The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde recently packed them in at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis for the Westminster Town Hall Forum, delivering an engaging and insightful talk she called “Courage is Contagious.”
Bishop Budde was the first woman elected as spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She exploded into the nation’s consciousness with a sermon she preached in January 2025 to President Donald Trump and others at the Washington National Cathedral.
Watch the recording of Budde’s Westminster Town Hall Forum talk here.
Budde served 18 years as a priest in Minneapolis. For her, a favorite Westminster talk was in 2003 by the late Rev. Peter Gomes, a Harvard ethics professor and the minister at the university’s Memorial Church. During that talk, Gomes described the sermon he delivered every year to incoming Harvard students called “How Are You Going to Live After the Fall.”
“Innocent pagans that most of them are, they assume that I am asking them what their plans are after September,” Budde said, quoting Gomes. “But I’m not. I’m asking them what they’re going to do after their first dreams fall from the sky. What are you going to do when you don’t get that job? When you don’t get the girl or boy? When you are brushed aside and hurt? When your children rise up to treat you as poorly as you are treating your parents?”
“The good life that you rightly seek must serve you in your most difficult, desperately hard times,” Gomes said that day. “If what you live by does not serve you then, it is no good for you, even in the good times.”
Budde got around to talking about courage, but first she spent some time on hope. “Our understanding of hope is critically important in the times we’re in,” she said. “We’re understandably disappointed when our hopes don’t come to pass. … When what we long for really matters to us, to the people we love, to the fate of our communities,” the disappointment is “devastating” when our hopes are dashed.
“That’s precisely why we need to tap deeper wells in search of a more resilient hope that enables us to persevere in the face of disappointment and prolonged adversity,” she said.
This practice of hope “has become increasingly important to me as I get older, because Lord knows the last thing the generations coming up behind us who are elders now need is our cynicism and our despair,” Budde said.
“What they need is wind in their sails. They need us to hold fast to all that is good. They need us to provide places of respite and encouragement,” she said. “They need us to write checks, to give sacrificially of our time and resources, and to keep the light of faith burning, just as our spiritual forebears did for us.”
That brought Budde to the topic of courage “and the simple observation that courage is contagious. It’s like hope: it’s mysterious and communal. It passes through and among us like electricity, helping us to accomplish, as the Apostle Paul once wrote, ‘far more than we could ask for or imagine.’”
As Budde was preparing her January 2025 sermon for Trump and others, she read an account of Roman Catholic bishops in California who had taken a strong stand of support for migrants in their communities. “Their courage to say what I knew, what we all knew to be true, that the vast majority of immigrants and migrants and refugees are not dangerous criminals but are active, contributing members of our society — their courage inspired me,” she said.
A sermon or a speech “is not consequential on its own,” Budde said. “It’s only decisive to the extent it is linked to lives of integrity, faithfulness and sacrificial love, and part of communities and movements that are dedicated to a higher purpose. That’s why you’re here,” she told those in the packed church. “The primary reason I accepted this invitation to speak was to say thank you to the people and the communities that taught me so much about courage.”
Learn more about the Westminster Town Hall Forum here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
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Let us pray:
Dear Lord, please hear the outcry of your children in need and provide a lighted path for them to find their way. Please empower those who serve them with the resources and energy needed to lift spirits and hearts. Amen.
