A Need, A Question, and a Dream

A month after I arrived at Good Shepherd as the new rector, I discovered a stack of visitor cards in a mess of papers in the office. It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, and my assumption was that the cards had been completed before COVID struck and that none of the visitors had been contacted. A voice within me said, “Reach out to them.”

Truth be told, I was desperate to attract new people to the parish. We were trying to rebuild, and so stumbling upon a stack of visitor cards felt like winning the lottery. I also knew that anyone who would take the time to complete a visitor card probably wanted to be contacted. And although I was a bit embarrassed to reach out so belatedly to those visitors, I, nevertheless, listened to the little voice inside me. I emailed everyone in the stack of cards.

As I predicted, a few responded, but many didn’t. But one response came back quickly and enthusiastically, with capital letters and exclamation points. I arranged to meet with the author of that excited email—let’s call her Anne. We sat on the porch of what is now our retreat house, with our face masks on, and we talked. In-person conversation in those days was such a welcome relief to Zoom. I discovered that Anne frequently passed by the church on her daily walks, and one day, she felt compelled to fill out a visitor card that she found in the church. She was delighted to receive my email, because it had been a while since she had first left her contact information at the back of the church.

Little by little, Anne and her husband, whom we’ll call Richard, became involved, Anne more so than Richard. But Richard felt a draw to this church, too. At the time, we’d just decided to close our Thrift Shop, housed in the basement of the Parish House. It was chock full of stuff, and we had about thirty people involved in the parish, and many were avoiding social interaction because of COVID. So, I had no clue how we’d get all the items cleared out of that overstuffed basement. “Fear not,” Anne said. “We’ll get this done.” “Perhaps we could set a goal for the summer,” I said to her. “We’ll finish it by March,” she said firmly. And finish we did, largely due to the efforts of Anne and Richard.

Over time, it became clear to me that both Anne, Richard, this parish, and I had three things in common. We had a need, a question, and a dream. Anne and Richard seemed to be longing for community and a spiritual connection with God. Their question was how to reconnect with the Church after some time away. Their dream was to find fulfillment in their lives through a relationship with God.

For me and the parish, our need was to attract people to participate in the ministry to which God was calling us. A very specific need was to clean out a room full of stuff in a former Thrift Shop. Our question was how we could rebuild after so many difficult years. More specifically, who would help us clean out a Thrift Shop, not to mention where all the items would go! Our dream was to be a flourishing parish once again after coming so close to death.

The voice that urged me to email Anne was not just a whim. I believe, now in hindsight, that it was the Holy Spirit. And it was the Holy Spirit that connected me and this parish with Anne and Richard, changing our lives forever after that. This same Spirit is the one who speaks first through an angel of the Lord to Philip and tells him to go south to the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. And it’s the same Spirit who tells him to go and join the chariot in which an Ethiopian eunuch is sitting and reading from the prophet Isaiah.

The Spirit knows what Philip and the eunuch don’t yet know: they’re being drawn to one another by a need, a question, and a dream. The eunuch needs companionship in his quest to interpret Scripture. His question is how he can interpret Scripture without guidance. And his dream is to come closer to God through the study of his holy Word.

It would seem, at first, that the eunuch—this outsider and social oddity—is the only one with a need, question, and a dream. And maybe that’s exactly what Philip thought in his evangelistic fervor. But in the mysterious providence of God, aided by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the eunuch and Philip meet in their shared need, question, and dream. Philip has a Gospel with which he’s been entrusted, and he has a need to share it. His question is with whom it should be shared. And his dream, of course, is that he will be an instrument of God in bringing the good news to the ends of the earth. In the beautiful provision of God, shared needs, questions, and dreams coalesce as Philip goes up to the eunuch’s chariot and sits beside him.

The voice that prompts him to go to the chariot invites him to stick close to it, literally, to attach himself to it. And he does. He patiently journeys with the eunuch and interprets Scripture to him, and the eunuch’s enthusiastic response is its own gift to Philip. When they finally arrive at water, the eunuch asks the question that seems to be undergirding his quest for knowledge all along: “what is to prevent my being baptized?” Nothing, is God’s answer. Nothing at all. And in a stunning moment, both the eunuch and Philip go down into the water and rise up again, changed forever.

Philip and the eunuch go down into the water as old selves, people who might have thought they were the only ones with a need, question, and a dream. They go into the water as individuals, but they rise out in the shared knowledge that they need each other. They rise to the new life of Christian fellowship, where joys and sorrows are shared, where no one is alone, where we can’t be the people God has called us to be without each other. The same Spirit who urges Philip to go to that lonely wilderness road and climb into the chariot also unites Philip and the eunuch in the shared love of Christ, who died and rose again so that we all might die to our old selves and rise to new life in him.

Nearly two years after I first met Anne and Richard, Richard was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Early on one glorious September morning with the first hints of fall in the air, I was awakened by a phone call from Anne. Richard had died peacefully in his sleep that night. I went over to the house, and as Anne and I sat at Richard’s bed that morning, she said to me, “Well, the Good Shepherd certainly found the lost sheep.” I knew what she meant, but I also knew that Richard and Anne were not the only sheep in this story. The Good Shepherd had not only brought Anne and Richard to the sheepfold of this parish; he had also brought me and this parish to them. We were united in our shared needs, questions, and dreams.

A month later, Anne told me that she was moving back home to be closer to family. I understood. Our lives had intersected for a fleeting moment when in God’s mysterious providence our needs, questions, and dreams needed to be shared and held in God’s love. Anne’s departure was a bit like Philip being snatched away from the eunuch’s presence after the glorious moment of baptism. Their lives had meshed in the power of the Spirit for a time, and then they moved on, changed forever.

We’re told that the eunuch went on his way rejoicing. Philip, brought to him by the Spirit, had met his need, had sought to answer his question, and had given him a means to fulfill his dream. The eunuch had done the same for Philip. And then the Spirit sent them on their way, and I imagine that Philip was rejoicing, just like the eunuch.

Anne went on her way, as did I and the parish, each of us grieving over Richard’s death, but also rejoicing that we had known one another. We rejoiced that through the power of the Spirit, something of God’s earthly vision had been realized in the intersection of our lives. I suppose that we instinctively rejoiced that we had listened to the voice of the Spirit inviting us to get up, go, and find one another.

This is the bittersweet joy of the Gospel. Within each of us, there are needs, questions, and dreams. Within each of us, the Spirit speaks to prompt and guide us to those who will respond to our own needs, questions, and dreams with their own. And although we may feel that it’s presumptuous to attribute our nudges and urges to the power of the Spirit, when we take a chance and do, we’ll undoubtedly be surprised. We’ll learn that the Spirit isn’t just feeding us when our lives intersect joyfully with another. The Spirit is also feeding the world. And when we and the world are fed by the sweetness of the Gospel, however fleeting it may be, we are changed forever. And we go on our way, rejoicing.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 28, 2024

Led Back to Goodness

Recent studies show that there may be a genetic component to the tone and quality of one’s voice, and it has to do with more than just vocal inflections. There may be shared physiological features among voices of biological relation. Does your own voice bear any resemblance to your parents’ voice? What about your siblings? Can you find any tonal similarity between their voices and yours? I certainly can. On numerous occasions, my voice can sound just like that of my parents or my brother.

Our own speech patterns will naturally be similar to those of our family members. Perhaps your father speaks rapidly and excitedly and you do, too. Or maybe your mother has a funny way of lowering the tone of her voice at the ends of questions, rather than the other way around, and you do the same. It’s only natural that our distinctive voices, however unique they may be, would contain recognizable vestiges of our biological relations. But how far back do these shared vocal qualities go? What tone colors in the voice of your seventeenth-century ancestor might you find? If somehow you could hear a distant relative speaking from the past, would you recognize her voice, and would it sound like yours?

And if you heard Jesus speaking your name, would you recognize his voice? And how? St. John tells us that Jesus the Good Shepherd knows his sheep, and they know him. He calls them each by name, and they heed his voice. Above all, they recognize the sound of his voice. On the contrary, they don’t recognize the voice of the hireling because he’s not good. He doesn’t care for the sheep. He’s a mercenary, a con artist, a coward. But when Jesus calls the name of the sheep, they know it’s him, because they know that he knows them. And because he knows them, they will follow him. But how do they know it’s Jesus? Is it the tone of his voice? Do they, by chance, hear some remnant of their own spiritual ancestry in that voice? And what about that heritage is so favorable that they’re compelled to follow the voice?

I would be interested in taking a survey of Christians today, and I would want to ask them this: when you imagine the sound of Jesus’s voice, what is it like? Is the tone harsh or gentle? Is it scolding or affirming? Is it forceful or invitational? And I would bet that many people—perhaps some of us here today—hear Jesus’s voice as condemnatory, full of harsh judgment, scolding, and rigid.

Maybe it’s because we aren’t so good with our imaginations these days. Too much listening to robotic voices means that the voice of the Good Shepherd sounds like a GPS navigator. The seething anger echoing in the corridors of worldly power imprints itself on our minds. Facile lies make it difficult to trust anyone’s voice. The voice of the cruel teacher who was always chastising you unfairly still hammers away in the recesses of your memory. The cold voice of the distant parent haunts you. The mocking voice of the bully who tortured you as a teenager is subconsciously buried alive within your heart. Maybe this is why it’s so hard to accurately hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. We know his voice is good, but it’s difficult for us to hear good anymore. The reason the sheep won’t follow the voice of the hireling, the bad shepherd, is because something inside of them—something about who they are—cautions them against following such a voice.

And although St. John doesn’t describe the sound of the Good Shepherd’s voice, he does tell us something important about the Good Shepherd himself, which might help us understand the sound of his voice. The Good Shepherd knows his own and they know him, just as the Father knows the Good Shepherd and the Good Shepherd knows the Father. And this must mean that in the voice of Jesus, we perfectly hear the voice of God the Father. In the voice of Jesus, we’re taken back through our spiritual heritage to the Source and Foundation of all that is and who we are.

To discover who we are in the clamor of today’s world, we must sift out the gentle voice of the Good Shepherd calling our names, and then we follow it like obedient sheep back to the beginning. We go backwards in time and try to trace this thread of a voice through history. In doing so, we learn something about who we are, because truth be told, we’ve forgotten who we are. But who we are is in the Good Shepherd’s voice.

As we go back in time, we’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in the saints who called the Church back to her roots. We’ll hear his voice resonating in the tortured larynxes of martyrs crying out the good news even in the face of death. We’ll hear his voice imperfectly in the calls of the prophets who tried so hard to bring God’s people back into covenant with him. We’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice even in the flawed leadership of kings and judges, sent by God to lead his chosen people. We’ll hear it in the guidance of Moses trying to lead a recalcitrant people into freedom.

And even today, we hear the Shepherd’s voice in the oppressed and marginalized crying out for dignity, or in the starving child calling out for food, or in the mother of the murdered teenager demanding that something must change, that there must be some hope for goodness in all that is bad. If we listen closely, we can hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in every little corner of hell on this earth, crying out for goodness. And because we live in him, and he lives in us, our voices bear some resemblance to his.

But since St. John has told us that the Good Shepherd knows us and we know him, and that the Father knows him and he knows the Father, if we heed and follow his voice, we’ll discover not only the voice of our heavenly Father. We’ll also find ourselves back at the beginning, where we’ll learn more about who we are.

When we follow the Good Shepherd’s voice back to the beginning, we’ll hear the dynamic, gentle voice of God the Father emerging from the deep nothingness as the eternal Word in the power of the Holy Spirit saying one thing: It is very good. These are the words that are so difficult to hear these days, whether about ourselves or creation or our neighbors. It is very good. And something within each of us is instinctively searching for goodness.

The Good Shepherd’s voice invites us to follow him, back through the ravages of history, over the beating of pruning hooks into spears and the lamentations of the forsaken, to find the sheepfold to which he has led us. And when we arrive at the sheepfold, we find that it is a garden. It’s a lush, gorgeous garden full of green, colorful, blooming things. It’s an idyllic existence, where humans walk and talk freely with God, unencumbered by cares, concerns, or insecurities. It’s a time before there was murder or war or greed or jealousy. It’s the beginning of all that we know, and at that moment in time, God calls us each by name and makes us his own. And God says, it is very good. YOU are very good.

But the beginning is not just a beginning. It’s also an end. If we have found the beginning by following the Good Shepherd’s voice, we’ll also catch a glimpse of the end God has prepared for us. The gate into the garden of Eden is also the gate into eternal life. And the gate is tended by our loving Good Shepherd, whose voice does not berate or manipulate or coerce but invites us into the sheepfold. And far from being somewhere in the distant future, the gate to the garden of eternal life is right here, closer than it might appear.

To hear the voice of the Good Shepherd is to hear that we’re not forsaken but loved, not condemned but forgiven, not left alone but brought into community, not scattered but united in the love of the One who lays down his life for the sheep. And the One who is perfect goodness, the Good Shepherd, yearns for our voices to echo his voice and to tell all the world what we can only know by going back to the beginning. And, indeed, it is very good.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 21, 2024

The Startling Power of the Resurrection

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the great French organist and improviser Marcel Dupré climbed out of bed on his fifth birthday only to be greeted by his father who said to him, “Marcel, for your fifth birthday, you may now modulate to the dominant.” If this means nothing to you, just imagine a parent telling you on your fifth birthday that now, you can finally ride your bicycle without training wheels.

Waiting is simply a part of life, even though we’re an impatient lot these days. And our restless mindset ignores the fact that waiting is often for our own good and the good of others. Indeed, waiting is often necessary.

And yet, we rightly feel impatient at times. One more natural disaster reminds us that we’re moving ever closer to environmental ruin. One more mass shooting jolts us out of our complacency to say that enough is enough. One more suicide because of loneliness compels us to change something about our lack of social interactions. It’s a struggle to hold the infinite patience of God with the need for earthly action, and it can seem like a hopeless problem. In the quest to alleviate our guilty consciences, there’s a grave temptation to ignore the perfect timing of God’s providence.

Waiting is at the heart of the conclusion of Luke’s Gospel, although it’s not immediately apparent from today’s reading. Just before we pick up the story today, Jesus has appeared to two of his disciples journeying on the road to Emmaus. Only when Jesus breaks bread with them do they realize who he is. Only now can their eyes be opened; before, they couldn’t understand. Now, they know it’s Jesus precisely because he repeats the action that he commanded them to repeat incessantly on the eve of his passion and death. And when Jesus does this, their eyes are opened. Until that moment, we’re told that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It’s as if they had to wait for the right moment for their eyes to be opened, which is the moment that Jesus breaks bread with them.

And so, in today’s Gospel story, when Jesus appears to a larger group of disciples, including the two who have met him on the road to Emmaus, it’s finally the right time for the disciples to understand who he is and what their mission is. The disciples are, at first, startled by Jesus’s glorified body. They’re startled by the power of the resurrection. So, Jesus shows them the physicality of his body, however changed it may be.

But then, he does something very strange. He asks them if they have something to eat, and what they offer him is surely a profound sign of the startling power of the resurrection to make the impossible possible. They offer him a piece of broiled fish, and now, they must see that it was with five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish that Jesus fed the 5,000.

Only now, can Jesus speak to them and interpret the Scriptures to them. Now is the right time. Now they can see everything in a way they couldn’t see before. Before, when they encountered a vast crowd of hungry people, those disciples couldn’t imagine how they would all be fed. Then, they could see only scarcity and not abundance. Now, they have witnessed Jesus’s passion and death. Now, they see that Jesus has been raised from the dead by God. Now, they feed Jesus with a piece of fish. And now, their minds are opened. They could never have opened their own minds. Christ had to do it for them. Until now, these fickle, immature disciples have ventured no farther afield than their homeland. But soon, again, when it’s the right time, when the Holy Spirit has empowered them, it will be the right time to go to the ends of the earth.

Timing is everything. Before, Jesus fed the disciples and the crowds in his earthly ministry, showing abundance where there seemed to be only scarcity. Before, in his miracles, Jesus embodied God’s uncanny ability to do the impossible. But now, in the aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, it all makes sense as it never could before.

This is the startling power of the resurrection, where God’s infinite patience offers us peace amid our impatience, where the impossible becomes possible, where despair turns into hope. Through the startling power of the resurrection, God demonstrates a relentless capacity to make new what has grown old and to give life to what is dying. But for our eyes to be opened to this incredulous reality, we must submit to God’s time. It’s God who must open our eyes.

Right up through the Emmaus appearance, Jesus’s disciples have been fed by Jesus, in the actions of his earthly ministry and, literally, in the bread and the wine. In their post-Easter grief and despair, Jesus appears first on the road to Emmaus and then to a group of disciples trying to process their encounter with the risen Christ. But when Christ appears again and offers his peace, he opens their minds when he asks them to feed him. It’s what they couldn’t do back with the 5,000, but it’s what they can do now. Now, is the right time. They can do the impossible because of the startling power of the resurrection. They will even travel to the ends of the earth, and they are the reason we’re here today.

But those flawed, hearty disciples had their eyes opened to something about which we, in our modern impatience, can often be quite dense. Jesus opened their eyes to see that their mission could only be sustained after having first been fed by him. Jesus needed to feed them before opening their minds. The timing must be right.

And this is a remarkable challenge to us. For too long, the Church has rashly skipped over the only thing that will clarify her future mission. She has too frequently failed to be fed by Christ before feeding others. It’s dangerous for us to presume to feed others before we have first been fed, for then, we will only feed them with our anxiety and dysfunction.[1] It’s spiritually reckless to alleviate our own privileged guilt by using the needy among us as pawns in our selfish projects. We can only understand our mission in light of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, by sharing in the breaking of bread and the prayers, by coming here weekly, by letting Christ feed us, by letting God open our eyes and minds to what he would have us do, rather than what we want to do.

All our pangs of conscience and rightful indignation about the injustices of this world should compel us to be here first. Here alone, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers, will God open our eyes and minds to the action he has in store for us. Here alone will privileged guilt be converted into self-emptying service. Here alone will we come to know just how God desires to include us into his remaking of a broken world by sending us out as ambassadors of reconciliation.

Before we came to this place, we, like those early disciples, could only see the impossible, but only now, as we are nurtured by Christ, can we have the courage to believe that anything is possible. Before we came here, we thought there wasn’t enough, but now, as we are fed with Christ’s abundance, we can trust that God has given us everything we need. Before we came to this feast, we thought we were no people, but now, God has assured us that we are his people and that because of his boundless grace, we, too, are witnesses to the startling power of the resurrection.     

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 14, 2024

[1] This roughly paraphrases Thomas Merton, who has written about the importance of contemplative prayer before action.

Solving the Mystery

If you ask me, the attraction of a great mystery novel is that the perpetrator of the crime is right under your nose until their identity is finally revealed. It would cheat the rules of the mystery genre for the guilty party to be suddenly plopped into the story at the end. That’s simply not fair! Part of the fun is knowing that any one of the many characters you’ve encountered throughout the mystery could be guilty. And it’s all too easy to miss the signs of guilt until the revelation of the culprit has been divulged at the end of the novel.

Often, a good mystery is difficult to solve because the perpetrator can hide amid the normalcy of life. Initial efforts at identifying the guilty party result in an immature blaming of the odd duck in the story. It’s easy to blame the quiet recluse who lives in a cabin in the woods whittling figurines from soap or the character with a volatile temper. But no one would suspect the churchgoer who bakes pies to deliver to new residents on the block, would they?

There’s a mystery that I’m interested in solving, although there’s no crime or murder involved. But it’s a mystery, nonetheless. It has its origins in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where we get a glimpse of the behavior of the earliest disciples of Jesus. We’re told that all those who believed were of one heart and soul. They held all things in common, and surprisingly, no one claimed that anything was their own. There wasn’t a needy person among them. And those who had possessions sold them, and the proceeds were used to help those in need.

This is a mystery to me because it seems so different from the Church that we know, and don’t you want to know why? Don’t you want to know how a motley group of people could be of one heart and soul? Don’t you want to know how sinful humans could behave so selflessly as not to cling to their possessions? Don’t you want to know how in a world of deep economic and social inequities there wasn’t a needy person among the earliest disciples? Don’t you want to know how the communal concern of Acts 4 was possible in a world just as disordered and lopsided as our own? This is a mystery that needs to be solved.

If we were to employ traditional mystery-solving techniques, we would, of course, look not for the most unusual behavior but for that which appears most normal. After all, the best mysteries are usually solved by paying attention to the ordinary details, and in that apparent normalcy lies the solution.

But there’s a problem because nothing in this description of the early Church seems normal. These days, it’s not easy to identify ready examples of Christian unity. The norm is to be painfully aware of the Church’s divisions. We see denominations wracked by schism, making one group of people the scapegoat for disunity. Rarely, too, do we see Christians easily parting with their possessions. It’s hard enough to give sacrificially, much less believe and profess that what we have isn’t even our own. And we all know that if there weren’t any needy persons among us, food ministries and soup kitchens would be superfluous. There would be no need for church-sponsored shelters for the unhoused. The early Church in Acts 4 is so far removed from our own reality as to seem like a pipedream, if not a fictionalized tale.

And so, in trying to solve the mystery of what is happening in Acts 4, there’s no ordinary behavior that might be hiding the real solution to this mystery. It’s as if we’ve entered an alternative universe. And yet, the vexing question remains: why does the early Church seem so different from the Church today?

Maybe the answer to this perplexing mystery doesn’t lie in decoding the witness of the early Church. Maybe it lies beneath the behavior of the Church today. Could it be that the answer to being an Acts 4 Church is right under our eyes? Could the clue to solving the mystery lie in analyzing the normalcy of Church life as we know it, not as the early Church knew it?

It’s hard to deny that the Church of our own day is struggling, even if we choose not to accept catastrophic predictions of decline. It’s true that a Church full of believers who are of one heart and mind seems like a rarity these days. It should be obvious that few of our acquaintances talk about shared possessions but rather talk quite normally about their own possessions. It's blatantly evident that too many people are in dire need around us, in our own community, in our own neighborhoods, and even in the Church. And it appears that the Church frequently fails to embody the behavior of the early disciples in Acts 4. Something is missing. So, what is it?

Here, in our own context, we see a Church trying and at least aspiring to be the Church of Acts 4. Despite her many divisions, we still profess to be saddened by them. We still pray for unity within diversity and hope to share one mind in Christ. We still strive to help those in need and long for a day when no one will lack any necessary resources. All this is true, at least in theory, but the reality is far from our hopes and dreams.

As in any good mystery, perhaps the answer is right beneath our eyes. Beneath all our modern aspirations, there seems to be a marked difference between the behavior of the early Church and the Church today, a difference that we might overlook in our quest to be an Acts 4 Church. Amid evidence of the earliest Church’s unity, altruism, and social concern, there’s a fulcrum of momentum that powers the entire enterprise. We’re told that with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It’s seemingly simple, but too often forgotten. This is the clue we’ve been looking for. This alone can explain the shared heart and soul of those early disciples. This alone can explain the genuine selflessness of the early Church. This alone can explain the lack of needy persons in the Church’s nascent days.

The power of the resurrection is what we too often fail to trust. If there’s anything that we can learn from the early Church, it’s that the Church we long to be will not be created by our own hand but by the power of God, the One who raised Jesus from the dead. It will happen when we start doing the one thing that seemed so obvious to the first disciples but sadly seems so strange in our own day. It will happen when we give our own testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. If we want to go anywhere and do anything, this must be our starting point.

The incredible behavior of the early Church was not the product of a better equipped Church. It was simply the sign of a Church that lived as if it truly believed in the resurrection from the dead. The early Church both believed in Jesus’s resurrection and lived as if that resurrection had taken over their lives. The early disciples believed that the dead could be raised, that sinners could be forgiven, that the old could become new, that the Church would thrive not decline, and that hope was greater than despair. The resurrection from the dead was the starting point for the early Church, not an aside to justify a means. The early Church lived out of a confident generosity, and such generosity reflected back to God, if imperfectly, God’s own perfect giving of himself to us, holding nothing back but giving us infinitely of himself, his love, his mercy, and his forgiveness.

Such courageous testimony to the power of the resurrection is what will give dynamism to the malaise of the modern Church. Such bold witness to a new creation is what will turn our normal, banal waywardness into the strange and life-giving direction guided by the Gospel. And our own unashamed proclamation that we believe the unbelievable can turn this world upside down. Because we’ve died and risen with Christ, we can never be the same again. And because of this, the world should never be the same again either.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Easter
April 7, 2024

No Going Back

In the hands of a great composer, a musical theme is recognizable but never stays the same. The stamp of superior craftmanship lies in how the themes are developed over time. Take, for instance, a piece of music in which the main theme is clearly stated at the beginning of a piece and then developed as the music unfolds. At some point, the theme will return, but in the hands of a first-rate composer, the theme will reappear not in its original form but in a different guise. Perhaps a trill or mordent has been added, or the rhythm is slightly varied. But because the theme has journeyed through time, it has changed. It’s as if the music has a life of its own. No musical theme can move through time and remain static.

There’s a profound question in John’s Gospel that is like a musical theme in the hands of a superb composer. It’s first stated in the exposition of this grand symphony, back in chapter one, when two of Jesus’s disciples begin to follow him. Jesus turns to them and asks them the question that will experience its own theme and variations until it reappears in altered form at the end of the Gospel: What are you looking for?

The entire Gospel is, in some sense, a development of this question. What are the disciples looking for? What is the world looking for? What are we looking for? By the conclusion of John’s Gospel, this question has been implicitly threaded through Jesus’s life-giving and controversial Galilean ministry, his miracles and signs, his final fellowship with the disciples, his journey to the cross, his entrance into the grave and depths of hell, and his resurrection from the dead. Now, on the other side of the empty tomb, the question reappears. But the question is not the same as it was in chapter one. It has changed.

At the Gospel’s end, Mary Magdalene stands outside Jesus’s empty tomb, weeping. The other disciples came to see the vacant tomb for themselves and then went home, trying to return to life as normal. But something has compelled Mary to stay. It’s as if the original question spoken to Jesus’s first disciples has become ingrained in her mind, too, perhaps by osmosis. What are you looking for?

Outside the empty tomb, Mary remains. She stands in a liminal space between the past and her future, which is still unknown to her. The question, what are you looking for?, became her question, too, when she decided to follow Jesus, and it must still haunt her, weeping at the tomb. Maybe that very question, for which she seems to have no answer, prevents her from going inside the tomb. Over the course of this theme and variations, the original question—the main theme—has not remained static. It’s as if Mary knows that going back into the tomb is not the answer. But her tears testify to her confusion about where to go and what to do next.

Could it have been a rustling on the path behind her? Or did she simply sense that the angels in the tomb weren’t the only ones with her? Whatever the case, she turns, and she sees Jesus, although she doesn’t recognize him in his resurrected body. And the theme of this grand symphony returns from the mouth of Jesus, although it hasn’t been heard in this variation before. Whom do you seek? Jesus beckons Mary’s gaze from the empty tomb of death to himself. Things have changed. There’s no going back.

And then Jesus does something that summons Mary irrevocably to the future. He calls her name, but it sounds different now because things are different. The world is different. Hearing her name spoken, Mary finally sees her new future. Yes, death is still there with her, just as it’s still here with us, but the theme of death has been transformed, just as the theme of life has changed over the course of this symphony. Back at the beginning of the symphony, it was Jesus who first turned to look at those disciples and posed its theme. Now it’s Mary who turns and looks at Jesus. He stands on the other side of death. He is her future, her life, her Savior, and the Way forward. Whom do you seek, not What do you seek?[1]

On this day, the first day of the week, we, too, have come to the tomb, as the darkness has given way to the light, and we stand at the open entrance, signifying the defeat of death. It may be that some of us are weeping over losses in the past year since we last gathered here at the tomb to greet the dawn of a new creation. We’ve all changed since last Easter, and the theme of this symphony doesn’t sound the same to us as it did last year at this time. Our world stands, too, at the gateway to the tomb, weeping as it always does over wars and natural disasters and planetary peril, but the world has been altered, too. Things aren’t the same as they were last year. There’s no going back.

And yet, there’s a subtle dynamic at work here at the entrance to the tomb in that space between past and future, between death and life. We celebrate that the victory over sin and death has been definitively won, but we know and recognize that sin and death are still with us. If we’re honest, we acknowledge that Easter isn’t a crude, triumphant erasure of our past, for then it would be injurious to all of us who still bear the marks of past wounds. And at the same time, things aren’t the same either. The persistent themes of sin and death are with us, but through the development of this symphony of salvation, they’ve been eternally altered, too. They will never be the same because they’ve lost their power.

Like Mary, we’ve heard the voice of Christ calling to us in the present and from our future, Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? In our worst and most despairing moments, we turn briefly and see him but don’t recognize him. We’re still looking for his dead body to provide its proper burial. We’re still gazing at an empty tomb, paralyzed with weeping. We struggle against the wiliness of sin and death as they try to drag us back into the past and into the empty tomb to search for something that isn’t there in the way we wish to find it.

We feel the pull of old anger and resentments. We feel the loss of hope and the firm grip of despair. We find ourselves rehashing the past that we want to control and correct. We find it so difficult to turn. But the truth is that we’ve changed. On the other side of the empty tomb, we can’t go back in. On the other side of baptism, we can’t cling to sin and death. So, weeping outside the tomb, like Mary, our future lies in following the voice that calls our name, because it knows us intimately and loves us so. He calls us by the name we’ve always had, but it sounds different now, uttered by the Risen One who is risen from the dead.

Our names have been developed and transposed over the course of this symphony. Now, as Jesus utters our names, we understand that although we were lost, now we are found. Although we were dead, now we are alive. Although we are imperfectly human, now we are invited to share in the divine life with him who calls us to his Father and our Father. We’re different. We’ve changed. We can’t go back. We’ll never be the same again.

And because of this, the power of our name being called by this One from whom no secrets are hid and who knows every hair on our heads has more allure than the tendrils of sin and death trying to grasp us back into the grave. Our name, signifying our new future, draws us out of loneliness into community, out of despair into hope, out of the old creation into the new, out of death into life. We’ve changed. There’s no going back. We will never be the same again.

 And the questions come back again, one final time: Why are you weeping? Why are you so anxious? Why are you so resentful? Why do you envy the love that God has for others, a love he also has for you in equal measure? Why are you rehashing the injuries of the past? Whom do you seek?

And so, we turn. We turn, knowing that at this time next year, we will once again stand weeping at the tomb, trying to look inside. We turn, knowing that the wounds of our past are still real and will always be real. We turn, knowing that sin and death will always try to drag us back into their hell. But in spite of that, something is different. We celebrate that we’ve met the One who has given us life because he first found us. We’ve been found by the One we were seeking. Alleluia! Christ is risen! And because he has risen, we’ve changed. There’s no going back. We will never be the same. And we step away from the tomb of death and walk towards the life ahead.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day
March 31, 2024

[1] See David Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 440.

On God's Terms

I had just taken a brief break from preparing for today’s sermon when I saw her walking up the path to the retreat house. To be honest, my head was in the space of Mark’s Passion account, and my first reaction was annoyance, to think of this visitor as a distraction in a week lacking in precious time. Then, the doorbell rang.

I descended the stairs, admittedly, with a sigh and grumble to myself, and I answered the door. “I need someone to talk to,” she said. She was seeking spiritual guidance about a distressing situation in her life and feeling devastatingly alone. She didn’t know where to turn except to a priest. That’s why she came looking for me.

I found myself moving from an intellectual reckoning with Mark’s Passion account into reality. We sat and talked. I offered whatever meager words I thought might help and prayed with her, but, ultimately, nothing was resolved. We were reduced to silence before the mystery of human pain and lingering problems. There were no clear answers, but both of us knew to trust in God’s loving care, which transcended anything we could understand.

And suddenly, it occurred to me that this woman’s finding me was not what I thought it was initially. It wasn’t a distraction from more important work that I had to do. It was, in fact, a deeper revelation about the Passion story that I had been mulling over in my head that morning. The woman’s situation was not a life or death matter, nor was it acute trauma. But it was, nevertheless, real human pain, which is always an echo of the suffering of Christ’s own Passion. The woman who sought me out, unwittingly, had brought me into the story of Jesus’s final days.

Which is precisely what St. Mark does in his own way. In the original Greek, Mark shifts his tenses, rather bewilderingly, between past and present. Linguistically, Mark is trying to bring us into the unfolding of Jesus’s Passion. In a literal look at Mark’s original words, we would become dizzy as we moved between the millennia of linear time. And this prevents us from easily extracting ourselves from the story.

For me, a woman whose ringing of the doorbell began as a seeming interruption in a busy week became a visible reminder that it’s impossible to compartmentalize Jesus’s Passion. There’s no way to hermetically seal his suffering and death in intellectual head space and then move on with the rest of our lives. His suffering and death, as well as his rising and glory, intersect with our embodied lives. It’s as if we were there with him on the cross, or standing by mocking him, or crying with the women at the cross, or running with the other disciples, away from his pain. And of course, we are there, even in this very moment. We’re at the cross with Jesus in Jerusalem. We’re in the crossfire between Israel and Palestine. We’re standing amid the rubble of a terrorist attack in Moscow. We’re at the hospital bed with a loved one dying of cancer.

On Palm Sunday, we’re faced with a theological dilemma. We recognize with awe and reverence that Jesus’s Passion is only his. It’s something we will never experience as he did; it’s his unique Passion that is tied up with the world’s salvation. “Never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine,” is how one hymn puts it.[1] And at the same time, Jesus’s suffering and death are ours, too.

But the greatest temptation as we begin Holy Week is to pretend as if we can remove ourselves from this story and put it at a safe distance. We can easily lie to ourselves, saying that because Jesus is the Christ, our own suffering can never be talked about in the same sentence as his. A woman’s distress that brings her to a priest is not worthy of being mentioned in the same context as Jesus’s own suffering. And then it’s a slippery slope, for our own sinfulness becomes nothing like the sinfulness of those who betrayed him. Our own fickleness is never like that of the crowds. Our mockery of the way of love is never in the same league as those who jeered at Jesus.

The dissonance of today’s liturgy reminds us that pride can become the source of our estrangement from Jesus. It’s what made me grumble as I descended the stairs to answer the ringing of a doorbell. Pride would deviously compel us to elevate Jesus’s suffering to such an extent that it has nothing to do with us, and then it’s only one small step for us to refuse to let him wash our feet, too. It’s only one small step not to let him love us and forgive us.

If Jesus came to save, then his Passion weaves in and out of our own lives. A hurting woman with her tears coming up the path to the retreat house has everything to do with our Lord’s Passion. Our own loneliness has everything to do with the world’s Savior hanging on a tree and crying out of sheer abandonment to his Father. Christ’s utter silence in the face of the powers of this world, a silence even unto death, is our own uncomfortable, anguished silence in the face of the mystery of suffering.

When we refuse to recognize that Christ’s own suffering and death intersect intimately with our own lives, we refuse, in some sense, God’s gift of salvation. But when we accept that we can never take ourselves out of his story, because it’s also our story, we see that suffering is an indispensable part of the Christian journey. We acknowledge in awe and silence that our salvation comes not as a triumphant erasure of evil and suffering but as a gift that meets us in spite of it and within it. The ultimate answer to the mystery of grief and pain is God’s wordless answer, which comes in the form of an empty tomb, standing silent on Easter Day. And that empty tomb will testify that, once and for all, the victory has been won, not on the world’s terms but on God’s.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 24, 2024

[1] “My song is love unknown,” Samuel Crossman (1624-1683), #458 in The Hymnal 1982

Found by Love

We might say that there are two kinds of people in life. In the first group are people on a quest for fulfillment. They’re deeply hungry for meaning, and whether they admit it or not, there’s some dissatisfaction with their lives. They sense that there’s a void there, but they don’t know what will ultimately fill it. These people are on a perpetual search to find whatever will. But for them, it’s just not God. It's their hobbies, their careers, their workout routines, their success, their money, their wealth. You name it.

In the second group, are also people on a quest for fulfillment. Like those in the first group, they’re deeply hungry for meaning. They, too, are dissatisfied with something in their lives. They recognize an emptiness within their souls, and they want someone, rather than some thing, to fill it. And truth be told, because they are human, they still try to fill the void in their lives with hobbies, careers, workout routines, success, money, and wealth. But unlike the first group, the people in this second group profess that God is really the one who will give ultimate meaning to their lives. We claim to be in that second group, don’t we? It’s why we’ve come here today. It’s why we come here week after week.

We’re often told that our world is polarized. There are those who don’t believe in God, and there are the ever-dwindling rest of us, who’ve not given up on God. But it seems to me that humanity is simpler than we wish to imagine. In all our diversity of beliefs, there’s a single deep desire that is driving our lives forward, and it can be summed up in one statement: Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

This seems odd, because we’re told more often than we care to hear that increasing numbers of people have no interest in seeing Jesus. We might wonder ourselves today where all the people are who want to see Jesus. True, we know that we’re here to see Jesus. But how can all those others, who prefer brunch to church and sports to religion, want to see Jesus?

And yet, there’s a simple but profound desire that drives the restlessness of our world. It’s what still draws some people to church and to the Eucharist. It’s what compels others to give to the poor, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry. It’s what drives some to nature or to silence. It’s an overwhelming desire to have the voids of our lives filled. And although many will never articulate the answer as we Christians would, for us, that universal desire can be boiled down to only one thing: Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

But for those of us of faith, it’s followed by an equally urgent question. Where do we find Jesus? This incisive question is what brings people to the parish priest, wanting to know if they’re on the right path. It’s what prompts some to reconnect with church later in their lives, as they see their years wane and fear for their souls. It’s what the dying person says at death’s door, as she begins to see beyond the veil between this world and the next. It’s what every Christian wants to know because, sir, we wish to see Jesus.

The desire in our own lives, and the unarticulated desire in the lives of others in this world, is the same desire that draws a bunch of Greeks to Philip, who then goes to Andrew, who then finds Jesus. These Greeks, who aren’t Christian, let alone Jewish, instinctively sense that this person about whom they’ve heard will add something to their lives that they’ve never had before. Sir, we wish to see Jesus, they say.

But when their stated desire reaches Jesus’s ears, he offers a less than desirable response. It’s an odd response, to tell the truth. It doesn’t clearly address the stated desire of the Greeks who wish to see him. It’s a kind of parable. And it’s a parable that seems to present a stumbling block for those of us who recognize and admit that we wish to see Jesus. It’s equally a stumbling block for those who wouldn’t characterize their own desire in such a way but who nevertheless are longing for ultimate meaning in their lives. And we, of course, know that it’s only Christ that will fill that gaping void.

Jesus responds to the Greeks’ quest to see him with a refrain that has become all too familiar to us this Lent. It echoes through all the Gospels. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Put another way: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

This odd response may be the reason why so many of us still think we haven’t found Jesus. It may be the source of anxiety and frustration in our lives. It may be the reason some have given up on the Church. It may be the reason some have forsaken Jesus, too, even if they’re still unconsciously searching for him. This stubborn, vexing Lenten refrain just won’t go away, but it nevertheless remains the gateway to finding Jesus. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. We must die to self in order to truly live.

This refrain, which is a thorn in our side, is about death, but it’s also about much more than death. It’s really about letting go of everything: letting go of our egos, our need for control, our longing for clear answers, our material things, our money, our sinful ways, our lives, and even of our very desire to see Jesus himself, as St. John of the Cross would remind us. And that may be the most perplexing revelation of all.

The reason we keep uttering our own refrain, Sir, we wish to see Jesus, is because we think we haven’t yet found him. And we think we haven’t yet found him because we haven’t been able to relinquish even that very desire to see Jesus. We haven’t been able to let it go because even though we tell ourselves otherwise, we really want not Jesus the Christ but Jesus of our own making.

We want a Jesus who will make us feel good about ourselves and affirm even our most sinful habits. We desire a Jesus who will tell us we can hoard our wealth and still follow him. We desire a Jesus who will assure us that we’re saved although we ignore the poor and unhoused. We desire a Jesus who tells us that we can keep our lives just as they are and still follow him. Simply put, most of the world wants a Jesus who lets them have their cake and eat it, too.

But the real Jesus, the Christ, the one who is our Lord and Savior and who lives among us as the source of our life, this Jesus tells us that to follow him, we must be willing to give up everything for his sake: our lives, our goals, our material possessions, even our desire for him, because in doing so, we will keep our lives.

And when we have the courage to let go of it all to find Jesus, we will not only find him. We will also find our truest selves, known and loved by God. When we arrive at the foot of the cross, on our knees and unencumbered by all that we once thought dear, we will see Christ as if for the first time. We can only see and know him fully when he is there, lifted high on the cross, “towering o’er the wrecks of time,”[1] as the hymn puts it. And lying among the wreckage of time there is all that we have had to part with, all that has given us false security, all the things that have become our golden calves. We can only know and love Christ as he reigns from the cross because the cross has transformed our imperfect desire into true love.

It’s there at the foot of the cross that we have prostrated ourselves and flung all our cares, desires, and worldly loves. And it’s there that we discover the most amazing thing of all. All this time, we had thought we were like those Greeks who came to Philip. Sir, we wish to see Jesus. That seemed to be the supreme motive driving our lives. But when we have finally cast off all our imperfect desires, we find ourselves naked and bare before the One who created us and called us good. And we finally realize that it was he, the living and true God, who brought us there in the first place. It was he, reigning from the tree in Christ, who had drawn us all that long way to the cross. It was he, who still draws all of creation to himself, both those who want to see Jesus and those who won’t admit that. It is he whose love was there before we ever knew it existed. And in that moment, on our knees at the cross, utterly vulnerable, known, and loved, we find who we really are. We discover that we’re finally meeting Christ for the first time, not because we have found him, but because he has found us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2024

[1] “In the cross of Christ I glory by John Bowring (1792-1872), Hymn 441 in The Hymnal 1982

God's First Movement

I remember a day from a music theory class in college, when one of my professors was discussing the dominant seventh chord. Even if you don’t know what that chord is, you would recognize it. It typically precedes the tonic chord, what we might call the foundational chord of a musical key. The sequence of dominant seventh chord followed by tonic chord is like a punctation mark: a period or an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. The whole tradition of tonal Western musical, classical and popular, is based on the juxtaposition of these two chords. The dominant seventh chord is structured so that it will naturally resolve into a tonic chord. Put another way, the dominant seventh chord wasn’t initially intended to exist by itself. Its instability was meant to resolve into the stability of a tonic chord.

To demonstrate the aural function of a dominant seventh chord, my professor moved to the piano in the room and played the chord. But he didn’t follow it with the tonic chord. And then, in his typical edgy way, he said rather provocatively, “I’m not going to resolve it. I’m just not going to do it.” And he walked away from the piano.

Most of us in the room were cringing. Resolve the chord, we were saying in our minds, while we laughed uneasily. It was driving us crazy. Our Western ears have been acclimated to a tonal system that seeks resolution of tension. Dissonance resolves into consonance, tension moves into release. Our tidy Western minds want things to be tied up with a bow and put back in order. Dominant seventh chords are meant to be resolved.

Now, if I were to read only verse sixteen of the third chapter of St. John’s Gospel, I wonder if you might hear it as unresolved. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Our theological minds are no different from our musical ears. We have been formed in a Western system of thinking about God and salvation. And what is unresolved in John 3:16 is where each of us will end up when the dominant seventh chord is resolved. Will we perish, or will we have eternal life? I suspect that every citation of John 3:16, whether on a bumper sticker or tattooed on an arm or plastered on a billboard, is intended to play a dominant seventh chord and walk away from the keyboard. There’s an element of manipulation to it, and the primary tactic of that manipulation is fear.

We’re taught to fear how the chord will resolve. Do we believe correctly and will we be rewarded with eternal life, or do we fail to believe and will we perish? With this unresolved dominant seventh chord hanging in the air, we travel through a cloud of anxiety. God is somewhere away in the heavens, hands hovering over a keyboard, waiting to resolve the chord in one of two ways: towards eternal life or towards eternal destruction.

But just as dominant seventh chords don’t usually hang out in the ether without resolution, John 3:16 doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As we well know from hearing this morning’s Gospel reading, the evangelist gives us resolution. And yet, I’ve rarely seen a bumper sticker or tattoo or billboard with John 3:17 included as well. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

God’s gift of Jesus to the world was a gift of love, intended for salvation, not for condemnation. But this isn’t usually the way John 3:16 is interpreted. This famous verse is usually wielded as an anxiety-laden dominant seventh chord hanging in the air, waiting for resolution to eternal life or eternal death. The focus is too often on believing correctly, as if belief could ever be narrowed to a multiple-choice option. The focus is too infrequently on receiving God’s gift of salvation in Christ by trusting that God’s desire for us is salvation, not condemnation.

But maybe the problem is trying to conceive of salvation with our Western, future-oriented minds. When we think of salvation, we think of a defining moment, a judgment day on which we will be put into one of two places, heaven or hell. God’s hand, hovering over the keyboard of judgment, resolves the dominant seventh chord in one of two ways. And naturally, we fear what that will look like.

But imagine, if you will, a less Western way of thinking about things. If you’re a music aficionado, think of the music of Claude Debussy or Olivier Messiaen. Think of dominant seventh chords hanging in the air that are never resolved because their purpose is not to be resolved. Instead, the chords have been extracted from a world where tensions must be released and dissonances resolved. The chords are worlds in and of themselves.

Such a world—which we might categorize as more Eastern than Western—helps us rest more contentedly in the present rather than in the future. Unresolved chords don’t need to be resolved in the future. They’re harmonies intended for the present, to be enjoyed and received, like gifts. And if you can, imagine salvation as rather like that. Imagine that St. John knew what he was doing when he put verses sixteen and seventeen together in the third chapter of his Gospel. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

This world of John’s is not free of judgment. It’s just that the judgment is right here, in the present rather than exclusively in the future. We’re judged when we refuse to accept God’s gift of love by turning from our sin. We’re judged when we worry so much about resolving the dominant seventh chord that we pay no attention to the people around us who are suffering in the present. We’re judged when we call darkness light and light darkness. We’re judged when we’re unable to trust that God’s first movement towards us is love, not condemnation. And when we can’t see that, we’re condemned to a fearful hell in which we turn our backs on the God who is always facing towards us in love, with arms wide open. And in this hell, we find ourselves in a zero-sum game of competition with those around us. We covet what they have, we envy their gifts, and we resent their offenses against us. We become enslaved to anxiety and fear because we’re unable to believe that God has enough love, mercy, and gifts for everyone.

If we’re so intent on resolving dominant seventh chords in the present, our future life after death will be a hell of worrying about chord resolutions when God is simply inviting us to bask in the music of beautiful chords that are meant to be received and enjoyed. The paradox is that when we worry less about salvation, we find it, but when we judge others, we ourselves are judged.  

I don’t know how the individual chords of our lives will be resolved. That’s up to God. But I do know that the first step into hell is an inability to trust that God loved us from before we were made, that God still loves us, and that God will always love us. The roads of hell are paved with fear: fear that God was biased against us from the beginning, that we’re never enough for God, and that we will never know our eternal future. But Scripture is also clear that fear is the opposite of love. If we choose the path of love over the path of fear, we will be true believers, and we will find ourselves walking right into the arms of God. And then we will see that heaven is much closer to us than we ever imagined.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2024

A Sign Like No Other

A few years ago, we received an interesting message through our parish Facebook account. A man doing research on Anglican Eucharistic miracles was inquiring about a reported miraculous apparition here at Good Shepherd. He must have heard of an apparition of Christ’s face on the veil that hangs in front of the tabernacle on the high altar. I was not familiar with any reported miracle here at Good Shepherd, so I simply assumed that the person who messaged us was mistaken. How common it is for people of faith to long for a sign, I thought!

The real miracle of the Eucharist is that Christ comes to us again and again in ordinary bread and wine to feed us with his life. It doesn’t get more miraculous than that. But in our modern quest for certainty and evident signs, that miracle would seem to be insufficient. We need apparitions on tabernacle veils, as opposed to the unending gift of heavenly food to all sorts and conditions of people.

It’s my suspicion that the person who messaged us had mistaken this parish for another Episcopal church in northeastern Pennsylvania, where there was a reported apparition. It’s true; look it up. But why is it that some people of faith need the assurance of a supernatural sign? I, for one, do believe in miracles, even apparitions, but I also believe that miracles happen more often than we realize. And we usually overlook them because we’re looking for faces on tabernacle veils rather than the miraculous mystery of a God who allows us to receive his perfect self into our imperfect bodies by consuming Bread and Wine.

The real miracle of the Eucharist is that week after week, and day after day, broken people like me and you bring all our emotional and spiritual baggage to the altar. We kneel together with all our different viewpoints and diverse life stories, and Christ feeds us with himself. He puts us back together again and sends us out into the world to love and serve in his name. The real miracle is that even though we turn away from God again and again, and even though we demand proofs of his existence through apparitions or clearly answered prayers, God continues to welcome us back into his loving arms and feed us abundantly. And so, if there’s any evident sign of what God is doing among us, it’s the profound mystery of God’s unconditional provision for us. God gives us himself, God feed us, but sometimes we prefer a spectacular sign instead.

Rather than a mystery, we want a sign that is visible, clear, and extraordinary. To put it bluntly, we want God to prove himself. And this is precisely what happens to Jesus when he goes up to Jerusalem around the celebration of Passover. It’s one of three such occurrences in John’s Gospel. Jesus makes a whip of cords and drives out the moneychangers and their animals. He chastises the moneychangers for trading in transactions in his Father’s house. He overturns their tables.

It certainly appears to be an act of violence, until we realize what Jesus is doing. And although some in the Temple demand a sign from him to prove that he has authority to do what he has done, the sign has already been offered but unnoticed because his interrogators are looking for an obvious sign, an apparition on a tabernacle veil, if you will. What they fail to see is that the overturning of the moneychangers’ tables is the sign, although it’s a disconcerting sign. But if we read all the details carefully, we can see more clearly what Jesus is about.

It's Passover time, a time to celebrate the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. It’s a time for freedom, and so Jesus releases the animals that are the victims of a transactional system. He releases the people, too, from a demand for sacrifices that require money to purchase unblemished animals to offer to God. It’s a system that could easily be abused, where it might be perceived that nothing was enough to appease God. And yet, Jesus’s overturning of the tables is not abrogating the value of his own Jewish religion. It’s a visible sign that the freedom and salvation of the whole world are now located and enacted in a person, this Jewish man, Jesus, the Savior of the world.

Jesus is the sign. He’s enough. His impending passion, death, and resurrection are enough to release the world from the cruel grip of competition and the mad rat race of power games. The overturning of the tables is a sign that points to the real miracle that God is doing among humanity.

To our mortal eyes, clouded by sin, what Jesus does seems to be only an act of violence. He trashes the moneychangers’ tables and pours out the money they have collected. And it appears as if destruction is the intention and the final word. Yet we know through the eyes of faith that there must be a mystery beneath this visible sign. It’s a mystery because it’s not an evident sign like an apparition on a tabernacle veil or even a burning bush. This mystery is nothing less than the entire world being turned upside down. In the strange wisdom of God, an upended world is the greatest and most beautiful sign of all.

The overturning of the tables in the temple points to a mystery where wisdom is folly, and folly is wisdom, where poverty is spiritual wealth, and material wealth is spiritual poverty. In this mystery, loss is gain, and gain is loss. At the heart of this mystery, violence is countered with peace, and the vicious cycle of vindictiveness is broken. Through this great mystery, death brings new life. The whole world is turned upside down, just as Jesus overturned those tables in the temple. It’s a visible sign that in the mysterious providence of God, what is broken is put back together again. What is old is made new. Offenses are forgiven, and apparent destruction is never the end. For out of such destruction, God recreates our world.

It’s only natural on this side of heaven that we hunger for signs that God is actively present in our lives. It’s understandable that when we’re wandering aimlessly, we’d want God to give us even just a small hint of certainty as to his will and where we should go next. And when the stability of our world comes crashing down and the rug is pulled out from under our lives, it usually seems to be the last word. Chaos seems to be the end of the story, and it’s very hard to see past it to the other side.

But just like those who interrogate Jesus in the temple, it’s easy to miss what the risen Christ is teaching us. The destruction of his body on the cross has the appearance of hopeless finality, but after three days, the world is turned upside down. A crucified, broken body on a cross is a sign that the world is being redeemed and made whole again. We learn that the world’s Savior still lives despite a crucifixion. We learn that the ruins of loss are the material that God uses to remake the world.

To follow Christ is to allow our worlds to be upended and reoriented around his Gospel, and this will hurt. It will hurt to let go of those things that seem to be the most visible signs of God’s favor, but which are simply the path to death. It will be painful to let go of our control, of our unhealthy attachments, of our resentments, of our power, of our desire for religious certainty, of our comfort, of our need to be right, of even our lives themselves. When we let Christ into our lives, it will feel as if the tables of our lives are being overturned. It will feel like we have lost everything.

In recent days, I have watched the lives of people dear to me being turned upside down. The pain is real and undeniable. And yet, my faith tells me that through this woundedness God can do something extraordinary. The overturned tables of our lives are a visible sign of the unfathomable mystery of God. And in that mystery, our unbearable loss is our richest gain. Our humbling experiences are our path to exaltation. The daily deaths of our lives are how we will rise to new life in Christ, who is the visible sign of our life’s freedom. And although our world may be turned upside down, it’s only a sign that the God who loves us unconditionally will always turn us right side up. And in him, although we seem to die, we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 3, 2024

Only the Beginning of What God Can Do

Some years ago, friends of mine were selling their condo. It was a beautiful home: nicely appointed, in great condition, and in a desirable geographical location. But my friends were surprised to learn from a realtor that to showcase the home on the market, the house had to be completely restaged. All the lovely furnishings in the home were removed, and new furniture was brought in, furniture that, in fact, was not nearly as nice as what my friends’ owned. As I recall, even the walls were repainted. The house became a movie set to appear most viable to eager house hunters.

Apparently, the problem was that a younger generation of potential home buyers had vastly different tastes than my friends. One might rightly allow for a tolerance of varying preferences in home décor. But the most surprising, and perhaps disconcerting, thing of all was that those shopping for new homes were incapable of imagining what my friends’ house could look like with their preferred aesthetic. The realtor couldn’t trust that home buyers would have the imagination or capacity to envision a new domestic aesthetic with their mind’s eye. They literally had to see it in the flesh.

Maybe a technological age had spoiled their mind’s eye. Maybe it spoils our mind’s eye. These days we can go onto the website of a paint store and any room can be instantly painted with a color of our choosing. But with a perceptive mind’s eye, we should be able to look at anything and imagine what it could be. My friends’ experience of trying to sell their home revealed that many people are incapable of imagining an ending that is not limited to the beginning.

I’m not sure if this is more of a problem in our own day than in ancient times, but if it is, maybe it’s because an overreliance on technology has caused our innate imaginative capacities to atrophy. If we can’t repaint a living room in our mind’s eye, then there are far more serious things that we’re unable to do. We can’t imagine the perspective of someone who has a different political view from us. We can’t see with our mind’s eye how to interpret a written document metaphorically or language figuratively. We can’t imagine that a criminal could ever lead a decent life again. We can’t conceive of how peace will come to the Middle East. We can’t imagine justice without violence. It often seems as if we’ve lost our imaginations.

And this might be why Abraham and Sarah seem like ridiculous fools to us. It’s tempting to write off ancestors in the faith, like Abraham and Sarah. It’s tempting to see them as “unsophisticated.” But maybe we’re really the unsophisticated ones because we’ve lost our mind’s eye. And seeing with the mind’s eye was precisely what Abraham and Sarah were able to do. In response to a sudden and momentous call from God, they could somehow envision a new future with their mind’s eye. They could trust that the ending of their story need not be limited by the confines of the beginning.

When God appeared to Abraham at age ninety-nine and promised that he would be the father of many nations and that his equally elderly wife Sarah would bear a son, it’s a preposterous scenario unless your mind’s eye is vital and active. No less, Abraham and Sarah had been waiting on God to fulfill his promise to them for twenty-four years. It’s a wonder that they had any mind’s eye left. They were what some would call foolish, too trusting, naïve, maybe even simple, or at least they were through the eyes of those who can’t paint a room a different color in their mind’s eye or to pessimists who can only see a future limited by the present.

But St. Paul sums it up best through the mind’s eye of faith. He tells us that in hope, Abraham believed against hope. Although Abraham and Sarah did indeed laugh at God’s promises, there was yet a piece of their souls that in hope, believed against hope. Their spiritual mind’s eye kept them from hastily judging the ending by the beginning. And this is what it means to have faith.

Abraham and Sarah are, in fact, the ancestors of many who would follow them in faith. Think of Moses, who would lead a recalcitrant people through many trials and still not see the Promised Land himself. Think of the prophets who preached with great threat to their lives because they, too, in hope, believed against hope. Think of a fledgling, young Church who in hope, believed against hope in the face of an empty tomb and yet spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Think of martyrs who saw in their own mind’s eye, a future prepared by God, even in the face of death.

And here we are today, the modern Church, and because we have shown up this morning, I suspect there’s an active mind’s eye nestled within us. There’s some hope still alive within our souls that enables us to believe against hope. Despite all that seems so misshapen around us, it allows us not to judge the ending by the beginning. To believe against hope is to know that we might not see the ending we desire but are yet called to be part of a movement towards that ending, which we trust will be far more glorious than we can imagine, even in our mind’s eye.

This, too, is the call of Lent. “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea”[1] to trust that the risen Christ will walk on the stormy waves towards us and calm them. Lent invites us to see with our mind’s eye that our worn, tired hearts can still have life within them by God’s grace. While the room of our present may be papered with the wallpaper of old, sinful habits, the room of our future prepared by God can be painted with a freshness of forgiveness and new life.

And maybe the prevalent lack of forgiveness in our culture and even within the Church is directly tied to a loss of spiritual imagination. We see only a future of decline. We see only Christ’s Body tarnished by human failure and imperfection. We see only an institution that appears anachronistic. And we look at Abraham and Sarah with condescending pity because in their mind’s eye they could believe against hope.

But we forget that they were right. They were vindicated. We forget so easily that generations did follow from their lineage of hope. And we forget that we, too, are part of that lineage. We act as if God is not ready, willing, and able to give us a mind’s eye to see a new and marvelous future. We forget that even in our old age of the Church, we can yet be empowered to bear fruit for generations yet to come.

If we look deep within ourselves this Lent, as individuals and as the Church, we might discover that pride lurks there, and it prevents us from seeing with our mind’s eye. Such pride prevents us from recognizing that God can take even our worn-out, sinful selves and make them new. And yet, if we look way down in the depths of our souls, we will find the image of the living God there, along with a mind’s eye that can see  through any amount of darkness.

If you can, then, imagine with your mind’s eye this. Imagine that you or someone else’s worst deed is not who they really are. Imagine that the tired barrenness of your life can bear fruit yet again. Imagine that a Church that seems gasping for air at times will not only survive but also be a beacon of eternal light in the darkness. Imagine that what is moribund can be resurrected. Imagine that what is broken can be healed. See with your mind’s eye in hope, and believe against all hope that we are only living in the beginning of what God can do.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2024

[1] Hymn 549/550 in The Hymnal 1982, words by Cecil Frances Alexander

Where It All Begins

Suppose that you’re trying to learn a new language, and in the language learning app, you’re faced with a sentence divided into segments. Some of the segments are complete phrases, others are just a couple of words. The segments of the sentence are scrambled, and you must use your knowledge of syntax, vocabulary, and grammar to arrange the pieces into an intelligible, complete sentence. When doing this exercise, if you’re really in a bind, you can always rely on the segment that begins with a capital letter to get you started. At least you know where the beginning of the sentence begins. But all the other segments must be connected by the rules of the language and put together in a particular order for the sentence to mean anything.

If we were to scramble events in the first chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, like a language learning exercise, how would we reconstruct it? We might even ask the question of whether the order of the events is all that important, aside from the historical sequence in the life of Jesus. Would it be possible for us to construct a convincing narrative by rearranging the events in a different order than the one Mark gives us? Maybe, but something crucial would be lost in doing so. Theologically speaking, order is everything. And because order is everything, we find ourselves today on the First Sunday in Lent revisiting the baptism of Jesus that we heard just a few weeks ago.

Let’s return to our imaginary exercise of confronting a scrambled version of chapter one of Mark’s Gospel. We find ourselves looking at several events. We have Jesus’s Galilean ministry, the call of the first disciples, his temptation in the wilderness, and his baptism by John. Of course, this isn’t the correct order, and we’re searching for a clue as to what comes first. Where’s the capital letter in all these segments? We need a clue to confirm what should come first.

Why couldn’t the call of the disciples be first? Or the Galilean ministry? And wouldn’t it make sense for Jesus to be tempted before being baptized and proclaimed as God’s beloved Son? In this way, the baptism and designation as God’s Beloved Son would affirm his weathering of the wilderness trial.

But in trying to reassemble the theological sentence of chapter one of Mark’s Gospel, the capital letter can only be found in the segment dealing with Jesus’s baptism. That’s where the sentence begins. The baptism must come first, not because Jesus needs to be washed of sin in any kind of way or even because he needs some kind of spiritual affirmation before he faces the wilderness temptation. The baptism must come first because who Jesus is explains why he is able to withstand the desert temptations. And the pattern of his self-emptying life seen in those wilderness trials must precede the call of his disciples, who are then to take up that cross-shaped pattern and follow him.

This order is important for us, too. If we’re looking for a capital letter to help us assemble the scrambled sentence of our lives, we need only look to who Jesus is. He’s the Beloved Son of God, the One who stooped to experience the greatest trials of the human condition and didn’t sin, who emptied himself even to death itself, and then journeyed into the depths of hell and brought all of humanity and creation up into the Godhead. And in doing so, he put the capital letter on the beginning of the sentence that God is writing for our own lives.

But there’s something more to the ordering of Jesus’s life that helps us reassemble the sentence of our own lives. To see that ordering, we must go back with Jesus to the wilderness. Unlike St. Matthew and St. Luke, Mark gives us a unique look into Jesus’s time in the wilderness. There’s no dialogue with Satan. We’re only told that Jesus was there for forty days and nights, tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and angels waited on him. Although this was undoubtedly a deep spiritual struggle, we don’t see him fighting with Satan. There seems to be no violence to this scene in the wilderness. Jesus simply shows who he is: God’s Beloved Son in steadfast, confident holiness, enduring the wiles of the devil and coming out on the other side as the victor. And because that victory has been won, our future has been prepared by God.

Do you see now that the order of things matters a great deal? Because of who Jesus is, he’s able to suffer the dregs of the human condition without succumbing to retaliation or violence. Because of who Jesus is, God invites us in our own temptations and trials to face the darkest moments of our existence, knowing that they have no power over us.

We don’t know exactly who the wild beasts were in the desert with Jesus, but we might imagine them literally as dangerous animals and also as the horrible, accusing thoughts that Satan used to assail Jesus. And rather than fighting them, Jesus only refused to give them the power they longed to have. And in doing so, he emerged as the victor.

Could it be so with our own Lenten journeys? What are we afraid of this Lent? Who are the wild beasts among us? Are we afraid of the dark emotions that have nestled in the bottom of our souls? Are we afraid of the anger that borders on murderous rage at times? Are we afraid of losing control? Are we terrified of the envy that causes us to loathe others? Are we scared of the accusing thoughts that tell us we’re not talented or smart or wealthy enough to receive God’s love? Are we assailed by a nagging pessimism that tempts us to question the viability of our own futures? What are we afraid of this Lent?

And when we recognize this fear, what happens? They say that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Are we spiritually armed with a perpetual hammer that makes us want to smash the living daylights out of all those emotions and thoughts that terrify us? Do we run from them? Do we employ yet more rage against them? This, it seems, is so often the Christian approach to perceived evil. We want to smash it to smithereens. We behave as if it has more power over us than it really does, and in doing so, we betray who we really are. We become people who react and fight in fear. But God calls us to endure and act in love. We have no need to fight. We only need to exist in the confident hope given to us by the capital letter that begins the sentence of our lives.

And this is precisely why the order of things matters. If we’re looking for a capital letter to help us reorder the scrambled sentence of our spiritual lives, we need to look no further than the defining event and truth that makes sense of it all. It all starts with who Jesus is and what he has done for us. As God incarnate, who deigned to undergo the trials of the human condition and emerge victorious, the evils that continue to vex us in this life have no power. Because the Crucified One was raised from the dead and now lives among us risen and glorified, the tempter and enemy of our natures has no power over us. There’s no need to fight. There’s no need to use violence. There’s only a need to rejoice in the fact that with faith and trust in God, there’s nothing that can change the divine ordering of our lives. It starts with what Jesus himself has done for us and who he still is for us. And while there may be wild beasts among us, the angels are ready to minister to us as well.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2024

You Are Mine

If we were to exchange Valentine’s Day candy hearts this evening, they might bear strange messages on them. Instead of “sweetheart” or “be mine” ours would say “you’re dust” or “repent.” We might as well own the oddness of the 2024 calendar as we begin Lent on Valentine’s Day.

But we would also do well to pay attention to the intersection of God’s time, kairos time, with our calendar time, or chronos time. A martyr’s feast day has become a secular day celebrating romantic love, and a as the world celebrates romantic love, the Church enjoins fasting and repentance. There’s a glaring irony in the Ash Wednesday liturgy as we come forward to have ashes imposed on our foreheads just minutes after we hear Jesus’s warning against practicing piety in public. It might be tempting to justify not being here today because to kneel before God in repentance and to receive ashes and to refrain from a celebratory dinner on Valentine’s Day would seem to draw attention to our piety. And this begs the question of what we might be tempted to run away from.

But perhaps the greatest paradox of all on this Ash Wednesday is that by not coming here in repentance, we would show ourselves to be the most flagrant hypocrites of all. To avoid the ritual intentions of Ash Wednesday, we would implicitly admit that our sinfulness must define us and our future. It would be, in some sense, to deny our deepest identity as beloved children of God.

On a day where people exchange candy hearts with meaningless messages on them, we recall that there’s a greater message that God is sending to us in in our fasting and penitence. It comes to us not stamped on a little candy heart, but underneath the confessions of sin and imposition of ashes and starkness of tonight’s Mass. It’s a message written on our very hearts themselves, a message straight from God: you are mine.

Despite our fickleness and spiritual amnesia, despite our sullenness and ingratitude and hardheartedness, despite our complacency and malaise, that message is still written on our hearts. You are mine. We always have been, and we always will be God’s beloved, no matter what we do. It’s hypocritical to pretend otherwise.

It’s hypocritical to live as if we were never washed in the waters of baptism and cleansed of sin and marked as Christ’s own forever. It’s hypocritical to live as if we’re estranged from God when God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It’s hypocritical to look for true love in worldly pleasures, or shallow friendships, or in our careers, or in self-affirmation. We’re God’s, and we have always been God’s, and we will always be God’s. And if we’re looking for true love, we need to return to the very beginning to find it.

The ashes that will soon be imposed on our foreheads remind us of our mortality, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But they also remind us that the dust from which we were made was called good, and that the dust to which we shall return will one day be raised in glory. You are mine, God says. You have always been mine, you are mine now, and you always will be mine.

Tonight, God wants not affected piety or manipulative prayers or groveling before him. God doesn’t need our guilt or over-scrupulosity. There’s no material thing we can give God to gain anything, and God doesn’t trade in transactions. We already have everything we need because God has already given it to us. God simply wants our hearts, and nothing less. God wants to transform our cold hearts of stone into warm hearts of flesh and put a new spirit within those hearts. And because God is already dwelling in our hearts, God really just wants us to sift through the clutter and shame in our souls to see him way down at the bottom, looking at us with great love. And God longs for us to echo back to him what he’s always been saying to us: you are mine.

The bizarre realization of Ash Wednesday, and indeed of Lent itself, is that the more we run from our sins, the more we run from love itself. Awareness of our sins is a profound grace that calls us away from a life of hypocrisy and towards our true identity as beloved children of God, released from sin and meant to be free. Jesus’s warnings against making overt displays of piety in public could just as well be applied to the excessive self-shaming and self-abasement common among many Christians. Such grotesque reveling in our unworthiness is, above all, hypocritical because it’s full of pride. It’s a proud thing to refuse God’s love and forgiveness. It’s a proud thing to ignore the eternal message God sends us on this Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, and, indeed, every day: you are mine.

To boldly acknowledge that we are dust and to dust we shall return is to receive God’s eternal gift of love. It’s to know that even the dust itself came from God’s gracious hand, and that the dust itself will not be wasted on the last day. To say we’re sinners and ask for forgiveness is to own the hypocrisy of living as if we haven’t been claimed as Christ’s own forever. To perversely relish our unworthiness is to refuse the astounding gift of God’s unending love, mercy, and compassion. To reject such love is to tell the greatest lie of all, that we belong to the deceiver who, night and day, prowls around like a roaring lion and constantly tells us that we are his instead of God’s.

But today, we reject that lie by being here to have our heads marked with ashes, to confess our sins, and to receive Christ’s healing in the Eucharistic bread and wine, all despite our own imperfections. And in showing up with all our imperfections, we’re not hypocrites but as utterly honest with ourselves as we could ever be. We’ve chosen to receive God’s precious gifts of mercy and forgiveness that mark our truest identity as his beloved children, redeemed and loved. And in those gifts, God reminds us: you are mine, you always have been, and you always will be.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2024

A Gospel Worth Trusting

If you will, imagine that you’re watching a play for the first time. It's just before the final act, and the curtain hasn’t yet been raised. The curtain is made from gauze, so it’s partially transparent, but it’s also difficult to make out the details of what’s on the other side because the house lights are so dim.

The final scene is set, and you, along with the rest of the audience, are waiting with bated breath to discover how everything will end. Until this point, the play has been quite dramatic. It’s about someone named Jesus, who people believe is the long-awaited Messiah. Remember, you must imagine that you know nothing about Jesus; you’re seeing this play and hearing this story for the very first time.

Thus far, the script has taken you through Jesus’s earthly life, where he casts out demons, heals the sick, preaches the good news, and works wonders. And you’ve also seen how his ministry has disturbed others. You’ve witnessed the side conversations and secret meetings with his opponents. You’ve watched as this Messiah has been cheered by crowds, then abruptly mocked and viciously antagonized. You’ve seen his closest followers confess loyalty to him and then deny knowing him in the next breath.

At the end of the previous scene, you were left with a cliffhanger. One of the Messiah’s very own disciples betrayed him with a kiss and handed him over to the authorities, who then arrested him and brought him before Pontius Pilate. And then, at a climactic moment, as Jesus stands before Pilate, before any conversation is heard, the lights go out, the diaphanous curtain drops, and the act ends.

Now, you and the rest of the audience are impatiently waiting to see how everything will pan out in the final act. But remember, this story is completely new to you. And now, you’re looking through the dim lighting and gauzy curtain to try to predict what will occur next based on the scenery and characters assembled on stage. You can make out crowds of people. There’s also a hill, and there appear to be three crosses erected on this hill, or is it a mountaintop? That much isn’t clear. It seems that there are three people hanging on these crosses, but you can’t tell who they are.

And because this story is unfamiliar, you wonder what will happen, and you try to figure it out. You’ve seen all Jesus’s amazing works in the play until this point, and now you’re convinced that he is the world’s Savior. And although you’re deeply aware of the antagonism directed towards him, you’re also hopeful that he will bring God’s salvation to earth and that he’ll be vindicated in glorious form. Justice will be served to right all wrongs.

And as you try to figure out just who is hanging on those crosses, you become certain that one of them can’t be Jesus the Messiah. Based on your hopes for this Messiah and on what others have told you, you believe that Jesus’s vindication will mean that the ones hanging on the crosses will be the ones who persecuted him. Justice in human hands has been won. This is how God would want it.

As you’re trying to rationalize the ending in your mind, the curtain goes up. The lights fade in. You gasp as the rest of the audience gasps. You’re in shock. It’s not Jesus’s opponents who hang on the crosses. Jesus himself hangs on the central cross, surrounded by two criminals. The audience who, like you, doesn’t know what will happen, is scandalized. Some are leaving the theatre. You hear a murmur of discontented voices, and someone even yells, “this can’t be!” This isn’t how things are supposed to turn out.

It turns out that the gauzy curtain between you and the scene on the stage was a veil of judgment, which you now realize. When you couldn’t see through clearly to the other side, you made up the ending based not on God’s perspective but on a human perspective. How could Jesus be consigned to the fate of a criminal? How could his victory be won through death? Why didn’t he exact the world’s justice on those who persecuted him? How could God let this happen? This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out. This makes no sense.

But of course, you rightly say, we know how this story unfolds, and it’s very hard to confront the ending of the story as if we didn’t know it. And yet, if we could encounter this story as if for the first time, we might realize that a veil still hangs between us and the redeeming life of our Lord and Savior. Isn’t it true that we still struggle to make out its ending through the opacity of the curtain’s veil?

I think that St. Paul’s words still ring true. If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, he says. The god of this world—the one Scripture calls the father of lies, the Satan—is still at work. He’s not causing heads to spin or bodies to contort. He’s pulling down a translucent curtain between our eyes and the story of salvation that continues to unfold before us through the power of the Incarnation. And the story isn’t over yet.

Whether in the workplace or home or even in the Church, we’re still prone to make up the Gospel as we go along. It’s as if we view the world through a gauzy curtain rather than through the transparent lens of the Gospel. We look at situations and people through a veil, and we see the final ending of the play that we want to see. And this must mean that we don’t usually see the world through the eyes of the cross. Instead, we see the convicted felon as the encapsulation of his most hideous act. We see the person who offended us decades ago as one undeserving of our forgiveness. We see the degrees listed after our names as the truest marker of our identity. We see the size of our houses or bank accounts as our ultimate security.

Or we see political dysfunction as a reason for despair or the stock market as the predicter of a parish’s survival, or we deduce the absence of God from statistics on world poverty or hunger or predict the demise of the Church based on the litany of wrongdoings committed by Church leaders.

The veil which hangs between us and the Gospel is deceptive. It’s a delicate spider web woven by the Accuser and father of lies who’s waiting to catch us in his sticky grasp. And so often, we take the bait. We believe the lies. We believe that flashy voices speak the most convincingly or that skepticism is the road to wisdom. Many have simply come to believe that the Gospel can’t speak for itself. The Gospel needs to have sparkle and pizzazz and that, without those things, it will fail.

The Gospel is dressed up in whatever guise necessary for it to be heard, whether parlor tricks or sound bytes or easy messages of neatly packaged ideas and perpetual prosperity. And the gauzy curtain comes down on the stage between the Gospel and us, and we see through the veil what we want to see, not what God intends. We see a Gospel and a world made in our own image, where the offenders get their just deserts, the faithful get rich, and our unchallenged comfort is God’s eternal will.

But the paradox is that by dressing the Gospel up, we make it bad news. Such a veiled Gospel shames those who are small in this world and condemns the poor, the quiet, and the meek. A veiled Gospel elevates the contented ones, whose complacency is disturbed by the suffering masses. In short, a veiled Gospel turns the cross upside down and robs it of its power. The world of the veiled Gospel is one in which nothing is ever enough because the Gospel itself isn’t enough. Simply put: it’s a world where there is no trust in the Gospel.

It's no coincidence that we hear the convicting words of St. Paul on the same day that we hear the story of the transfiguration of Jesus on the holy mountain, on the very cusp of Lent. When looking through a veil at the crucifixion, we might very well see only the glory of transfiguration and ignore the cross on the other side in the valley. We see what we want to see and ignore what we want to ignore.

But although the father of lies will always seek to pull the wool over our eyes, there is One infinitely greater who will raise the curtain on a remarkable scene before us. It’s a scene of ultimate truth, where an empty tomb shines with the light of Easter morning. And from this empty tomb a Gospel that needs no makeup will be carried with great haste to the ends of the world by fervent believers who have the courage to trust it.

Even today, that Gospel pulses with electricity despite its scoffers. It stands, preserved in all its simple yet profound glory and truth. Although it has been fumbled in the hands of many and veiled by others, there’s nothing we need to add to it. It needs no costume dress or shiny sparkles. It only needs loving and trusting hands. It needs our hands to believe in its power and to ignore the voices that make us question its efficacy. And most of all, it needs our confident hands to carry its gleaming light into the darkness.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 11, 2024

Wanting to Be Found

I haven’t seen the television series The Chosen, and I admit to being biased against it for reasons that are probably not entirely fair. But I do understand from some trustworthy and astute parishioners that it’s worth watching. Based on what they’ve told me, at the very least, the show’s dramatic portrayal of Jesus’s life in ministry could encourage us to encounter the Gospel stories with more imagination.

Truth be told, it’s not always easy to do this. Maybe we think that we’re not allowed to use our creative intelligence with holy Scripture. Or maybe we feel as if we don’t have enough to work with in the text itself. And Mark’s Gospel, of all the Gospels, is pretty lean in its prose. It’s a rapid-fire succession of dramatic events, with little embellishment. Mark gets straight to the point.

But, if I were scripting today’s Gospel story for television, and if I needed a title for the episode, I would call it “The Hunted.” We’d want to draw the viewer in without delay, so the initial scene would feature Jesus with Simon, Andrew, Simon’s mother-in-law, James, and John in a tiny house eating a meal prepared by Simon’s newly-healed mother-in-law. They’re enjoying fellowship and conversation after this meal when, suddenly, the rumble of feet is heard outside. Voices get closer. And before long, people are knocking on the door and pressing against it. The door itself is bowing in.

Scores of eager people outside have come from all over the little village of Capernaum because they need something from Jesus. They’re desperate. Some desire healing for themselves or other family members. Others merely want to catch a glimpse of Jesus. But all of them want something from this man about whom they’ve heard so much. Jesus is the pursued. He’s the one who is hunted by the crowd.

In the next scene of our television episode, we see Jesus healing all these people who’ve hunted for him. The remains of the meal previously shared are left on the table inside the house. Jesus is outside, working once again. We see him silence the demons, who oddly enough, know who he is. But in a subsequent scene, the camera fades into a glimpse of Jesus sitting alone in a deserted place, praying. It’s a vivid contrast to the previous scenes, in which he was bombarded with requests from hordes of people. The melee has subsided into tranquility. Now, he has hunted for a lonely place to be with God, all by himself.

But this quiet loneliness will not last. Soon, Simon and some others seek him out. We’re told that they pursue him, but the verb is really stronger than that. The meaning is closer to that of a predator going after prey. They hunted for him. They zealously sought him out because everyone is searching for Jesus.

It's been debated whether this hunting for Jesus was perhaps misguided. People were always seeking Jesus out, and rarely did they understand his mission. They wanted his healing, teaching, and comfort, but when they learned how difficult discipleship was, they fell away and lost their nerve. So, some have interpreted the disciples’ hunting for Jesus as a negative intrusion on his desire for privacy.

But right now, I don’t want to get lost in the weeds on this nuance. I want to give Simon and the disciples the benefit of the doubt. Were they possibly misguided? Yes. Did they understand what following Jesus would really mean for them? Not yet. But there’s something in their hunting for Jesus that’s compelling to me. I’m moved by the fact that so many people wanted to be near and with Jesus. He’s the one who’s hunted, perhaps not so much as a predator goes after its prey but as a suffering person goes to any length to find the source of their healing.

And maybe I’m so drawn to this hunting of Jesus because it feels so removed from our own age. Jesus so often does not seem to be the hunted one these days. He’s the neglected one, the ignored one, the forsaken one, because many people simply think they don’t need him. And there are many who claim to love him in their own way, but they still seem to be looking for every excuse not to find him. I don’t understand it, and it breaks my heart. But you’re here today because you’re hunting for him, and so am I. Let’s linger for a while with this incredible image of Jesus being passionately pursued by the crowds.

The fact that crowds of people were hunting for Jesus is evidence that something was amiss in their world. We tend to think our own societal problems are worse than they’ve ever been in human history, but that’s simply a mark of modern arrogance. Jesus was born into a deeply troubled and disordered world. And if I directed an episode of The Chosen, I would make sure those problems were known: the injustice, the imperial oppression, the marginalizing, the stigmatizing, the poverty, the hunger. All of it would be shown in vivid detail because such a description explains why Jesus was sought out and pursued. The suffering masses were hunting for him because they wanted to be free, and they somehow sensed that this man for whom they were hunting would not only heal them and help them: he would give them glorious liberty.

It begs the question of why more people aren’t hunting for Jesus in our own day. If we really are so tired of the perpetual bad news and of seeing hearts broken, then why aren’t more people hunting for the one who will set us free? And do those of us who profess to be hunting for him truly believe that he can and will set us free? Or have we, too, given into the narrative of despair? Where are the masses of people at the doors of our churches, yearning to get in and meet the one who saves and makes us whole?

And yet, there’s one thing that would be hard for us to depict in today’s Gospel story if it were scripted for television. We have the benefit of living in the aftermath of the resurrection, and this changes everything. And on the other side of the empty tomb, there’s an astounding role reversal. The one who is hunted before the resurrection suddenly becomes the hunter after he’s raised from the dead. He’s the hunter in the best sense of the word. He takes all the desperateness out of the zealous pursuit and turns it into perfect love.

The risen Christ is the one who seeks us out in love. The one who prayed by himself in a lonely place and was sought out is now the one who’s not bound by time and space and who finds us in our own lonely places. The one once hunted is the Good Shepherd who goes after his sheep. He pursues us relentlessly, not to accuse or condemn us, but to love us back into wholeness and to bring us back to his heavenly Father in that unremitting love.

He seeks out all with an indefatigable passion: the lonely, the lost, the forsaken, the imprisoned, the sick, the stubborn, the angry, the cold-hearted. He searches for all of them with the same measure of compassion, ready to heal, love, forgive, and redeem. There’s no good way to depict this in visual form. It defies storytelling. It’s simply a truth that I wish more people could know and understand.

This pursuit by the risen Christ is an incontestable fact. He seeks us out, whether we’re looking for him or not, whether we’re knocking on the door of his house or running away from it. But there’s one catch to all this. We won’t be transformed by his gift of love unless we want to be found. We aren’t prey hunted by a predator, we’re beloved children sought after by the one who loves us infinitely more than we love ourselves. But he never forces us into that love. We can only be embraced by his love if we stop running from it.

God has a mission for us, and it’s one that will run off the pages of any television script. It can’t be scripted because its reach is too vast. We’re being invited to take our love and knowledge of being pursued passionately by Christ into the world. We’re to go into the streets, alleys, and hidden corners of our communities and let the citizens of our anguished, lonely world know that they, too, are being pursued by one who wants to love them back into wholeness. And he’s the only one who will make us whole and set us free.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 4, 2024

Showing Up for Salvation

I’ve always loved how random characters in a novel by Charles Dickens suddenly reappear later in the story. A character with a humorous name like Pipwick or Bumblewig will make an initial appearance, and then, just when you least expect it, the character returns towards the end of the plot, proving to play some important role in the narrative. This is also why the television show Seinfeld is so brilliant. Ingenious writing ties several disparate plot threads together, and somehow it all works.

Charles Dickens or the producers of Seinfeld might have enjoyed tying together the seemingly unrelated stories of the Holy Family, Simeon, and Anna. These strands at first appear to be no more than three ordinary, unrelated stories, but in the hands of St. Luke the Evangelist, they’re shown to be intricately woven together by the subtle hand of God.

Without knowing how this story of Jesus’s presentation in the Temple is going to play out, you might wonder what all these characters have to do with one another. But we soon learn that something marvelous unfolds out of the different stories of a family with a newborn baby, a righteous and devout man, and an ancient prophetess who spends most of her time in the Temple. The marvelous intertwining of these initially unconnected lives is what, in ordinary life, would be called a coincidence, but we know there’s no coincidence here. God is doing something.

The first story strand involves Mary and Joseph, who are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do according to the Law. They’re going to the Temple to present their firstborn son to be dedicated to the Lord. It’s worth noting their obedience to the Law, especially in an age where we tend to scorn obedience. The Law tells them to show up in the Temple after a certain period of time, and that’s what they do. Why would they question the Law’s command? And while they could have made excuses about not being able to afford a sheep for the sacrifice required by the Law, they also know that a turtledove or a pigeon will suffice. This family is obedient, and because they’re obedient, they bother to show up in the Temple.

In the second strand, we’re introduced to a righteous and devout man named Simeon. Simeon also shows up in the Temple, not because he’s commanded to, but because he’s inspired by the Holy Spirit. We might call him deluded these days. He feels a nudging and a call to show up at the Temple. And while many might have dismissed that hunch, Simeon pays attention to it. Maybe it’s because he’s particularly attuned to God’s voice by virtue of his righteousness and faithfulness. Maybe he shows up because he hasn’t yet given in to the despair of his own day. He’s still looking for the consolation of Israel while many have given up or become disgruntled with impatience. And to our own jaded and skeptical world, we might laugh or at least marvel at Simeon’s confident hope. He surely sees the broken, hurting world around him, but he still hasn’t given up on God. So, he shows up, too.

And the third plot strand involves a prophetess named Anna. Now, she’s the local eccentric. She never leaves the Temple. I wonder if her lips were constantly moving in silent prayer like Hannah in 1 Samuel, and we know that Hannah’s observers just thought she was intoxicated. Anna is quite old, maybe even over the age of 100, so perhaps people unjustly questioned the reliability of her mental faculties. And we know what people think of those who are constantly praying or worshipping. They need to get a life, and they must be. . . well, you fill in the dots. But Anna also knows where she’s supposed to be, where she’s meant to be, perpetually in the presence of God in that holy Temple, praying and fasting. So, she shows up, too. She always shows up.

It’s at this point in the story where Charles Dickens or a scriptwriter for Seinfeld might merge the three plot strands together. The story about nothing turns into a story about something quite remarkable. And this is precisely what Luke does. Simeon’s faithful expectation of God’s salvation meets two peasant parents who show up obediently with their child, who is the Savior, and those parents learn something more about just who their son is. I imagine those unnamed persons in the Temple also learned something, too. And then Anna gets thrown into the mix, as well, helping others see the mighty works of God.

From three ordinary strands, an incredible story is woven that moves far beyond that of a poor family showing up in the Temple according to the Law, or a man showing up because of a hunch, or an elderly woman witnessing one more presentation in the Temple because she was always there. The story that has been woven is authored by a God who takes the mundane and weaves it into a surprising story of salvation and good news for the entire world. God’s eternal, mysterious time is superimposed on quotidian time. It’s enough to surprise even twenty-first century rationalists.

God has created this tapestry of good news by using both obedience and freedom. God has taken the loyalty and dutifulness of humble parents, mixed it with the faithfulness of prayer, and added a dollop of profound openness to the unpredictability of a Holy Spirit that blows at will. And for a moment, before everyone returns to their ordinary lives, it becomes clear how this God works. It becomes clear how this God is tied up in human lives. Obedience mixes with freedom, and as the world will later find out, in this alternative universe, by losing your life, you will find it anew. In submitting to God’s law and will, true freedom is gained. In paying attention to the ordinary, the extraordinary is revealed. In showing up, salvation is found.

And this evening, you’ve shown up, too. For some reason, you’ve chosen to be here rather than somewhere else. Maybe you were scheduled to serve in some capacity. Maybe you felt obligated. Maybe you really just wanted to attend the potluck supper. But whatever the reason, you showed up, and in an age where people don’t always show up for God, that’s no small feat. It’s a deep mystery that this stone building set among so many other buildings in a busy community can be a locus for the revelation of extraordinary grace, a grace that is always readily available if we bother to show up.

In this place, spiritually hungry people show up, randomly, searching for answers. Others are brought by compulsion. Strangers stumble through the doors in a time of crisis. People come week after week because it’s what they were brought up to do. And then the Holy Spirit weaves all those strands together in some unfathomable way. It defies our control, but it changes us irrevocably.

In a world of competing demands, it’s far too easy not to show up. It’s far too easy to question the nudges that surprise and yet compel us to some action. It’s far too easy to write the faithful churchgoer or devout person off as out of their mind. It’s far too easy to dismiss the quirky character whom God will bring back at the end of the story to tie the amazing plot together. It’s far too easy to imagine that we could ever be characters in such a fantastic story, especially when our lives seem little more than a story about nothing.

But the presentation of the world’s Savior under the obligation of the Law reveals the manifestation of the powerful freedom of God. Obedience and freedom go together, the extraordinary is manifested in the ordinary, and from nothing, something boundlessly life-giving and creative emerges. And as ordinary as it may seem, when we bother to show up, we will find that there’s no detail that God can’t or won’t use to weave together his beautiful story of salvation.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple
February 2, 2024

[The notion of divine providence guiding the intersection of the lives the Holy Family and Simeon is powerfully noted by Joel B. Green in The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 146.]

The Only Thing Worth Having

The church in which I was raised was an interesting piece of architecture that dated from the modernist period following the Second Vatican Council. You entered the church at the front, so everyone could see your messed-up hair or untucked shirt when you passed through the doors. The sacristy was at the back, so the altar party could easily process to the altar.

The roof sloped from over the sacristy to the front, over the altar, at a rather steep angle. There was a skylight over the baptismal font. There were abstract Stations of the Cross about which I could make neither head nor tail. There was little symmetry in the internal arrangement, and pews surrounded the altar on most sides.

It turns out that the innovative design of this church may have been its downfall, though. After a major hurricane in 2017, the church experienced so much damage that it couldn’t reopen again. Maybe it was the innovative roof or experimental design, or perhaps just shabby craftsmanship, but sadly, this past fall, the building was demolished. Sometimes innovative designs just don’t work. Maybe they’re too innovative for their own good.

But take this building, for instance. There’s nothing innovative about it. It’s a feat of bold retrospection, idealizing a period in Church history that we like to imagine was purer and better than any other time. News flash: it wasn’t. But no matter how flimsy that romanticized argument of the medieval period is, this building isn’t flimsy. Sure, the windows and the roof have been known to leak. Water seeps through the porous stone when it rains, and brittle stone falls off the walls, which is why I wouldn’t recommend using Wissahickon schist for stone in the future. But this building has a good structure. It’s solid. They just don’t build them like this anymore, we say. This building has strong bones. It’s not puffed up by innovation; it’s meant to last.

That, I think, is St. Paul’s understanding of ministry, at least if we draw a connection between his theology of the Body of Christ and the mission of the Church. “Knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. Our translation puts scare quotes around knowledge. Too often, we moderns simply think we know more than we do. And as Paul bluntly tells us, if someone thinks they really know something, they don’t know anything at all.

It’s excellent advice that Paul gives us. Be builders, he exhorts, not people who are puffed up by big talk. It’s less about what you “know” (scare quotes again) and more about how you love. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Talk all you want about your “knowledge,” but it means absolutely nothing without love and charity. And love and charity are delectable.

The somewhat enigmatic passage from Paul’s 1 Letter to the Corinthians is not so much about food sacrificed to idols; it’s about how to flourish in a community built up by love, rather than one that’s merely a puffed-up bubble of conceit. For Paul, it means nothing if some of the Corinthians can in good conscience participate in feasts containing meat that has been involved in pagan sacrifices. Their consciences might be clear because they know that idol worship has no validity to it. Who cares if I eat that meat, they say? I don’t believe in that pagan nonsense.

But not everyone is as assured as those puffed up with “knowledge.” For some, who have not quite realized the invalidity of idol worship, watching others chow down on meat used in idol worship is harmful to their faith. Oddly enough, something that might not be an inherently sinful action could be sinful if it affects another brother or sister in Christ. Sin is profoundly contextual in some instances.

For those of us puffed up with Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest, Paul’s words are simply ludicrous. After all, we “know” so much more than Paul because we have “evolved.” And those of us who have “evolved” will survive; the rest will die out. For those of us steeped in a culture of individualism, we imagine that our innovative minds and sophisticated “knowledge” give us license to do whatever we want, assuming we avoid blatant sinning. But often we sin when we try to demonstrate the correctness or sophistication of our “knowledge” and thereby wound the novice in the faith, who still needs milk and is not yet ready for solid food.

Undoubtedly, our age is one of much puffed-up “knowledge” and very little checking of the tongue or staying of the arm. Sometimes our puffed-up knowledge is better kept inside than let out, though, especially if it’s not grounded in charity. Love builds, but knowledge can easily tear down. And that Christ-like love, the builder of all good things, requires patience, sensitivity, grace, compassion, and above all, wisdom. St. Paul is right. We’re called to be builders, not destroyers.

Something can be torn down in the blink of an eye but take decades to rebuild. An insensitive remark can do long-term, irreparable damage, but a small gesture of love can move another soul in an instant. A bold stance taken for a supposedly right and just reason can go deeply wrong when others are destroyed in its wake. Sometimes even the zealous proponent of “truth” is the only one standing after the rest of the building surrounds him in smoking embers.

And for those steeped in this “age of anxiety,” to borrow from W.H. Auden, the temptation is, oddly enough, not to build with patient love but to build with haste. Many lust after innovation as the newfound idol that will solve all the problems of malaise and decline. Many long to stand out with novelty in a sea of apathy, wrangling whatever gimmicks are available to cheerlead others into faith. Provocation and careless banter are wielded to command attention. And rarely does such innovation and provocation pause to assess the souls that have been lost to their crassness. Only infrequently, it seems, are charity’s quietness and gentleness recognized as the best ways of all.

Yes, as St. Paul reminds us, we’re called to be builders, not puffed-up innovators. If we’re truly following Christ, then we won’t accept a tired narrative of Church decline or easy solutions to anxious problems. Instead, we might be less loud-mouthed and quieter because love is the way and charity costs nothing. Indeed, such love will help us gain our souls.

If the Church wants to be stronger, then every joist and timber in her structure is essential, and every part of her frame will need to find its source of gravity in love. And worshipping in this marvelous and solid building today is such an inspiration. If any place is a witness to the power of Christ’s redeeming and reconciling love, it’s this parish. Harmony has spoken more powerfully (if more quietly) than division. What is old has spoken with a clarifying newness and with astounding openness. A relatively small number of people can build a sturdy house, especially if that house is built on love. And even if the exterior stone is fragile, the house will stand forever if the bones are good.

We know that it doesn’t take long to tear something down, and we also well know that it takes a long time to rebuild. But God has more time than we can ever imagine.[1] God’s way is to take the long road of patience and perseverance. Love and charity would have it no other way. God can turn a few scraps into a marvelous feast. God can take fissures in an aging frame and weld them together to last a lifetime. God can do anything with very little. God doesn’t need puffed-up things; God just needs our cooperation in love.

And here’s the most amazing and countercultural thing of all. This building up to which we’re called and which is the sole purpose of the Church doesn’t require an advanced degree or expertise or an IQ of 140. It doesn’t require money or power or prestige or fame. It’s not puffed-up or fancy or innovative. This building up, which is our truest calling, requires only one thing. Love. And if we brave the risk of throwing all our knowledge to the wind, this love is the pearl of great price and the only thing worth having.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
January 28, 2024

[1] This idea is influenced by Stanley Hauerwas, especially in Matthew: A Theological Commentary (Ada, MI: Brazos Press, 2015).

The Pang of Poignancy

In Salvador Dalí’s famous 1951 painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross, a crucified Jesus is viewed as if from above. The viewer looks at him head-on but sees only the top of his head. His eyes are looking downwards from the cross. His arms are stretched out as we are used to seeing him on the cross. Light illuminates the cross, but all is black behind.

The same light that shines on the cross seems to spread downward onto a scene by a lake. It’s clearly the Sea of Galilee, which is really a lake because of its modest size. Clouds hover over the lake, but some light breaks through. It seems to be the light from the cross itself but might be the faint light of a new horizon. Perhaps it’s early in the morning. Two fishing boats can be seen on the lake, although they’re partially obscured by shadows. And among those rather lonely-looking fishing boats stand what appear to be three fishermen, although because of the shadows of the painting, it’s actually difficult to tell just how many.

I’ve preached on this painting before, on Good Friday, as a matter of fact, but this painting is not just about the end. It’s also about the beginning. The beginning and the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry are portrayed in this magnificent and eerie painting by Dalí. And I’ve always been struck by the poignancy of this painting. A picture of these simple fishermen next to their boats on the seashore is nondescript and not necessarily poignant. But when the entire scene is overlooked by Jesus dying on the cross, it’s enough to cause a lump in your throat. The simple fishermen, longing for a catch, have no idea how their lives will change when Jesus calls them into discipleship.

The poignancy of this painting—we might even say the sadness—is not maudlin or sentimental. It just goes right to your gut. Jesus knows his disciples will have to persevere without his earthly presence. We can only imagine the loneliness of those former fishermen without their Lord among them in the flesh.

And yet there’s an even deeper level of poignancy that Dalí’s painting elicits. It’s the poignancy we always experience when we look back on the past with knowledge of the future. It’s the slightly hollowed-out feeling I get when I watch movies that I saw as a 10-year-old and think about what I didn’t know then and what I do know now. The way I watch those movies now is so different than how I watched them back then. I’ve changed, even if the movies haven’t. I recall all that I had to experience between then and now to get where I am today. And then I remember all the innocence I’ve lost since then, all the adult problems I’ve had to take on, all the hair I’ve lost and bodily aches that I’ve begun to experience, the grandparents and friends who’ve died, the opportunities forfeited. There’s such longing in looking back.

But there are times when I want to go back, even if for a time, to that childhood where I didn’t have to worry about filing taxes or paying bills or arranging for snow removal, or more profoundly, watching people I love get sick and die. There are times when I want to be innocent once again, to experience life with less loss, and to go back to a time before I parted with what was once so dear to me.

At the end of the day, though, I always come back to the present, and I know that there’s no other place I’d rather be. No matter the trials and sadnesses, no matter the burdens and the worries, and no matter what I’ve had to give up, what I’ve gained with age and maturity is invaluable.

In Dalí’s painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross, two moments in time coalesce to summon a pang of poignancy in the viewer, and such poignancy protects us from oversimplifying the story. It’s true that certain aspects of this story are simple and uncomplicated. Jesus calls, and Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John respond. It all happens without any delay, which is a testament to the power of Jesus’s presence and invitation.

And at the same time, there’s nothing uncomplicated about it. It’s the most poignant and redolent of moments as Dalí’s painting shows. At that call of the first disciples, the cross hangs over it all. From that moment of response to Jesus’s summons, things will never be the same again. Because those disciples said yes without a second thought, they submitted, if inadvertently, to the lordship of One who would change their lives and the world forever.

Those ordinary fishermen were called from a local context to an international one. They were moved from the status quo of their quotidian lives to the dynamic creativity of unpredictable life fueled by the Holy Spirit. They were transformed from fishing for food merely to alleviate hunger and poverty to fishing for people to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. And with that call, they had to abandon so much: their careers, their comfort, their homes, even their biological families, and eventually, some would even give up their lives because they said yes to that call.

Could it be, then, that the pang of poignancy in our own lives of discipleship is the truest test of the depth of our commitment to Christ? Is it more often the case that when we consider what it means to follow him, we feel no poignancy at all? Aren’t there scores of Christians who think they can follow Christ with no loss whatsoever? Or maybe what we choose to part with is conveniently determined on our own terms.

Those of us who were baptized as infants can’t even picture a life before Christ called us into membership in his Church. But imagine, if you will, a time in your past when you weren’t officially a disciple. Or imagine a time even after your baptism when you had no desire to follow Christ. And then think about how it all changed afterwards. Think about what you had to give up to place yourself behind Jesus and follow him. Think about the losses you’ve experienced and will still experience to be a true disciple. Think about what you’re giving up even to be here today.

Do you feel the pang of poignancy? To feel the loss of something dear to us because we’ve chosen to follow Christ means that we must be on the right path. The Christian life is always pulsing with the pang of poignancy.

And yet, is there any other place we’d rather be than here and now? Would we really want to be back on the shore of that lake, working our ordinary jobs and content with just a catch of fish? Would we want to go back to a time before the Risen Christ walked by us and asked us to follow him and fish for people? Would we want to go back to a time before we knew the palpable presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives? Would we really want to go back to a time before we experienced that sense of deepest communion in the Eucharistic feast? We may have lost so much innocence and had to forsake one too many idols, but is there any place we’d rather be than here in the present, finding our true home behind Christ under the shadow and light of the cross?

It’s the call of Christ that gives us our future, no matter what must be given up. It’s the call of Christ that calls us from comfort into risk and something greater than we can imagine. It’s Christ’s call that gives us the priceless gift of hope.

The pang of poignancy reminds us that to become a disciple, we had to become poor and humble and powerless. We had to abandon our wealth, our pride, and our power. But despite all that we’ve lost, we’ve gained something eternal. We’ve gained our souls. We’ve moved from fishing for ourselves to fishing for others to invite them to be changed like us, too. And hopefully, no matter how wistful we may be about the past, we’ve lived long enough on this side of the call to trust that there’s no other place we’d rather be than right here, right now, in our true home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 21, 2024

Yet to Be Seen

There’s a distinct but very obvious difficulty in reading a novel for the second, or even third or fourth time. After the first reading, you know exactly how it ends. Returning to the beginning of a novel for a second reading is to bring the end into the beginning. The initial excitement of reading voraciously through a book to discover how the climax will play out is difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

And it’s no different with the Christian story. If we’ve gone to church and read the Bible, and perhaps even if we haven’t, we know what happens. We know that God creates everything and calls it good. We know that God’s people rebel time and again, and yet God still calls them back into covenant with him. We know that God sends the prophets but that God’s people usually don’t listen to them. And yet, God still persists in love. We know the misfortunes of God’s people, how Jerusalem is ravaged and how the people go into exile. We know that they return to the holy city and rebuild the Temple. We know that the story is an alternation between sin and repentance with God’s unremitting love holding it all together. And we know that in the fullness of time, God sends his only-begotten Son to take on human nature and live and die among us. We know that he’s crucified and raised from the dead. And we know that this changes everything.

In short, we think we know the climax of the story, and it seems as if we’re living in a perpetual denouement after the events of that third day following Jesus’s death. And this, I think, makes it very difficult to approach the story as if we don’t know what happens. And it also makes it quite easy to encounter this story as if we were reading the phone book.

But because we have chosen to be here while much of the world sleeps in or has determined that Christianity is irrelevant or boring, let’s try to reset our minds and rediscover the initial excitement of our great story as if we’re experiencing it for the first time. Let’s imagine for a moment that we don’t know what happens. We’ve been told that this is a thrilling story and that it involves a man named Jesus and his disciples and that this man, who is the Messiah, will change everything. But that’s it. Now, let’s imagine that we’re with those first disciples in backwater Galilee, and Jesus finds us and says something simple. He says, “Follow me.”

Maybe we’re struck by the fact that Philip immediately follows without really knowing Jesus very well. Perhaps we’re impressed that he would then go and find Nathanael to bring him to Jesus. But then, it might be that we’re sympathetic to Nathanael’s initial skepticism. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good come out of . . . well, you fill in the blank. I’d mention my own hometown, but you’ve never heard of it.

Nathanael is the one in whom there’s no guile. He’s bluntly honest. “How do you know me?” he asks Jesus. And Jesus says that he saw him under the fig tree even before Philip called him. For whatever reason, this is enough information to cause Nathanael to confess that Jesus is the Son of God and King of Israel. And then Jesus utters the line that should make us want to pick up this story again and again and read voraciously until the end. “You shall see greater things than these.” Or as one translation puts it, you haven’t seen anything yet![1]

But for those of us who know how this story ends, we say, of course. Yes, we have seen what is yet to come. Jesus will work miracles and heal and teach and preach. He will die on a cross. And then he will be raised from the dead and appear to his disciples. He will ascend into heaven and then send his Holy Spirit upon his disciples to empower them to reach to the ends of the earth. The Church will grow and spread. Millions will be baptized. Many will die for their faith, but that Church will still thrive and do amazing things. The teaser that Jesus drops in his conversation with Nathanael is talking about all this. Nathanael hasn’t seen anything yet. And it’s going to be incredible.

But the problem remains: it’s not as easy for us as it was for Nathanael to hear Jesus say, you haven’t seen anything yet and feel goosebumps or notice our heartrate accelerating or gasp with excitement. We think we already know the end of the story. It’s as if deep down in our hearts we really believe the greatest things have already happened, that this story is over, or, at the very least, that it’s in its perpetual denouement.

And because we supposedly know how this story ends and might be bored, we find ourselves strangely back with Nathanael who doesn’t yet know how the story will end. We’re stuck with Nathanael’s skeptical and cynical question, can anything good come out of Nazareth? The unexpressed silent question from us is really a doubt that there’s still more yet to come that will change our lives and the world. And although we may confess with Nathanael that Jesus is the Son of God and the King of Israel, we seem to think that’s this is all there is to the story. We recognize who Jesus is. He’s our Messiah. We follow him. That’s it. And we conveniently forget that the story is still in dynamic motion. Jesus is still here among us as the Risen Christ who is ascended and glorified, and he still speaks to us just as he spoke to Nathanael all those many years ago. And he says, you haven’t seen anything yet!

If only the Church could fully believe this! Haven’t we lost this eager anticipation? Haven’t we forgotten what it was like to pick up the novel and read eagerly to see how everything would unfold? And have we come to believe that there really is nothing left to this story? Do we trust that God is still revealing things to us and showing us greater and greater things? When and how did this incredible story become so innocuous to us?

The constant question of the Church is too often, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good come out of a fledgling group of followers who seem to be decreasing in number? Can anything good come out of the scandals and the divisions? Can any harmony be found amid so much discord? Can any enthusiasm for God be found amid so much malaise?

It’s as if we’ve forgotten that the One who came to join heaven and earth still joins heaven and earth. He still comes daily into our lives, in every moment and in every place. In every corner of this planet walks One who is risen from the dead and whose presence is the locus of angels descending and ascending through an opening in the heavens. He’s the One who reveals to us that indeed we haven’t seen anything yet, that the story isn’t finished, and that great things are yet to come. He’s the One who reveals a God who’s still acting dynamically and creatively in our lives and especially when they seem so very ordinary and hopeless.

To believe that we still haven’t seen anything yet is what it means to be a Christian. It’s to change the narrative that tells us that we’ve already seen everything worth seeing. To change the narrative is to say that the world’s apathy about Church and God is not the final word. It’s to say that even a parish brought close to death can revive once again. It’s to say that asking whether we have enough money or enough children to start a chorister program or enough people to do ministry is like asking, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

But the Risen Christ replies that the story isn’t over yet. It’s only just beginning. Come and see, Christ says. You haven’t seen anything yet. See the gifts present in yourselves and in your neighbor in the pew. See the resources God has given you for ministry. See the goodwill out there despite all the hatred. See the lives that Christ is still changing. See the beauty of creation that hasn’t yet been despoiled. See the potential for spiritual growth in your very midst. See that there is so much good yet to come.

We may still from time to time ask that question: Can anything good come out of Nazareth? It’s the question put into our minds by the Accuser and Enemy of our natures. It’s the monotonous question of a confused and apathetic world. But we can always expect the truest answer to come from the One who yet reveals our future to us. And when we’re in relationship with him, no matter how many times we ask the question, we must always be prepared for his answer: you haven’t seen anything yet!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 14, 2024

[1][1] The Message translation by Eugene Peterson

What's in a Preposition?

If you ask me, one of the most challenging aspects of learning a new language is understanding the use of prepositions. Prepositions are difficult enough to grasp in English, but having navigated their ambiguity in one language, it’s no easy feat to learn the intricacies of prepositions in another.

In my recent efforts at relearning Spanish, I still get confused about when the English word “at” needs to be translated as a Spanish “a” or “en.” There’s a long list of other confusions that I have, too. Part of the challenge is simply learning idioms and how they are used in another language. But there are times when knowing the many different uses of prepositions in one language can open new vistas of meaning.

I find this especially interesting in Biblical Greek. One Greek word that ordinarily means “with,” can also be translated as “along with,” “after,” or even “behind.” In John’s Gospel, when he says “the Word was with God,” it could also be translated towards God. This describes a completely different orientation of the Son towards the Father. Even though you must pick one option for the translation, knowing its other potential meanings makes the word all the richer. So, what’s in a preposition, we might ask? Well, sometimes, a whole lot indeed.

And there’s a whole lot going on with prepositions in St. Mark’s account of Jesus’s baptism by John, which tells us a great deal about just what this baptism is but also a great deal about what this means for us. Mark’s account of Jesus’s baptism is the only one of the four Gospels that describes the baptism quite so vividly. Jesus goes down into the water, and then he comes up out of the water as the heavens are torn apart and he’s proclaimed as God’s beloved Son. Jesus’s baptism is not the same as our baptism, but our baptism is into Jesus’s baptism.

And I bet you didn’t catch the preposition that I just used twice. In that preposition is the real meaning of today’s celebration. We won’t get this preposition from the rather innocuous translation we’ve just heard. But Mark is clever. John the Baptist may be baptizing people in the Jordan River, but when Jesus is baptized, he’s baptized into the Jordan.[1] Jesus’s baptism effects a new, fuller, Spirit-filled baptism. The preposition is a Greek word that means “in,” but it can also mean “into.” And I wonder if Mark uses different prepositions to tell us just what this baptism is.

This baptism is no sprinkling with water on the forehead. This baptism doesn’t need to take away any sin from Jesus, for he has none. This baptism is both an epiphany of who Jesus is as God’s unique, only-begotten Son, and a revelation of the depth of that baptism. In this movement into the water, Jesus goes down, as if he were descending into the depths of hell after death, and then he rises up, out of the water. Down, then up. Into the waters of chaos, and out into the fresh air of a new creation. Into the parted Red Sea and out into the land of freedom. Into the River Jordan that was crossed by God’s chosen people as they exited the wilderness of forty years and out into the Promised Land.

And when Jesus goes into the Jordan River and rises up out of it, the Spirit is vividly present and immediately propels him into the desert for a time of temptation. The good news will soon be hurtling like a comet into the world to turn it upside down.

All this means that when we go into the water of baptism ourselves, we go into the Jordan River, but also into the Red Sea, and into the waters of chaos at the beginning of time, and we rise out of it again, changed forever, with a seal of the Holy Spirit marking us forever as God’s children. We rise out of the water, empowered for ministry and for setting out like human comets into the ends of the world to share that good news.

But what has happened to the power of that baptism? What has happened to a baptism into dangerous waters and out into a world in need of baptismal energy? Why has baptism become more like a gentle boat, merely skimming the surface of the water? Have we forgotten what it was like to go into the water, to get our hair wet, and to emerge out of it, gasping for air?

We were baptized, like Jesus, into water, but not just into water, but into his life, death, and resurrection. His life has passed into ours. His breath has passed into our breath. His power has spread through our limbs to set us on fire with the Holy Spirit and to live as if we have gotten our hair wet and not just sprinkled with a few drops on our foreheads. To go into the water and not merely float on the surface means that we’ve been baptized by Christ’s very life in the Holy Spirit.[2] Not just with it, but in it. Our spiritual DNA has been altered. Our hard hearts have been softened. We’ve been altered forever. We’ve plunged into a new life with Christ. And because we were baptized into that water, we must rise out of it to go into the world.

And under the water, when we dive into it, there is an amazing world. Like a scuba diver who breaks the surface of the water, we find new, vibrant life below the surface, with fascinating microclimates and exotic environments. Our perception of the world changes. We find a wholly different civilization below the surface when we dive into the water and don’t just stay on the shallow surface. In that underwater dwelling, everything and everyone is on fire with the Holy Spirit.

Somehow, though, this doesn’t seem to be the world in which we live. When’s the last time you heard someone talk about the Holy Spirit’s presence in their life? How often do you see Christians living as if baptism has disturbed nothing in their lives? How many baptisms have you attended in which it was a social occasion or cute rite of passage rather than a risky life-altering movement into the waters of the deep?

It may be that what our world needs—indeed, what the Church needs—right now is a deeper understanding of how Jesus’s baptism into the waters of the Jordan shapes our own baptismal identity. If we can go bravely into the deep, we will find that place of transformation that causes us to breathe differently with the Spirit’s very breath and sends us out with great power to breathe that breath into a world struggling for oxygen.

If you’ve spent enough time here at Good Shepherd, I hope you’ve seen evidence of that deep downwards movement into the water and out into a transformed life. I certainly have, nearly every day. It’s manifested in a hearty faith that takes the sacraments seriously and church seriously. It’s present in a commitment to show up weekly for Mass, to grow in faith through formation, to venture out into the community to seek out the lost. Above all, it’s revealed in a desire to make God alone the center of our lives. And in a day and culture that treats God as a dispensable option, this is no small feat.

We’re not meant to stay on the surface of the water. On the surface, we’re told that politeness is the equivalent of being a good Christian. On the surface, we’re told that we can be a decent Christian without going to church. On the surface, we’re told that political conformity is better than righting injustice. On the surface, we’re fed with shallow claims.

But the Church’s call is crystal clear, no matter how much she might forsake it. Dive deep. Go into the waters, despite how scary it may be. If we dive deep, into the water, we will be changed forever, and we’ll learn the truth that sets us free. Breathe in that truth deeply, learn how to breathe differently, and never stop breathing that breath of the Spirit into a world that is struggling to breathe. Then, God’s very breath of the Holy Spirit, our very breath, will help us carry that truth into a world that needs to be turned upside down.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 7, 2024       

[1] This point is made in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 129.

[2] See David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2023).

The Answer to All the Riddles

We should start by acknowledging that there’s very little we know about the three wise men except what Scripture tells us: they were from the East; they were magi, quite possibly involved in astrology or Zoroastrianism and known for their vast knowledge; and they weren’t too proud to follow a star and a dream. That’s it. The rest is left to our imaginations.

But with those details, it’s indeed possible to imagine what they might have been like. And this is what the good Anglican Dorothy Sayers does in her radio drama The Man Born to Be King, produced and broadcast by the BBC during World War II. In keeping with tradition, the three magi are named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Caspar is described as old, learned, and wise, “a little withdrawn and aloof,”[1] as Sayers puts it. His is the “wisdom of the intellect.” In contrast, Melchior is younger, practical, and concerned with “the wisdom of the bodily senses.” And Balthazar, although young, is a mystic who’s interested in the relationship of humans to God and God to humans, and his is “a wisdom of the heart.”

We know how the magi get to Bethlehem. They get there by starting with what they know best: the heavens. They follow a star that they inexplicably know is the star of the one born king of the Jews. And we’re told where they end up: at the manger, with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child. We know, too, that there’s something unusual about the wisdom of these magi. While their heads might be in the heavens, trying to decipher the stars and make accurate predictions based on natural observations, these magi are wholly different from Herod’s wise advisers. Although Herod’s men can at least figure out that Bethlehem is the likely birthplace of this child-king based on Scripture, beyond that, they seem to have no desire to go any further. And through an odd act of divine providence, the magi are aided in their quest to find Christ through the machinations of the ruthless, cunning Herod.

In Dorothy Sayers’s play, the wise men arrive at the manger not only with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but also with three riddles. The first king, Caspar—who I imagine is rather like Dumbledore in Harry Potter—says something surprising for a wise old man. When Mary acknowledges her humble status as she greets magi, Caspar responds, “Alas! the more we know, the less we understand life. Doubts make us afraid to act, and much learning dries the heart. And the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Wisdom and Love live together at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?”

The youthful and practical Melchior has his own riddle: “order puts fetters on freedom, and freedom rebels against order, so that love and power are always at war together. And the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Power and Love dwell together at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?”

And finally, the mystical Balthazar wonders how union with God can be found in a world of suffering: “Fear is our daily companion – the fear of want, the fear of war, the fear of cruel death, and of still more cruel life. But all this we could bear if we knew that we did not suffer in vain; that God was beside us in the struggle, sharing the miseries of His own world. For the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Sorrow and Love be reconciled at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?”

These are certainly vexing riddles, but ones that aren’t unknown to us. These Gentile wise men who come from a distant, exotic land pose to a poor, uneducated Jewish peasant girl the difficult questions of a perplexed and hurting world. The riddles shared by both Jew and Gentile come to rest at the feet of the Christ child. And Mary responds by reducing everything to an answer that is both simple and yet one of the most challenging things to accept, especially for us moderns. She says that she understands “that wealth and cleverness were nothing to God – no one is too unimportant to be His friend. . . So I know very well that Wisdom and Power and Sorrow can live together with Love; and for me, the Child in my arms is the answer to all the riddles.” The answer is the Child. He—not knowledge, authority, or any other skill—is the answer to all our riddles.

Having taken their heads out of the skies, the magi come from afar, and their immense knowledge of a world in riddles is reduced to the truest answer in the universe. The Child they’ve come to meet is the answer to all the riddles. The magi have moved from the head to the heart. They have moved from finding answers to basking in mystery. And their only response to the mystery in the flesh is to bow down in worship before him.

Twelve days now after this Child was born for us, we, too, kneel in homage at his manger, bringing the riddles of our world and our lives. Some of us hold multiple academic degrees, have defended dissertations, and have more letters after our names than the alphabet contains. Some of us value law and order, keeping things in their place, and respecting the power of worldly authority. And hopefully all of us have hearts that break over suffering, imprisonment, and constant tragedy. But none of us, I imagine, is exempt from carrying a riddle to the manger this evening.

Our world is riddled with riddles if we want to be clever about it. We have arguably more knowledge about the universe, human bodies, and the environment than we’ve ever had before, and yet academia is deeply confused and the planet is in grave peril. We have weapons of defense and more prisons than you can shake a stick at, and yet we have tremendous violence that has infiltrated even our most sacred spaces. We have the gift of psychology and wellness programs, but we have broken spirits and more loneliness than ever before. And we bring all these worldly riddles, which seem intractable and unsolvable, to the manger, and we ask, like those magi, Can wisdom, power, and sorrow dwell with love in the promised kingdom?

We ask because so much of the world, which may also include us, is looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. We’re looking for love in shallow relationships. We’re looking for love in workplace success or status or worldly authority. We’re looking for love because we’re aching with a deep hunger, but no matter how much human knowledge we have, we find that love still eludes us at times.

This love eludes us because it has continued to elude the world since it was first born so many years ago. From love’s first cry as a baby, power was revealed in weakness, knowledge in humility, and compassion in the courage of suffering. And if we only had open hearts like the magi, we might be more willing to trust a star and a dream, instead of our own devices. We might be able to say no to the antics of power, greed, hate, and perpetual suspicion. We might be able to imitate the magi and throw all our sophisticated learning to the wind, fall down on our knees, and worship.

I, for one, don’t believe that current statistics on belief and unbelief in God portray an accurate picture of people’s hearts. I believe most people are searching for what is true, good, and lovely, but most simply don’t know where to find it, because they’re looking in all the wrong places.

But this evening, Scripture tells us where to find love. We will find it only by being foolish enough to trust a star and a dream and to follow where they may lead, no matter how much we’re mocked for it. We’ll find love only by recognizing that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know. We’ll find true love by moving from our heads to our hearts and seeing that love abides there, closer to us than we could ever imagine. And we fall down and worship this love—true Love—who is the answer to all our riddles.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Feast of the Epiphany
January 5, 2024

[1] Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 1943 (https://christspieces.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/sayers1943_the-man-born-to-be-king_01_kings-of-judaea_35-53.pdf)