that are now part of St. Elizabeth’s kind of school are Muslim, as are their teachers. And so John said to me, Mark, it’s so wonderful to have our school building become a place of prayer, meaning Islamic prayer at the appropriate hours during the day.
And the organization they partnered with is called Neighborhood House. And the whole point is, yeah, how do I take meaningful action in this complex world? Well at least start by looking in your immediate neighborhood or the immediate neighborhood of your congregation. What are the needs? Who are the people here and now? So that’s my story about, and then we met on a Tuesday and he preached the next Sunday and he sent me a copy of his sermon for that Sunday. It was the sermon for February 9th. The gospel story is the story of the great catch of fish in Luke, in Luke’s version of it. And I mean, here’s just a couple of John Forman’s words. If we hope to avoid being overwhelmed by the whirlpools of this turbulent sea, we’lll need to sustain vulnerability, cultivate curiosity and practice compassion. And he goes on and on. It felt like to me already too much in advance, my friend is preaching hope for this Easter 2025.
Seth: Beautiful. Which brings, that goes back to what you said at the very beginning. Even of that, each Sunday, each moment we have the opportunity to gather in Christ’s name. And remember, we proclaim Easter, it’s resurrection. Every Sunday is a resurrection. Every season of Easter is elongated statement of Easter tide. I’m going to pause them, they can cut that back out. But what I want to say is that we’re seeing these tangible places to live out the Easter message throughout the cycle of the year, not only in just a moment of one Sunday. So how do we preach hope and Easter? Well, we preach it every week, every day, every bit of our lives. I love that as well. The attentiveness. We gather and consider the needs of our community as we tend to our days, which then allow us to find places of hope or look for it, at least. I thank you for sharing about St. Elizabeth as well. I think what communities, what their community’s opening up there is beautiful and it is that picture of hope. Mark, I wonder if you have some specific ways that you’d like to inspire us as we look forward into this season of Easter. What are some specific ideas that you have or we could create together as we think about living out this dangerous hope?
Mark: Right? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I’ve got two things and these maybe get us close to the end. We’ll see. So like I said, I’m an occasional preacher. I’ve never preached on Easter Sunday because I’m not the rector or an associate clergy in the congregation, but I’ve preached a good bit. So getting ready for this conversation today, Seth, I went back and actually realized, yeah, I’ve actually preached a good bit, not just on the Easter, not just on every Easter Sunday, that is every Sunday of the year, but in the seven week Easter season. To me it feels, and maybe this is part of the collaboration, although it’ll be mostly my invitation, it feels weird to talk about preaching in without having any preaching. So I would love to just offer you all the beginning paragraph, the beginning page of the sermon I offered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, third Sunday of Easter last year. So 2024. And it’s weird because in one way a lot of this could have been last week, not last year on the other hand. Anyway, so let me offer a few of my actual preaching words from a year ago, and then I’ve got a couple of much more open-ended thoughts that lots of people can dive into after that.
Seth: That sounds great.
Mark: I need Easter not as decoration or distraction. I need Easter as a matter of life and death. I need Easter, not just for one day or even a seven week season. I need Easter for a lifetime. I need Easter as the beating heart and breathing lungs of my life. I need Easter. It’s a life and death matter. I need to see and hear and touch the risen Jesus. I need the eyes and ears of my faith opened, its hands and feet roused. I need to share a meal with the living Christ and know him nurturing me in the breaking of bread. I need Easter because, as the apostle Peter says, we have rejected the holy and righteous one and asked to have a murderer given to us. We have killed the author of life. I need to encounter Jesus raised from the dead death that enslaves us, the death we have done and the death done on our behalf. I need hope for the future, not just dead things brought back to how they once were, but a new future of abundant life. For as the Apostle John writes, we are God’s beloved children now, but what we will be has not yet been revealed. This we do know when the risen and living Christ Jesus is revealed, we will be like him for we will see him as he is.
So that was last year. That was a year ago. And so when I preach, if I preach this Easter season, which I assume I will, yeah, it’s interesting to revisit Mark a year ago and St. Paul’s a year ago and the neighborhood a year ago and the world a year ago. So that opens up possibilities of new possibilities, new opportunities,
Seth: And the ability to look back allows you to gain that perspective for where you’ve come from as well. Then if we are able to, I mean that’s part of my theology of hope is that remembrance of God’s goodness in the past and the consistent reliance that God will be good going forward. God has been good and God will be good and I will hope in that. So this ability to both to hold time as you’ve said earlier, both looking forward at where we are going as well as using the past as our reference. I love that.
Mark: If I were to preach this coming Easter, knowing what the lectionary readings are, like I said, we already talked about this one. I’m really attracted by that notion of known in absence and just being willing to name the absence even as we hope for the revelation of the risen Christ. The other one that really intrigues me, the seventh Sunday of Easter of this year, the reading from the Acts of the apostles is from chapter 16, and it’s the story Paul and Silas have arrived in Philippi in Macedonia, and they’re out in the street doing their thing. And there’s a young girl, I’m going to call her a trafficked young woman who has, she’s demon possessed, but her possession allows her to tell the future, to be a fortune teller, a divinizer, or whatever that word would be. And of course, like the demons in the gospels, she immediately knows who Paul and Silas are serving. She knows they’re Jesus guys and she’s all over them. This man serves the most high God, and they finally get annoyed. But I also wonder if they get empathetic. And Paul in the name of Jesus casts the demon out of her. The problem is she was a major income source for her traffickers and they haul Paul and Silas before the city council or whatever they called it. They’re thrown in jail, they’re singing, they’re singing hymns and praying at night, and there’s this earthquake, this angel, the prison doors come open and they all run away. No, they’re worried about the safety of the jailer who’s about to kill himself and they stay until they’ve met that person’s need. I’d love to preach on that this year. I don’t know what I’d do other than, wow, what a story.
One more. I’ve got three Godly Play style wondering questions to end with. Before we quite get there. There was an Easter back before COVID, I think it was 2019, where at our five o’clock Sunday evening service, which practices what we call a shared homily, which is the preacher gives eight minutes of fairly focused orienting remarks, but then closes with questions that anybody in the room to which anybody in the room can make a brief comment. This one year, 2019, Lent, the theme was petition, protest, petition and penitence. And our rector, Sarah at the time invited all of us preachers not only to leave the shared homily, but also create a protest sign that would be in the room. And so I did a drawing of Mary, of Bethany in John 12 anointing Jesus’ feet, and she’s there and I made her with dreadlocks. So she’s got her hair all wild, her jar is there in the oil spilling out, and that was my protest sign.
My 13-year-old grandson and my daughter were at the US Capitol yesterday. They live in DC. Rowan, my grandson’s sign read ‘President Trump, I have to follow the rules, why don’t you?’ and my daughter’s sign said ‘Trump and Musk are hurting American families.’ Now, I’m not sure. I mean, despite what Moltmann said about protest, I wonder if this Easter, we could work together on not protest signs, but signs of hope and how would we portray those visually and not just verbally. I mean preaching is verbal, written maybe, and spoken, but I’m so intrigued. And as you know Seth, in my book, that’s what it’s a lot about is how do we preach imaginatively in the literal sense of finding images, maybe even physical images or tactile images as well as verbal images to sort of carry, to carry our thoughts. So I’d love to do something around that with a community this Easter and invite listeners to think, I mean, so at back to space, I mean our five o’clock Sunday liturgy until some renovations used to meet downstairs and we could have stations in the room and people during the quote shared homily could get up and walk around and look at photographs or art or whatever.
I preached on the story in Luke 17 of the tax collector and the Pharisee, where this Pharisee stands right up front, all proud and the tax collector won’t even raise his head to the heavens, God be merciful to be a sinner. I actually had everybody in the room get up and try on those two poses and it was really good. And then come back and talk about what was it like to be the tax collector in that posture? What was it like to be the Pharisee standing right up front, self-assured and whatever. So anyway, so think about manipulating your space if possible this Easter.
Seth: Well, and those examples both are stories where people are putting their own words to make meaning of the text in collaboration with one another. I love the protest. I love the sense of being able to share a space but also have our own voices raised, and it’s inviting more people into the preaching act to actually co-create. I love that. That’s beautiful. And the Godly Play questions guide us into that kind of meaning making, don’t they?
Mark: They do. Yeah. And it’s so interesting. I was in a meeting of the five o’clock liturgy team. There were six or seven of us and we were in a normal meeting. I think we were planning advent of some year. And I looked around the room and realized every one of us is a trained Godly Play teacher. And the physical layout of the original five o’clock service was church in the round on movable chairs. And so that circle of people contributing to the shared homily was like the circle of the Godly Play. Children listening to the storyteller tell a story.
Seth: What a beautiful way of re-imagining breaching. I mean, that’s our theme here. We were trying to think of these new, maybe not new, but different or ways of thinking about this craft and inviting more voices. And that’s beautiful. Mark, would you like to lead us out with some of your questions? Because I think that’s a perfect way for us to put some of this into practical action.
Mark: So I’ve got three Godly Play style wondering questions and just invite all of you that hear them respond to ’em in some way:
I wonder where you most feel the absence of Jesus’ words and deeds of affirmation and inclusion and reconciliation? Where do you most feel the absence of Jesus?
I wonder where the risen Christ might surprise you this Easter and make himself known unexpectedly? Wait and see. Don’t be surprised if you’re surprised, right?
And I wonder out on the streets of our neighborhoods, whatever that means, I wonder out on the streets of our neighborhoods what vulnerable human beings we need to free from the demon of oppression in the name of Jesus, even if it puts us and our communities in some danger?
Seth: I just want to hold those that beautiful, powerful questions. Mark, thank you so much for your time today and for your just collaborative approach to this process. It’s wonderful to get to talk with you, and we pray that your community and those that we all serve would be inspired and awakened in this coming Easter season to find this dangerous hope.
Mark: Thank you, Seth. Blessings on you and your Easter preaching.