The Cry that Means Everything

In the 1970s, an American developmental psychologist named Edward Tronick carried out a series of studies observing the relationship between a child and the child’s caregiver. The fruits of these studies are known as the “The Still-Face Experiment.” In a video demonstrating this so-called still-face paradigm, a young mother and her infant child are in a room, and the mother engages the child in play. She smiles at the child, makes cooing sounds, and the baby responds. They touch one another. They’re thoroughly and emotionally engaged. The baby smiles and watches the mother. The mother greets the baby, and the baby responds with a cute cry of affirmation. When the baby points at something in the room, the mother’s eyes follow the child’s finger, and she smiles in affirmation. The parent and child interact in the most loving and heartfelt way.

After a couple of minutes of this play, and in an instant, the mother looks away from the child and then turns back to her. This time, her face is blank. She stares at the child with no expression on her face. As the infant processes this change in behavior from her parent, she attempts to reconnect with her mother, using the same gestures as when they were engaging in normal interactions. The baby smiles, but the mother offers nothing in return. Then the baby points at something, but the mother doesn’t follow the baby’s finger. The baby becomes more distressed as she realizes that all her communication tools are failing. Finally, she utters an outcry of frustration, shrieks loudly, and dissolves into tears. At this point, the mother breaks her still-faced persona and returns to a loving interaction with the baby.[1]

The point of The Still-Face Experiment was to demonstrate the inherent connections between human beings, who are relational by nature. This deep relationality can be seen in its incipient stages by observing a parent interact with an infant child. When the mother in the experiment withheld normal, loving facial expressions and modes of communication from her child, the child withdrew emotionally in her own way and exhibited signs of negative behavior.[2] In the video experiment, the point at which the mother discontinued her still-face and returned to her usual self was the moment in which the baby’s negative reactions collapsed into a distressing cry.

There’s something about a cry of distress that elicits anxiety and a need to placate from any normal human being. I frequently hear such cries from children as I walk back and forth between the rectory and church, as a baby in the preschool next door cries out in distress or a child is frustrated on the playground. And my immediate instinct is for that cry of anguish to be alleviated. The cry of distress or the lament, it seems, is the normal vocal mechanism by which one in need establishes connection with one who can be a source of comfort or aid.

For whatever reason, which may always remain a mystery, the apostle Paul understood the power of that primal cry in the relationship between humanity and God. In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes the Spirit of God as praying within us, groaning inwardly with sighs too deep for words. This Spirit prays within us when we don’t know how to pray.

And then in his letter to the Galatians, Paul describes the Spirit of God’s Son, which cries, “Abba! Father!”, the very words used by Jesus in his hour of death as he speaks to his Father. Paul tells us in Galatians that because we are adopted children of God, we, too, have the right to utter that primal cry, “Abba! Father!” Indeed, it’s the very Spirit of God who gives voice to that cry within us. And it’s that passionate cry which connects us to God, our heavenly Father.

But I wonder if this utterance of the Spirit within us is rather like an eerie reversal of The Still-Face Experiment. The Still-Face Experiment demonstrates that the cry of distress from an infant is what can prompt a parent to turn back to the child and reestablish communication and affection. In the famous video, the moment in which the baby dissolves into tears is when the mother breaks her manufactured still-face, smiles, and speaks lovingly to the child once again. It’s as if the mother can’t take the manufactured withdrawal anymore. Because she loves her infant so much, she can no longer pretend to be oblivious to her needs. She must engage with her.

But in God’s interaction with humanity—and contrary to what we might often think—there’s never a moment in which God the Father confronts our pleas for help and responds with a cold, still-face. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that it’s we who are so often blind to God’s pleas for us to turn back to him. We maintain a still-face, stubborn in our sin, cold-hearted in our refusal to love, and parsimonious in our unwillingness to help the needy. The Spirit’s cry within us is something like God’s own cry for connection. It’s as if God cries out within us, in his longing for us to reestablish relationship with him, desperately hoping that we will hear his cry of love and change our still-face into a smile.

On this seventh day of Christmas, Paul reminds us that the birth of Christ to a woman, under the law, was God’s precious gift of intimacy. The birth itself was a baby’s cry to a still-faced world broken by sin and evil. For centuries, God had been faithful to this people, chosen and loved by him eternally. Although God had proven his love time and again, this stubborn people suffered from persistent amnesia. Although they had been told by God himself to remember so many things, they still forgot. They forgot to remember God’s deliverance on that Passover night, to remember the commandments in the Law, to remember how good all of creation was, to remember that they were chosen and loved, to remember that the covenant established with them was unconditional. And so, in the fullness of time, God became a child, an infant crying in the dark night of a wintry world to forge a connection in the most intimate way possible and to turn the cold, selfish still-face of humanity into a warm, interactive countenance of love.

In God’s own gesture of love, God had to come in the flesh, get beneath our skin, and seep his way gently into our hearts, and into those hearts, God would send his eternal Spirit to cry out, “Abba! Father!” This plea for help, this cry of filial intimacy, would be how God would woo humanity’s still-face back into responsive relationship.

All around us, people are yearning for belonging. They’re weary of being told that they’re not enough and that they can never be or do enough to be loved by the world. Many have been told even by the Church that they’re not even enough for God himself, that they can never be enough to stand before God and receive his love. And far too many behave as if they know nothing about the incredible message that St. Paul shares with us, a message that reaffirms our beloved status as adopted children of God.

It’s a still-faced world in which we live. The apathy of humanity before its marvelous Creator is chilling, if not frightening. But there’s one beautiful thing that can cut through that icy chill to elicit a response. It’s a plaintive cry that sounds not somewhere out there in the world but right here inside our hearts. It’s as near to us as the hearts beating in our chests and the blood pulsing through our veins. It’s a cry that can be our very breath if we so choose. It’s the very Spirit of the risen Christ yearning for us to breathe with his breath and turn back to God. And it’s the Spirit’s very cry within us that affirms that we are no longer slaves to this world of sin but are children of God. And not just children, but heirs of an eternal promise in heaven, where no cry goes unheeded and where we have a Father who looks on us with unceasing love, ready to welcome us back home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas
December 31, 2023

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Jw0-LExyc

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tronick

No Small Thing

In recent years, I have made an annual practice of rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol around Christmas. It’s partly for selfish reasons. Having been in parish ministry for as long as I have, I find it increasingly difficult to settle into the Christmas spirit without a little help. The myriad tasks that need to be accomplished before Christmas always seem to get in the way, which makes it a joy and cozy comfort to pick up A Christmas Carol and reread it each year.

But in doing so, I always discover why Dickens’s famous story has such charm. It’s a good story. And it’s not only a good story. There are theological themes running throughout it as well. It was in the middle of this year’s rereading of that story that I found my attention drawn to the part where Scrooge is taken on a visit by the Ghost of Christmas Past. With the help of this Spirit, he goes back to his childhood, recalling with great sadness the loneliness of his early years in school and the later poignant parting with an early love because he had chosen worldly gain over devotion to her.

He becomes painfully aware of all the missed chances of his past, and he realizes how jaded and unhappy he has become. It’s nearly unbearable for poor old Scrooge, and as he recalls those lost opportunities, something begins to change in him. His visit to the past plants a seed for his transformation.

The changing Scrooge begins to give voice to this in a scene from Christmas Past where he revisits his apprenticeship to Mr. Fezziwig. Scrooge’s defining characteristics may be his miserliness and idolatry of work and money, but as he remembers his time working for Mr. Fezziwig, he begins to understand that there’s something more to life than the daily grind and money.

In the scene of Christmas Past, as the clock strikes seven, Mr. Fezziwig puts down his pen, laughs, and calls his apprentices into the room and says that no more work should be done. It’s Christmas Eve! “Let’s have the shutters up. . . before a man can say Jack Robinson!” he says. And before you know it, a fiddler appears, as well as Mrs. Fezziwig, and three Misses Fezziwigs, and a whole host of other people, including some unfortunates. They’ve come to the impromptu ball! Before long, they’re all dancing and making merry until eleven o’clock at night. Each guest is then wished Merry Christmas by the Fezziwigs and all go to bed. It’s a marvelous Christmas Eve.

As Scrooge relives this wonderful memory, the Ghost of Christmas Past slyly goads him, saying that it must be a small matter for Mr. Fezziwig “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.” But Scrooge retorts vehemently that it’s no small thing at all. And the Ghost replies, “Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”

And then, in what he says next, Scrooge inadvertently reveals how he has changed. As the story tells us, Scrooge begins to speak as his “former self,” not as his “latter self.” He replies defensively to the Ghost that the happiness given by Fezziwig’s impromptu ball “is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” Through his visit to Christmas Past, Scrooge’s latter self has been transformed a bit into his former self.[1]

When on Christmas Eve we hear of Jesus’s birth from Luke’s Gospel, we hear of good news brought into a world of sin. We hear of perfect humanity, who’s also perfect divinity, being born into a world that is deeply broken after its Fall in the Book of Genesis. We might say that in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes to save humanity in its latter self.

But on Christmas Day, in John’s Gospel, we go back even farther in time—beyond time, really—to a time before the Fall of humanity. We’re reminded of the cosmic origins of existence, of the eternal nature of the Word that eventually becomes flesh in Jesus. We’re reminded of the beauty of creation when all things came into being through the Word, who always was with the Father and the Holy Spirit. We’re reminded in the opening words of John’s Gospel, with its allusions to the Book of Genesis, that God called everything very good. We’re reminded that in the eternally creative gesture of God, there was life, and that life was the light of all people. That light is eternal. It’s a light that can’t be squelched by darkness. Indeed, darkness can’t even comprehend the mystery of this true light because it’s such a great light. On Christmas Day, it’s as if our own Spirit guide is the Holy Spirit, taking us back through our own collective story with the help of St. John. And this Spirit helps us to recall our former selves, selves created in the image of God and destined to become children of God. In some sense, because we live after the Fall, we’ve never truly known these selves. But they exist eternally in the mind of God.

On Christmas, it’s as if we need two sides of a beautiful coin. On one side, in the darkness of Christmas Eve, we must recognize the reality of sin and evil in our lives, and we must acknowledge that our Savior was born into that reality to save it. We recognize that Jesus was born into peasantry, under the boot of a ruthless empire, in a smelly manger, and with all the messiness of childbirth, and with a destiny to die brutally on a cross. But in the dawn of Christmas morning, we are guided by John’s Gospel to the true source of our life in the creative eternity of God, where the Word who eventually became flesh always existed. And in doing so, we catch a glimpse of our former self.

Like Scrooge, our former self has been hijacked by all the wrong things. The mighty dollar has become our god. We’ve turned inwards on ourselves out of self-preservation. We’ve turned against others because we have essentially forgotten who we are and to whom we belong. We’ve forgotten our former self, which is in the origins of a creation destined for goodness. And in forgetting our former self, we’ve forgotten how much God looks with favor on us. We’ve forgotten that God created us and called us—yes, us!—very good along with all the rest of creation that we carelessly ravage. Amid our busy lives and addictions to so many things, we’ve forgotten that we can always put the pen down, like Mr. Fezziwig, and say enough. Let’s dance. Let’s have a ball. And Scrooge was right about that. It’s not a small thing. The fullness of life and joy given to us when we remember our former self “is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

And when we remember that past and our former self, can we help but be changed just a bit? When we remember our roots, from whence we came, can we still continue acting as if our latter self is all there is to our existence? A visit to the Christmas Past of our lives is a loving look back on the source of our life, who is God. And such a God created us out of love and for love, so that we can begin to receive the gift of his power to become his children, not children of the latter self but of the former self.

However, cozy Dickens’s A Christmas Carol might be considering how it ends, Scrooge’s visit to Christmas Past is both transformative and painful. It’s painful because he’s fully aware of what he’s lost, and some of it can’t come back. It’s painful, too, because he's reminded of an innocence that has vanished, of a former self inevitably colored by a latter self.

Perhaps it’s the same for us. On this day, we glimpse our past and our former self with the help of St. John, and we mourn our losses and the reality of the latter self that governs our lives. But we also rejoice in the good news that our latter self can eventually be transformed into our former self. This is John’s version of the good news. From whence we came is ultimately where we’re invited to return. We were made good and destined to be good. And in visiting the Christmas Past of our former self, we dare to hope that by God’s marvelous grace, one day, we, too, will live as our former self in the age to come. And that’s no small thing. It’s “quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 25, 2023

[1] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009), 35-37.

If You See Something, Say Something

I never had the privilege of visiting New York City before 9/11, which I rather regret. I wish I’d known that great city before. So, when I eventually moved to Manhattan in 2004, I came to know New York only as it was colored with hypervigilance and anxiety. It seemed like everywhere I turned—on the subway, on the bus, on the streets—I was confronted with signs blaring a consistent message of caution: if you see something, say something.

It’s hard for many of us to imagine a world where we aren’t constantly looking for something that might cause us harm. These days, it might as well be in our online banking accounts or in the physical places we had long thought to be the safest. We seem to be living in a time when we’re always looking for bad news and then saying something about it. Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised when something struck me this past week as I was engaging in my usual morning ritual of browsing through the news headlines.

I typically look at two major newspapers, and after consulting the first one, I came to the sobering conclusion that having scrolled through well over ten headlines, I hadn’t seen even one piece of good news. Not one! Honestly, I would have taken a silly, ridiculous headline as a gesture of levity, or even a made-up story. A joke—somebody tell a joke, please! But I couldn’t even find that. So, I went to my second newspaper source, where I managed to find one hopeful story, having passed it by on first glance. Only after a second scouring of the headlines for good news did I realize that this seemingly ordinary story stood out for bearing some news that could lighten the heart. It wasn’t a headline about politics or the economy or one more war. It was about a non-profit offering cooking lessons for youth dealing with food insecurity.[1]

And yet, why should I have been surprised to have such difficulty finding good news? I’m assuming that this Christmas Eve night, you come here weighed down with the same headlines that are burdening me. I’m assuming that you’ve had little more success than I in finding some good news out there. You, too, have been conditioned to say something when you see something. And we all know that the things we see and about which we must say something are usually not good. They’re terrifying. These days, most of what we tell out is rooted in fear.

If there had been news headlines in Bethlehem all those years ago, they might not have seemed much different from our own, or at least, they would have echoed a similar litany of bad news. There were crucifixions, there were the usual poor living under the chokehold of the Roman empire, there were the vast systemic injustices, and there were families on the run at the command of the political powers, just like Mary, Joseph, and their expected child.

Scrolling through those headlines would have been as futile an exercise as our modern one. Where’s the good news? There was just so much fear. If you see something, say something, because there were many things to be afraid of. But off the screen of the news headlines, something was happening that would quietly change everything. Upon second glance at the headlines, if you knew where to look, it was the most unbelievable good news.

This thing was happening off the radar because the good news was intentionally not being announced to royalty but to humble shepherds outside the major cities and in the quiet of a lonely night. The good news was heard by these ordinary folk living close to the land and attuned to nature and the skies. It was to these poor folk that a sign was given.

They knew the headlines, too, like their contemporaries. They knew it was all bad news probably because they were living in the thick of that bad news, which is why they needed a sign. It’s also why they could appreciate that sign. Upon hearing that their Savior had been born, they, like everyone else, would have been looking for him in a palace or at the head of armies. But the angels’ sign told them what to look for and where to find it in the most unlikely of places.

And they went with haste, looking for their good news. They eventually found the mother, father, and baby after looking all over, after a thorough search. They had searched thoroughly because that good news wasn’t so easy to find. That good news was wrapped in bands of cloth—a poor man’s clothes—in an animal’s feeding trough, and it was in a small city with a big claim to fame. And no one was looking there, except for them.

But they tenaciously turned everything upside down, and they found him. They found their good news, a crying baby, the Word made flesh who couldn’t yet speak a word. And it dawned on them that they had seen something and so they must say something. This Savior who had inverted the world’s power dynamic had now inverted their language of fear. They no longer needed to speak about the bad news of the world. They could speak about the good news. If you see something, say something.

And they did say something. They told it to so many people, who wondered and were amazed. They announced to the world this incredible news, always lying quietly and unexpectedly below the depressing headlines. We, too, are the recipient of their good news, and we, like them, know the sign for which we should be diligently seeking. After scrolling through headline after headline of despair, we know from those lowly shepherds that the good news is always born for us, perhaps most vividly in the places that seem the most unpromising. That good news was born, oh, so many years ago. It’s still born today. And it will be born forever.

We know what the sign tells us. Go and look in the most surprising locations, and there you will see where heaven and earth are joined. Go to the helpless and the lonely. Go to the people hiding in the fallout shelters of war. Go to the poor wrapped not in royal clothes but in ragged bands of cloth. Go to those wandering the streets and searching for room in an inn. Go inside your own souls, which might seem confused, hurting, or lost, and there you will find the Christ Child, speaking his word of truth into your own life. You can find it if you know the sign and if you’re willing to search for it. And when you see something, say something.

The mystery of Christmas, which is papered over with tinsel and meaningless platitudes this time of year, is that this good news isn’t easy to find. And we can’t find it without some help. But we have been given a sign. Look away from the headlines and into the rough but vibrant world around you, and you will find the good news. It’s there. And when you see something, say something.

Or better yet, sing about it. Break into song like the angels. Sing about the peace that’s so difficult to find but that is possible and does exist in hidden corners on this earth. Sing about a peace that can exist, even in Israel and Palestine, where Peace himself was born as a little child. Sing about a God who has such good will towards us that he will constantly be born anew in us to show us his love. Sing about a God who tells his good news first to shepherds and not to kings. Sing about a merciful God who chooses to work off the headlines and in the corners of the earth, in stables, and who can work in war zones and, yes, even on Capitol Hill. Sing about a God who himself sings his way into our lives, rather than scolding us.

Let us sing this night about that marvelous thing seen by shepherds in Bethlehem so long ago. Let us sing with thanksgiving that they decided to say something after that had seen something and that their language of fear was transformed into joy. Let’s sing about a God who invites us not to look for bad news in the headlines but asks us to see his good news, all around us and in the most unlikely of places. Glorify a God who changes our own fear into rejoicing.

Go and run with haste to find that God and his good news. And this will be a sign for you: you will find that good news off the beaten path, out of the headlines, and nearer to you than you can imagine. You will find this Child in the stranger and forsaken, in the lonely and unloved, in the imprisoned and in the depressed. And you will also find him in your own conflicted hearts, always, ready to be born anew. And when you see this good news, remember that you have one more thing to do. Say something. Or better yet, sing that something with all your heart. And whatever you do, never stop singing.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2023

[1] “Teenagers say they don’t have anything to do. Philly Bridge & Jawn taught them how to cook for one another,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 21, 2023: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/pbj-bridge-jawn-kensington-teens-cooking-20231221.html?query=jawn

If and Only If

Have you noticed that a growing trend in modernity seems to be the loss of nuance in language? We’re rightly concerned about the power of words and how words can be used in damaging ways, but we still struggle to make room for such caution and also retain the great variety of meaning that words can convey.

The beauty of language is that so much meaning lies in what is not evident on the surface. Sometimes that beauty is most palpable in what the words leave unsaid. And what is often unsaid must be supplied by our imaginations. This ambivalence in meaning should create a sense of humility, where we don’t claim to know more than we do. Unfortunately, this isn’t usually the case.

Take, for instance, a conditional “if” statement in English. If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car will slow down. This is fairly straightforward, isn’t it? It’s a generally accepted fact that brakes cause cars to slow down. In the way this conditional statement is worded, there is little doubt about what will happen if you put your foot on the brake.

But let’s say that we change the words up a bit. If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down. Now, we’re in a different territory altogether. It’s not at all certain that the driver will put her foot on the brake, and consequently, it’s not at all assured that the car will slow down.

And the nuance of meaning can be probed even further. We don’t know whether the statement is a slightly passive-aggressive, scolding injunction to drive slower: If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down. Or if the speaker is simply stating something that is more impossible than possible because the driver has a penchant for going above the speed limit: If you put your foot on the brake while driving, the car would slow down.  

Speech matters. Tone matters. Inflection matters. But unfortunately, we don’t have many of those rather musical details in Scripture. So, we’re often left wondering what something in the text means. And in that, maybe there’s a wonderful gift for us. What, then, do the angel Gabriel’s words suggest to Mary?

Gabriel tells her that many seemingly impossible things will happen. Mary will conceive in her womb and bear a son, whom she will name Jesus. And he will be great and be called the Son of the Most High. He will receive the throne of his father David and reign over the house of Jacob forever. And there will be no end to his kingdom.

This doesn’t seem evident at all to a young virgin, so Mary asks how. And Gabriel continues to elucidate. The Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her. Because of her favored status with God, so many things will happen to her.

It seems as if Gabriel states what will happen by the hand of God as if there is no question about it. But despite that assurance, there lingers in the midst of such confident speech that beautiful question of Our Lady: how? How shall this be, since I have no husband?

There’s so much about the how that we don’t know. Does Mary doubt that all this can happen? Does she have any say in the matter? Is the impossible possible? Will Gabriel’s words come true regardless of what Mary says? There’s so much we don’t know, and that is a beautiful thing.

For a moment, let’s imagine a Mary who’s not over-sentimentalized or meek to the point of having no agency. Let’s imagine a Mary whose body is not forcefully taken by God to accomplish his purposes. Let’s imagine a Mary who has free will like any other human, who doesn’t know how all this will happen, but who knows that it will happen if she assents. So, there’s only one way she can respond to the words spoken to her by the angel. Let it be to me according to your word. Because of who she knows God to be, this is her only response.

And here’s where so much of the world laughed, has laughed, and will continue to laugh. When the impossible is accepted as possible, the world laughs. It’s why Sarah laughed when she was told she would bear a son in her nineties. It’s why people in the crowd laughed at Jesus when he said the little girl he had healed was not dead but merely sleeping. It’s why even some Christians have laughed at the thought of a young virgin conceiving a son apart from knowing a man. It’s why people laughed at Jesus on the cross when he cried out for his Father. It’s why others laughed at an empty tomb. It’s why our own contemporaries laugh at the hope of achievable peace or merciful government policies or a Church that is still around in a hundred years. They laugh because they’ve equated understanding how something will transpire with its possibility. They laugh because they lack the grace of Mary.

But over and over again, we’ve heard and still hear and will hear what God has done, is doing, and will do. God has brought his people out of slavery into freedom by dividing a sea in two. God has brought his people home from captivity when they never thought they’d see Jerusalem again. God has given many barren women the gift of children, especially when others laughed at them. God has stuck with his stubborn people through thick and thin and even when they scoffed at him and complained. God has saved the world through the life and death of his only-begotten Son even though some laughed at his works. God has raised that very Son from the dead and made even an unreliable group of fallible humans his living Body on earth to accomplish his will in the world. Laugh if you will, but this is the God to whom Mary says yes. Let it be to me according to your word.

When the angel Gabriel tells Mary what God will do for her and the world, it sounds to us as if God is trying to bulldoze his way into Mary’s world and ours to save it. But when Gabriel says that God will and can do all that, the future nevertheless hangs on that final answer from the Blessed Virgin: let it be to me according to your word. It’s like a conditional statement that carries all the real possibility of being fulfilled if and only if, the gift of that possibility is accepted by the receiver. Yes. Let it be to me according to your word.

And this is where we are. We stand like Mary between two clauses of an unfinished sentence. God has told us what he will do. God has said that he will give peace to this world. God has said that he loves us unconditionally, and so no matter the worst we have done, if we turn to God, he will forgive us. God has said that everything he has made is very good, and that God will continue to love it as very good. God has said that all is not lost and that he will give us a glorious future. All this God has said he will do.

If and only if we ask not how God will do it but how we can be used by God in that prepared future, we will be a little closer to the posture of the Blessed Mother, who asked how and yet believed. She believed that she could bear the Son of God because God said she could. She believed that in spite of her questions, she would be the meeting place of heaven and earth where the lowly would be exalted and the hungry would be fed and the poor would have what they need and all who were laughed at for the sake of God’s kingdom would eventually rejoice.

For nothing is impossible with God. Indeed everything is possible, despite those who would rather laugh. God will do all that he has promised, but we must say yes. And aided by the prayers of the Blessed Mother and all who have said yes after her, we, too, can ask how and still say yes. Let it be to me according to your word.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2023

A Light in the Darkness

This past week I found myself pondering two things that I encountered online. The first was an opinion essay in the New York Times called “Finding Light in Winter,”[1] written by a clinical psychologist. She argues that if we want to find light amid the darkness, we can do so. The author isn’t naïve; she’s actually pretty honest about all the darkness surrounding us: the wars, the dysfunction in our government, the mass shootings, and the perilous plight of refugees fleeing unstable countries. Rather than ignoring all that darkness, she notes that she would simply fall apart if she couldn’t find the light that still shines.

She wants to find the light because she has a generally favorable view of humanity. She believes that most people desire peace and want to do good. It’s just that it’s difficult to see such goodness because there’s so much darkness. In response, she has cultivated intentional ways of finding the light in her life. She rises early to watch the sun appear in the sky. She treasures special moments with her family. She meditates and prays. She looks constantly for the light.

And then the second thing that grabbed my attention this past week was the Facebook post written by a former seminary classmate of mine, who provocatively suggested that we should abandon Advent. For him, Advent has become just one more way that people over-anticipate Christmas, causing Advent to lose its meaning.

While I did not enter the fray of lively commentary in response to his post, I quickly noted how much pushback he received, and it wasn’t pushback grounded in a desire to prematurely sneak Christmas into Advent. Rather, I detected a loving defense of a season of waiting and anticipation, and I suspect that this love of Advent is, if unconsciously, rooted in a desire to find light within the darkness. Advent is a season in which we’re brutally honest about the darkness that seems to prevail while also looking with hope for the light that can shine within it, indeed in spite of it.

It's to this light that John testifies. For the second week in a row, we meet him in Scripture, although he’s depicted differently by Mark and John. Mark’s John is “the Baptist,” the rugged man who’s a precursor of the Christ, an edgy prophet crying out in the wilderness. But John’s John is not called the Baptist, nor does he seem to be the center of attention. His primary function is to do one thing: to point to Jesus, the true light that has come into the world.

And John does this in the most peculiar way. He states unequivocally what he’s not. He’s not the Christ. He’s not the prophet. He’s not Elijah. He might be a voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord, but by saying who he’s not, he effectively points to the true light, which is Jesus Christ. It’s as if John is the first exemplar of the via negative or “negative theology” that tries to speak about God by saying what God is not, or by saying rather little about God at all, lest we make God too small.

But there’s something powerful in John’s negations, which aren’t merely negative or pessimistic. There’s something in them that’s both oddly clarifying and oddly hopeful. By acknowledging that there’s one greater than he, John acknowledges that the One who is Messiah, who is the great Deliverer, is beyond what we can fathom. And best of all, that One comes to us in the darkness.

It's rather like finding light in winter. The author of the New York Times essay was not making an explicitly Chrisitan argument, but her point does apply to our Christian belief. And our belief is that there is real darkness in the world, and to deny that reality is to deceive ourselves and to do great harm at the same time. To pretend as if there’s no sin or evil is to diminish the profound suffering of the innocent civilian caught in the conflict between Hamas and Israel or the despair of the person struggling with depression as the days get shorter or the helplessness of the student bullied by teachers and students alike. To ignore sin and evil is to be morally irresponsible.

And yet, the darkness is not the complete picture of reality, nor is it the truest picture of it, which is precisely why my seminary classmate’s post about getting rid of Advent is off the mark, in my opinion. We do need Advent. We need it because it’s the season in which we both confront the reality of darkness in our midst and profess that it doesn’t have the last word. The final word can only be spoken by the Word made flesh, who is the true light that lightens the world.

And all this makes Advent a peculiar and glorious season. We allow some joy of Christmas to break into this shadowy world, when in the northern hemisphere, the days are dark and short. But we honor the waiting for Christmas to arrive. To ignore the waiting is to pretend as if only the light exists, as if everyone must be perpetually happy at Christmas, as if there is no darkness, sin, or evil.

And this is where we are called to be like John, the one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord. We are called to point to the true light of the world by saying what that light is not. And that light is not so many things. It’s not the power-mongering of war, corporate greed, institutional dishonesty, unforgiving anger, the careless ignoring of the needy, the celebration of division, or the insidious individualism that threatens our collective identity. The true light is precisely what those things are not.

When we acknowledge what the light is not, we need not become reactionary or negative. We testify to something to which John himself witnessed: that despite the darkness, there is a light that shines with hope and glory beyond our imagining. We’re never told that the light that enlightens the world drowns out the darkness. We’re just told that it can’t be extinguished by the darkness. This true light is brave and strong and loving enough to come to us in the darkness.

And this is such good news for all who are lonely, suffering addictions, struggling financially, or locked in a prison cell. Their situations are real and horrible, but the final word is given by the true light that shines into their lives in spite of overwhelming darkness.

In the overwhelming physical darkness of this time of year, as I was closing the church after Evening Prayer on Tuesday, I found a handwritten card in the basket at the back of the church. It was another iteration of a prayer intention that has been left routinely in this church by someone coming in to pray. The intention asked us to pray for a son who has been addicted to drugs for fifteen years. Despite much prayer, nothing has changed. The writer of the card said they were losing their faith and beginning to give up on God. My heart broke. I brought the card to the sacristy, and I have kept that card with me as I pray the Daily Office as a reminder to hold that son close in prayer.

The cry for help on that card is a reminder that there’s darkness in this world, persistent darkness. But that card’s plaintive cry is answered by John’s cry in the wilderness of darkness, a cry of persistent hope. It’s a hope I want the son’s parent to feel. I want that parent to know that even in winter, there’s light. I want the parent to know that the darkness of the son’s addiction is not the true light, but that the true light is still there with that son. It shines hope into a world dark with addiction and violence and despair. The true light has come into the world and still comes and will come again. It still shines because of a resurrection and in spite of a crucifixion. It’s greater than we are, it’s greater than John was, and it’s not what we often think it's supposed to be. This light can always be found in the darkness, because although there are many things it is not, what it is not cannot overcome it.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 17, 2023

[1]Mary Pipher, “Finding Light in Winter”, The New York Times, December 11, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/love-light-winter-darkness.html

On the Backroads

As we say in Godly Play with the children during Sunday School, “some people think that time is in a line.” Don’t most of us? Inevitably, our lives are oriented around time in a line. On a recent trip south for Thanksgiving, Google Maps wanted to prevent my car from going on the backroads. My husband and I were deliberately trying to avoid I-95 and major thoroughfares, and it took quite a lot of work to outsmart Google Maps to stay on the backroads. Google Maps seems to think it’s smarter than all of us, and it’s certainly even more impatient than we impatient moderns tend to be.

My spouse and I wanted to go on the quieter country roads, because driving there is far more pleasant. As the crow flies, it was not an expedient journey, but it was worth the extra time. We saw lovely foliage and old farmhouses, even though Google Maps was constantly rerouting our journey, trying to take us back to the highways.

Time in a line also encompasses more than just geographical time. We plan our careers and our futures as if time is really in a line. What’s the quickest way to make the most amount of money? Can you avoid the low-level menial paying jobs and go straight to the top? Sometimes I wonder whether I have wasted years. Was the nine years spent studying music in college and graduate school a waste of time if I’m no longer serving as a professional musician? Was it worth all that student loan debt?

But if I recall that time is not always in a line, I usually settle on the conclusion that it was worth every minute of the excursion. It was worth all the experiences of living in New York City and studying with a fantastic teacher. It was worth meeting my spouse. And going to seminary after all that study to prepare for ordination was worth it, too. There’s no second of life on the backroads of life that can be extracted from who I am now. If time is only in a line, then it’s just the churning of cogs in a mechanistic world, and it’s pretty meaningless.

But this isn’t easy for us to understand in our modern world. Aside from communities on the backroads of life, where the pace is slower and people live closer to the ground, it’s very difficult to comprehend time that’s not in a line. It’s hard not to honk at the car in front of you that doesn’t advance a millisecond after the light turns green. It’s hard to wait to spend all the money you received in your annual raise. It’s hard not knowing some piece of information, so you must look it up immediately on Wikipedia. It’s hard to wait for Christmas, so we put the tree up before Thanksgiving.

It's hard, too, to let the person with whom you disagree finish their sentence, without stepping on their words with your rebuttal. It’s hard to await the biopsy results on that tumor that was removed. It’s hard not to share a piece of news instantly, even if a delay would be more prudent depending on the circumstance. It’s hard to invest more money in ministry while the stock market goes down, especially when it might go back up later.

It’s not easy to listen to the reader who goes unhurriedly through the precious words of Scripture because we want to devour it as fast as we do every other book we read. It’s painful to watch more suffering and starvation and violence on the evening news without wanting to fix it all. It’s frustrating to watch the newcomer to the faith struggle their way out of bad theology without wanting to correct it all immediately. For most of us, time is definitely in a line.

Way back on that timeline, the author of Second Peter wrote a letter that probably took an ungodly amount of time to reach its addressees, who were early Christians living nearly a hundred years after Jesus’s death. The letter was timely, coming as it did decades of time in a line from the remarkable events in Jerusalem centered around an empty tomb and a promise. At that point on the time-in-a-line line, there were many naysayers and scoffers, not unlike modern day ones. I’m sure you’ve encountered them.

They’re the ones who scoff at our foolishness for waiting on a promised kingdom that hasn’t yet fully arrived. Meanwhile, wars rage, children starve, and there’s yet one more school shooting. The scoffers, for whom time is in a line, have given up on God. Any attempt to explain that with God, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day will elicit more scoffing. It’s just an excuse, they say, to cover for a God who doesn’t act in history and might well not even exist.

There are other scoffers who haven’t necessarily given up on God, but who believe that God’s timing needs a little help. They’re the ones who have no time for worship and prayer because action is all that matters. They’re the ones who must respond immediately to every perceived injustice without prayerfully discerning the appropriate time to act. They’re the ones who simplify complex issues with hasty solutions. They’re the ones who talk over those who disagree with them.

And there are yet other scoffers who aren’t outwardly rash or contemptuously atheistic but who still behave as if time is in a line. They’ve simply grown weary with waiting for God to shine some light into the persistently oppressive darkness. They’ve lost hope in the promise made so long ago that a new kingdom would be ushered in to last forever. For these scoffers, impatience is the root of despair. It's to all these scoffers and those persecuted by scoffers that the author of 2 Peter speaks, offering a marvelous invitation into time that isn’t in a line because time in a line misses far too many backroads and far too much hidden goodness.

On the backroads of life, our sense of time changes. We realize that impatience with God, ourselves, and others, usually emerges out of our own self-centered individualism. Sometimes our motives for acting out of impatience are simply ways of trying to alleviate our own discomfort. It’s not at all easy to conceive of time that’s not in a line. We have no concept of the fullness of time, God’s time where one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.

For a world where time is in a line, every prayer that seems unanswered and every day away from the advent of God’s perfect kingdom is another reason why God can’t be actively involved in our world. But what we can’t see is that God’s timing is perfect in its fullness. We can hardly conceive that what appears to be tardiness might be an incredible gesture of mercy and compassion from a God who is waiting for us to find him, ourselves, and others, and above all, to find love.

As we begin to envision time outside of a line, we see that the quick and easy toll roads of life are usually not the best way. They’re not the best way because on those speedy thoroughfares, we miss each other, and we miss God. We miss the fact that our own salvation is not all that matters. The salvation of others matters, too, and our own salvation is caught up with theirs. On the fast toll roads, we miss the moments of grace to become patient with one another, which is how we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. On the interstates of life, we miss the fact that God has been so infinitely patient with us that God has sent his beloved Son as his perfect revelation in the fullness of time. And it could only happen when the time was right.

Oddly enough, the delay of our Lord’s Second Coming isn’t proof that God is slow to act or gone from the picture. It means that God cares for us far more than we can imagine. And God cares for every other soul on this planet, too, so much that God would be as patient as is required so that not one soul will perish.

Know this: the scoffers among us will try to outsmart our backroad routes and bring us to the quicker highways. They will try to take away our hope and our patience. They will claim to know the best way for us to travel. But no one knows the way better than our God, who’s so infinitely patient with us that he’s willing to take as much time as is necessary to bring us all into the kingdom. And when one soul is lost on the way, such a God will take all the time needed to bring that one soul back. And that’s a God I can take all the time in the world to follow.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 10, 2023

What We Don't Know Will Help Us

“I think we’re living in the end times.” That’s what Mrs. Murray said to me as I was giving her a ride home one Sunday evening. Mrs. Murray did occasional cleaning at the inner-city school where I was working at the time, and because she didn’t have a car, I would sometimes drive her home after the Sunday evening Mass.

When she told me that she believed we were living in the end times, we were riding through a much-neglected part of the city. My car was fighting with potholes, as we drove past houses that looked structurally unsound. Mrs. Murray had told me before about the gun violence in her neighborhood, how she would hear gunshots at night and how people were often killed right down the street from her house. Sadly, this was nothing extraordinary for her; it was simply part of her distressing world.

I remember thinking to myself that I didn’t agree with Mrs. Murray on the imminence of the end times. But how could I fault her for thinking the end of time was near? Every day was a struggle for her and her family. It was a nightmare for many who lived in the neighborhood through which I was driving, where trash littered the streets because the city had not provided enough garbage cans and where yet another shooting was seen as just one more statistic, barely worth a mention in the newspaper.

Add to that the nation’s political situation at the time, the ever-increasing despair around environmental issues, and the deep anxiety of a world reeling from repeated acts of terrorism, then maybe Mrs. Murray was on to something. Maybe the end was near. Or at the very least, it wouldn’t be foolish to look at the signs and think so.

Mrs. Murray certainly wasn’t alone in feeling that the world was coming to an end. If I had a penny for every connection made between natural disasters and the apocalypse, I would be a rich man. Novels about the end times make the bestseller lists, and bizarre cults form around definitive predictions of when the Son of Man will appear, coming on the clouds to judge the world and gather the righteous, and of course, doom all others to eternal punishment. Everybody, it seems, wants to know when. From Scripture, we seem to know what will happen, but the real unanswered question is when.

And that’s precisely what Jesus says we cannot know. Immediately before today’s Gospel passage, Jesus has described earthly suffering—wars, famines, earthquakes, and great anxiety—that he says are not yet the end. They’re only the birth pangs. They’re the natural sufferings of earthly life that will demand endurance and patience from his disciples. It’s during those difficult times that false prophets will arise, attempting to mislead us. But the end times are not yet here.

Jesus, insistently, won’t tell us when the end will be, but he does tell us what will happen. The end of the age will be a cosmic event that upends a world ravaged by sin and subverts oppressive worldly powers. Jesus provides an image of how comprehensive this transformation of the world will be so that we can recognize it when it arrives. But the time of that exact hour is not for us to know. It’s as if what we don’t know won’t hurt us, as the saying goes.         

And yet, it certainly seems as if not knowing is working against us. Think of the definitive hope we could have if we just knew when it would all occur. Think of how prepared we could be to greet our Lord at his Second Coming. Think of the hope it would give to Mrs. Murray in her under-resourced neighborhood, waking up at night to gunshots and longing to sleep for one night without being awakened to violence. Think of what such knowledge would do for Israeli and Palestinian hostages who can’t communicate with their families and to Ukrainian civilians enduring an endless crisis. Think of the hope it would give to anyone whose earthly existence feels like hell itself. Why wouldn’t we want to know when the end will come? Because if the end comes soon, things will surely be better soon. And for some, hoping for the end to come very soon is worth enduring the present suffering.

I can’t blame those like Mrs. Murray who interpret present human suffering as a sure and certain sign that the end is near. They’re looking for hope. In this sense, they’re unlike the irresponsible Christians who wield the end of time as a stick of fear to beat others into compliance. But Jesus has already told us that the vivid reality of earthly suffering is not yet the end. It’s only the beginning of the birth pangs, something to be endured patiently and bravely until God truly brings in his kingdom. We can’t know the when of that advent. It’s as if Jesus knows what’s best for us, and what’s best for us is that what we don’t know won’t hurt us. Indeed, what we don’t know will actually help us. Not knowing, it appears, is an indescribable gift.

Because if we really think about it, knowing when would do no good at all. Worrying and fretting about when causes us to be either impatient and foolish, or too patient and slothful. If we knew when, we would be tempted to sleep through the present and abdicate our responsibilities. It would cause us, like many Christians, to focus so much on the end of time that the present means nothing, giving us permission to squander creation and live recklessly.

On the other hand, worrying about the delay of when it will all happen, can create such impatience that humanity tries to become its own savior, refusing to wait in patience for the Second Coming of our true Savior. Knowing when would prompt us to do the right things for the wrong reasons. In short, fretting about when causes us to live in great fear and anxiety or in egregious laziness, which only increases the world’s problems. It causes us to look only to the future instead of receiving the gift of the present.

But maybe Mrs. Murray was partly right. Maybe we are living in the end times to some extent. Maybe this undergirds the invitation latent in Jesus’ words to his disciples as he approaches the cross. Watch. Keep awake. You don’t know when, but you do know what has happened and what will happen. And that’s a gift.

Unlike those disciples hearing Jesus’s words, we know that our Lord was crucified on a cross, inverting the world’s power dynamic for all time. And because of that what, we know that death no longer has dominion over us. We know that sin has been defeated, and the devil has been trampled down. We know that the Holy Spirit has been given to us, to lead us into all truth. We know that we are the living Body of Christ with a powerful role in God’s mission in the world. And we know that although Christ will come again to bring in the perfection of God’s kingdom, because he has already come, the end times are already, in some sense, breaking into this age although not fully realized.

The time in which we live is only the birth pangs of earthly tribulation, where violence reigns, injustice is rampant, and the world seems to be crumbling around us. It’s a time of great testing that will demand our utmost patience. It will require us to be watchful and awake. It will require us to be a people alive with the Gospel, who live not in constant fear or anxiety but with an animated sense of hope borne out of the good news we have received in Christ.

The gift of not knowing is that in the most uncertain times, we find the most surprising gifts. When we don’t know the future, we live in the present, and we see that daily, the risen Christ comes into our lives. Daily, the Holy Spirit drives us to some action that we find has blessed another. Daily, God sends yet another person to this parish to use her gifts for the building up of the kingdom. Daily, our unknown future leads us into unexpected ministry that we would never have otherwise found.

When we don’t know when but when we trust in what will happen, we live boldly. We take risks in ministry. We live generously. And while waiting patiently for the perfection of God’s reign, we also live with urgent expectation that the present can be better than it seems to be. In short, we live in hope because we know that Christ has come, and that has upended our world. We know that he still comes, and that inspires us to live fully in the present. And we know that he will come again at the end of the age to judge the world and establish righteousness.

So, maybe Mrs. Murray was partly correct. We are living in the end times. Already partly here, and not yet fully realized. And while we don’t know when that glorious end will come with Christ riding on the clouds, we do know what it will be. It will be something infinitely more wonderful than we can ask or imagine. And something that wonderful, whenever it does come, can only appear from outside our world, riding on the clouds.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
December 3, 2023

Closer than It Appears

On Christmas Eve of 2008, a vibrant Anglo-Catholic parish in a major American city was celebrating our Lord’s nativity on Christmas Eve. The church was bedecked with garlands of greenery. The pews were full. The organ was sounding in its full glory. The Mass opened with a procession around the church and happy voices loudly singing “O come, all ye faithful.”

It was during that procession that several choir members, and I’m sure others, noticed the homeless man who often showed up for Mass at this inner-city church. He was hard to miss because he was wearing what he always wore, no matter the weather: a bulky silver winter coat that shimmered in the light. He was standing at the back of the crowded church, which was not surprising because it was Christmas Eve, and the pews were packed.

The sight of this frequent attender of Masses was only surprising the next day when the choir members picked up the local newspaper and saw that the homeless visitor spotted the previous night at Mass had been brutally murdered on the city streets. The most surprising thing of all was that the murder had happened on Christmas Eve, before the Mass where he was seen.

Although those who confidently assert that they saw the man that night were at first shocked upon learning of his tragic death, perhaps they weren’t entirely surprised to consider that he might have been spotted at the back of the church where he so often attended Mass. It was a place where he found refuge. It was a place where he was seen and welcomed, not ignored. And of all nights to be there, why not Christmas Eve?

The congregation of that church was gathered to celebrate the nativity of Christ and revel in the mystery of the Incarnation and its radical claim that God became so intimately wrapped up in the lives of human beings that God, in Christ, took on human flesh. The people gathered in that church would have heard St. Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, but of course, in the backs of their minds, they would have supplemented the story with details from St. Matthew’s birth narrative. They would have been potently aware of Christmas’s special significance: that Christ is Emmanuel, God-with-us. God in Christ is revealed to be rather like the message in the rearview mirror of cars: closer than God appears.

In that Anglo-Catholic parish, which was firmly committed to honoring the Real Presence of Christ in the poor on the streets of a troubled, deeply segregated city, parishioners would have understood that receiving Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar was inextricably connected with receiving Christ’s presence in the poor, homeless, hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, and sick. And on that Christmas Eve, God showed up tangibly in both the Sacrament of the Altar and in the vision of a man who had been heinously murdered by those who were supposed to treat him as if he were Christ himself.

If I were to take a poll of the room right now, I would guess that many of you have already sorted characters from this story into sheep and goats based on Matthew’s parable. It’s a scene that is full of judgment and that seems to be about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, and ultimately, a rigid reading of this parable is usually based on our own fear of judgment. But if we have learned anything from the parables of the last few weeks in Matthew’s Gospel, we have learned that our motivations for following Christ will be distorted if they are rooted in fear. And this is why the parable of the sheep and the goats is ultimately not about fear but about how God’s love is revealed in judgment. And in this realization, we find that salvation is closer than it initially appears.

For nearly twenty-five chapters, Matthew has reinforced a central message to his Gospel: that our salvation is tied up in the ordinary moments and actions of our life. Indeed, salvation itself is closer than it often appears. It’s not an elusive pie-in-the-sky dream. It’s not something that can be controlled or weaponized by the Church. It’s something that is freely given to all who will receive the gift, whether they profess to be Christians or whether they’re living as Christians are supposed to live without even knowing it.

So, as Matthew’s Gospel draws to a close and Advent draws nigh, we encounter this judgment scene that confounds all exclusive, fearful notions of salvation. Salvation is closer to us than we appear. It’s tied up in our willingness to live as if God is closer than he might appear. Salvation is tied up with our willingness to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the imprisoned. And in Matthew’s rather practical but convicting depiction of judgment, we find that none of us can receive salvation without each other.[1] Salvation is closer to us than it appears. God is closer to us than he might at first appear. But what is closest to us is often what we least want to face.

Such as an immigrant without a home whose life was taken on the street where he slept. His life was taken by those who should have seen in him that their own salvation was closer than it first appeared, that God himself was closer than they might imagine.

But that homeless man found his way to a place that welcomed him as they welcomed the refugee child born homeless in Bethlehem, the city where salvation became far closer than it had ever appeared. On Christmas Eve, a homeless refugee in our nation’s capital didn’t need to greet his King in a royal palace but met him face to face in the Sacrament of the Altar, where his King exchanged his royal robe for bread and wine. A congregation attired in their Sunday best could easily appreciate the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic Bread and Wine, but some also saw Christ in the presence of the man from the streets. That Christmas night, Christ was present at the east and west ends of that church, in the sacred food of the altar and in the man from the streets.

Christ is the King who exchanges his royal robes for clothes with holes in them. He is the King who exchanges the royal feast for begging for food on the street. He is the King who exchanges the sumptuous bed of a royal chamber for a cold, hard city street. Christ is the King who exchanges the lavish palace for a dank prison cell. He does it all so that heaven can become closer than it appears. Christ is the King honored at the altar and in the streets. We can’t meet Christ in the high places without also finding him in the lowest places of the earth. And in the lowest places of the earth, we find the heavenly throne room.

Christ the King is Emmanuel who comes to us in surprising vesture, although we meet him most truly when we least expect it or are aware of it. This is often when we come closest to salvation. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, neither the sheep nor the goats can understand their fate. The righteous ones are not consciously aware that they were ministering to Christ when they ministered to the needy. And the wicked ones are not consciously aware that they had failed to minister to Christ when they had failed to minister to the needy. Following Christ is about not letting our right hand know what the left is doing. And doing the right things without pretense or ulterior motive is precisely the point.

When we are blissfully conscious of meeting Christ in the ordinary, then we have found heaven. There’s no need to calculate every step of our lives for fear of losing heaven or for hope of gaining it. If we live as Christ is asking us to live, we will find heaven, partly in this life and perfectly in the next. Heaven is closer than it often appears. Is it any wonder, then, that a murdered man being welcomed towards the pearly gates might also be seen in his shiny silver coat in a church on Christmas Eve?

When the poor and needy are pawns for us to use to gain heaven, then we have found hell. When the hungry and thirsty are inconvenient to our daily comfort and when we judge them because of their situation, then we have found hell. When a person on the streets is nothing more than an object of pity, then we have not yet found heaven. When the altar is only a royal throne and not a manger of hay, then we have not understood what heaven is and we have failed to understand the kind of King that comes to us daily.

For us Christians, there must always be two altars. There must be the altar in our church, where Christ comes to us assuredly in the Blessed Sacrament, and there must be an altar on the street, where we meet Christ in the stranger and the one in need. Although it often seems that heaven is light years away in the toil and tribulations of this life, when we begin to see Christ’s royal robes shining forth from the tattered jacket of the one in need, we will learn that none of us can find heaven without each other. And heaven itself is always much closer than it appears.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
November 26, 2023

[1] I am indebted to a similar argument made by David Bentley Hart in That All Shall Be Saved (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2019), 148-149.

From 10,000 Feet

In the past year and a half, I have been relearning Spanish as a hobby. And as part of my learning project, I’ve been listening to a bilingual podcast produced by Duolingo. Recently, I listened to the story of Eréndira Sánchez, a Mexican woman who eventually fulfilled her dream of becoming a professional skydiver.

It all started when she turned fifteen. As is the custom in Mexico, Eréndira was thrown a quinceañera by her family, although hers was not a typical celebration. Hers was held at a skydiving training camp where her father worked. After everyone was gathered, her father fastened a parachute over her white quinceañera dress, and she soon found herself 10,000 feet in the air, inside an airplane with her father, waiting to jump. And jump they did, together, sharing the same parachute. For Eréndira, that day was a moment of vocational clarity when she realized that she wanted to spend the rest of her life skydiving.

Eréndira said that when skydiving, “many persons feel free. I feel happiness. When you jump from an airplane, you feel as if you are far from every worry. Suddenly, the things that seem important on Earth, look very small and insignificant from the air.”[1]

It strikes me that this is not only a helpful perspective for handling the anxieties of life but also a valuable spiritual lesson. Sometimes for me, it’s necessary to look up at the night sky or at a beautiful sunset to remind myself that my own petty worries and preoccupations are next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. I’m only one small part of a vast world where there are far larger preoccupations than my own. My usual inclination is to look at the world from ground level, where there’s so much fear. But zooming out brings me a bit closer to a perspective of abundance and freedom.

And yet, I think there’s also something more in this image of skydiving. The joy of floating in the air comes only after enormous risk. Skydiving is not for the faint of heart. It takes a gigantic leap of faith (pun intended) to jump from a plane hovering at 10,000 feet, and it takes another leap of faith to trust that when you open the parachute it will indeed open after all. At its most basic level, skydiving can be a matter of life and death.

Floating in the sky, especially at 10,000 feet, offers both a visual and spiritual perspective. Once the fear of heights is mastered and you’re soaring through the clouds, it does seem as if worries are far away. It’s as if we are seeing things from the vantage point of God.

This seems to be the primary point of the parable of the talents. A talent in this parable might be a sum of money, but in my view, this parable is primarily not a parable about money. This parable invites us to try and see things through the eyes of God by ascending to God’s vantage point.

And if we use our imaginations, we find two points of view: one is from 10,000 feet, floating in the clouds, where the things that seem so important on Earth begin to seem less significant from the sky. The other perspective is on ground level, where there are worries around every corner and the general picture is grim.

At 10,000 feet, we find God. In the parable, we might say that the master of the servants is meant to stand in for God in a human kind of way, without literalizing the allegory too much. From 10,000 feet, the master is almost certainly aware of problems in the trenches where his servants labor, but he seems far more interested in making decisions based on his abundant sense of trust. But to a casual observer on the ground, the master seems a bit foolish. He entrusts a huge sum of money to each of the servants, although those amounts vary according to the capacity of each servant to do something with the money. The master then leaves the scene, taking a massive risk that he will indeed lose everything he has handed over but feeling hopeful that he hasn’t made a mistake in the end.

Skydiving from 10,000 feet in the parable are the first two servants, who are making decisions from their awesome vantage point in the skies. The cares and worries of Earth do seem rather small and insignificant up there. Or if they aren’t necessarily insignificant, at 10,000 feet they seem to be part of a much more complicated picture.

So, the first two servants take the frightening risk of jumping out of the plane. The first servant acknowledges the trust and freedom given to him by his master, and he immediately makes five more talents from the five he has been given. Sure, the investment could have busted, but he believes it’s worth the risk. And he’s rewarded as he floats through the air after taking the leap of faith, experiencing the freedom that comes with braving risk. By the time he’s safely on the ground, the master has returned to settle accounts. The servant’s perspective on life has broadened. He has been spiritually opened up. He has already experienced the joy of which his master speaks.

The same is true for the second servant, who jumps from the plane, too, feels the freedom of freefalling in the air, lands safely on the ground, and is also praised by his master. He, too, has known the joy of being generously bold.

But at ground level is the third servant. From ground level and perhaps to us, he seems responsible and prudent. He’s overly concerned about the risk of investing his one talent. He doesn’t have the courage to take a plane to 10,000 feet and reorient his perspective on the universe, and he certainly isn’t risky enough to leap from the plane by investing the one talent entrusted to his care. Consequently, he misses out on the wild freedom of floating in the skies. He anxiously remains on Earth the entire time, and when his master returns, all he can do is hand back exactly what he was given, which he simply buried in a hole in the ground.

The principal message of this parable is really not about money at all. It’s about acknowledging who God really is and letting that form who we are. It’s no coincidence that the careful and least productive servant is the one who is afraid. And it’s no coincidence that this servant believes his master to be a hard man. Because he’s so afraid of his master, he’s not brave enough to risk the master’s displeasure or his own failure. He plays it safe, and he misses out on the 10,000-foot view.

But the first two servants operate from a 10,000-foot vantage point of generosity and abundance. They see from the outset that their master trusts them enough with a large sum of money, and they are inspired. They can do nothing except be fruitful with what they’ve been given. They understand that to receive a gift truly, it must move beyond the recipient and bless others. A real gift has a dynamic life of its own.

Where are we in this parable? If we’re at ground level, we will only be able to see things from a place of fear. If we have made God in our own image, then God is a perpetually wrathful and angry person in the sky who is just waiting for us to mess up again. And if God is like that, why in the world would we ever take a risk of faith to invest ourselves, our gifts, or yes, even our money in a risky enterprise that might change the world for the better?

But if we are more like the first two servants, we will have a different view of God and see that no matter how much we are made in God’s image, God himself is not a mirror image of our own imperfect fears, worries, and resentments. God is no wrathful person but the creative Source of all life. And God has taken an enormous risk in creating us to be utterly free. God allows us to climb onto planes, ascend to 10,000 feet, and run the risk of yanking on a parachute that might not open. God allows us to jump from planes every day in the trust that it’s worth doing to experience God’s joy.

We are rightly horrified at what we see on ground level—war, poverty, hunger, brutal violence on our streets—and these are hardly insignificant. But if we ever desire for true change to happen, we must get our heads out of the ground, where we’re burying our one talent in perpetual fear. We need to see that even one talent is a tremendous amount of money and precious gift that can change the world. We need to be risky and trust that God is actively and creatively working for good in this world, and God is doing so through us.

If we could only ascend to 10,000 feet, we might see the horrors of ground level in a different way. We might see that each of us is being called to a scale of generous living that we never thought possible. And if we can summon the courage to finally jump from the plane by trusting in God’s gracious provision, we would find that we’re as far from fear as we have ever been. We would find that we are truly free.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
November 19, 2023

[1] Duolingo Spanish podcast, Episode 44: Estar en las nubes “Head in the Clouds”), January 1, 2020, translation of the Spanish.

Tending to the Light

At the top of the list of endangered occupations is that of the lamplighter. In early nineteenth century London, New York, or Philadelphia, your safety would have depended on the reliability of lamplighters. Each evening at dusk, they would appear, poles in hand, topped by kerosene-soaked rags, to reach up and ignite gas flames in the many lamps strategically placed throughout the city streets. No one wanted to venture out after dark without the lamps being lit.

Lamplighters knew all the neighborhoods of major cities. They had to show up on time and be dependable. They worked around the clock. They appeared at dusk to light the lamps and then again at dawn to extinguish them. Today, with electric lights on timers, it’s difficult to imagine just how important lamplighters would have been to an earlier age. And as difficult as it has been to get our light timers working here around the church, I almost wish we could hire our own lamplighters.

Interestingly, the profession has not gone completely out of style. The city of Brest, Belarus, has employed a lamplighter since 2009, and there’s still a small group of lamplighters in London. Only a handful of cities across the globe have active lamplighters.[1] They’re a dying, nearly extinct, breed of people, hanging on to a profession that has been superseded by technological efficiency.

But with the demise of this peculiar profession, there has been a loss of more than just jobs. Think of the ways in which lamplighters were so tied up with the communities in which they worked in ages past. They knew the streets. They knew the people. They provided an invaluable service for the people, and the people depended on the lamplighters for their safety and freedom. In some ways, community was formed and nourished around light, and at the center of those relationships of trust, were the lamplighters.

Maybe we need a modern guild of lamplighters. I don’t mean actual lamplighters roaming the streets and lighting the few extant gas lamps that aren’t self-igniting. I’m talking about a guild of people committed to giving light to a world where the light seems to be going out, to give hope where there’s constant despair. We need a guild of people committing their lives to showing up, dependably, to let the light shine so that others can find their paths in the darkness and proceed on their way in safety, with the hope that they will reach their destination.

If what I read daily in the news or hear in conversations with others or see on the streets is any indication, scores of people are struggling to see the light. I don’t think the world is particularly worse than it has been in the past, but it seems like it because we have so many more mechanisms of spreading a perpetual message that the light is going out, or that it has been extinguished altogether. And this is why the world needs the Church. We are the modern guild of lamplighters. We can be a reliable source of light in the darkness and a lodestone of reconciliation and peace if we reclaim the mission God has entrusted to us. And to reclaim that mission means we need to be more like the wise maidens in Jesus’s parable rather than the foolish ones.

Of all the Gospels, St. Matthew’s in particular gives us the encouraging wisdom that to follow Christ is not to grasp at some elusive notion of God’s will. To follow Christ necessitates doing certain things. What we do matters. Christian discipleship is not only a matter of the heart. It is also a matter of our hands and feet taking action so that we gradually conform to the self-emptying pattern of Christ’s life. To find Christ’s light in a world of darkness, we must constantly replenish our lamps with oil. We must bother to take extra oil with us on the journey. We must be prepared.

We can learn a lot about the two types of maidens in Jesus’s parable by reflecting on their level of preparedness. The wise maidens are not only smart and organized enough to anticipate a long wait for the bridegroom. They’re humble enough to know that when the oil runs out, they can’t presume to rely on backup oil from others. It would be arrogant to consider joining the banquet by piggybacking on other people’s preparedness if they weren’t themselves prepared.

But the foolish maidens have not only been irresponsible; they have also been proud. They have assumed too much—that the bridegroom would not take so long in arriving at the banquet and that if they themselves could leave for the banquet in haste without fully preparing, others would bail them out. It’s not that the wise maidens don’t want to help the foolish ones; it’s that the wise ones know that helping the foolish ones will help no one at all. The oil will run out, and no one will get to the banquet.

And these two types of maidens are rather like two types of Christians. One type of Christian knows what is required of a true disciple. It’s no mystery. Say your prayers. Go to church. Feed the poor. Clothe the naked. Give drink to the thirsty. Love your enemy. Treat your neighbor as you would want to be treated. Humble yourself to be exalted. Empty yourself to be filled. And when you set out on the road of discipleship, make sure you always have enough spare oil.

The wise Christian knows that on the road to heaven, the light will wane. It will threaten to go out. At times, it will appear as if it has gone out. The wise Christian knows that it’s impossible to control the darkness, but it’s more than possible to tend to the light. It’s no mystery. Jesus has shown us what to do.

But the foolish Christian has taken it all for granted. The foolish Christian certainly wants to feast at the banquet but can’t imagine that the bridegroom will be delayed in coming. The foolish Christian will hope for others to assist when deliberate unpreparedness comes home to roost. The foolish Christian will wait until the tragedy strikes to cry, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But the door will seem shut because there will be no readily apparent answer. And the answer’s light, which is always there, will not be seen because the lamp has run out of oil. The foolish Christian is willfully unprepared.

If the Church is about anything these days, she must be about tending to the light. We must be a guild of lamplighters, even though these days we often yearn for recognition, just like that dying breed of actual lamplighters. Like the handful of lamplighters who still give light to their respective communities, we in the Church can be seen as an anachronism. Who needs the Church’s wisdom when we have the wisdom of technology? Who needs the Church’s community when we have the fellowship of social media and clubs? Who needs the Church’s works of charity when we have social service agencies to help the needy?

But without the Church, the light that seems to be fading into darkness will be insufficient to light the way forward, because the Church’s very mission is to manifest the Light of Christ to a confused world. And we are the lamplighters, tending to the flame among us, and lighting the path for others to find the true Light that lightens the world.

Jesus’s parable of the ten maidens is so often heard with anxiety. Will we miss the banquet? Will the door be closed to us? But this parable is, in fact, a gracious, non-anxious invitation to be a guild of lamplighters that this world so badly needs.

When the rest of the world believes that the light is going out and will go out soon, we’ve been told that the light always shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t overcome it. We’ve been told by Jesus himself how to put oil in our lamps, and no matter how much we have failed to do it, we know that keeping oil on hand is within our capacity to accomplish.

The Church is no anachronism to the world. She is its living light that points the way to the true Light. And what the world needs from us is clear. The world needs us to be prepared, watchful, dependable, and faithful. Ironically, a world that seems increasingly to stay away from church needs us to be here, in church, weekly, dependably, faithfully. The world needs us to show up constantly to say our prayers and pray for others to find the light that shines in the darkness. The world needs us to lighten the darkness by our works of charity and mercy and through our refusal to concede to despair.

The world needs us because we are keepers of the light. We are the lamplighters, with one exception. We never need to show up at dawn to put the lights out. The light always burns. It burns before the Sacrament in this church. It burns in our prayer and daily work. It burns in our authentic witness to the Gospel. And if we choose to put oil in our lamps, we will be the ones to shine a path in the cold darkness to the living Light of the world, who invites the whole world in to feast with him.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 12, 2023

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter

Our Undoing Is Our Remaking

My high school piano teacher would laugh when she made mistakes. I vividly remember sitting at a Steinway piano in her music studio while she sat at the piano next to me. She would demonstrate something, and then I would try to imitate what she did. And I was always surprised, and delighted, when she made mistakes because she would gently laugh.

As a seventeen-year-old perfectionist who was very hard on himself, I was not only surprised when my teacher laughed. I was impressed. In fact, I was somewhat envious. I secretly wished that I could laugh when I made mistakes at the piano. But I was incapable of it because my developing emotional self was too riddled with self-judgment and guilt to do so. I would scold myself over every missed note or memory slip. To make a musical mistake was another blow to my self-esteem.

But unlike me, my teacher was able to extend grace to herself. While demonstrating a figurative passage in a Scarlatti sonata, she would misjudge a leap, and then she would smile, laugh, and continue. This was no scornful or dismissive laugh. It was a laugh of good humor, a laugh demonstrating that my teacher was abundantly aware of her own imperfections and, I imagine, confident enough in her many gifts as a musician and teacher. It reflected her personality itself, which was always kind and gracious. Mistakes couldn’t suppress the smile, laugh, and twinkle in her eye because she didn’t take herself too seriously. She didn’t keep score of all her mistakes. She was in it for the music.

The secret envy I had of my piano teacher’s ability to laugh at herself was not just about music. I longed to be able to extend grace to myself in all aspects of my life, especially in my life with God. Our spiritual lives are hardly like piano lessons, but perhaps there is some analogy here. Are we in it for the music, or do we fearfully tally mistakes and shortcomings? Of course, missing an accidental is morally neutral, and committing a sin is not. Laughing at a missed octave leap in the left hand isn’t an offense against God, but laughing at your sin could be blasphemous. So maybe the analogy lies in how we manage our mistakes and faults. Are we in it for the music, or do we ruthlessly keep score?

This would be a good question to ask the prophets, who seem to be custodians of long lists of faults and failings. Where’s the music in their judgmental speech, which fastidiously keeps score of the sins of God’s people? As difficult as their speech is, we tend to love the prophets only when they support our agendas. Liberals love the prophets because they speak truth to power and are strident voices for social justice. Conservatives love the prophets because they pronounce God’s judgment on those who willingly defy God and commit immorality. But one thing holds both sides in common: they both love the prophets as voices of judgment against their enemies. And they love the prophets because the prophets reinforce their own moral superiority.

But these are all the wrong reasons to love the prophets. Truth be told, if we love the prophets so easily, we must not be hearing what they’re really saying. And if we love the prophets because they accuse our enemies, then we, too, are ruthlessly keeping score and are unable to hear the music.

It seems clear what the prophet Micah is saying to the false prophets of his day, but it’s not so clear where the music is in what he says. Micah castigates those who say what the political and religious powers want to hear. If they’re given enough money, they will say anything, regardless of the word of God. They are the ones who avoid speaking the truth out of fear of losing the wealthy parishioner’s pledge. These prophets don’t challenge an unjust social order; they reinforce it by tailoring their words to encourage the oppressive status quo. They say comforting things to the upper crust of society whose mouths are filled with good things while those working the land can find no bread. These prophets make crooked the straight ways of God. They are charlatans, not prophets. And Micah is also clear about the destructive consequences of such behavior.

But in Micah’s caustic words, is there yet music to be heard amid all this score keeping? Is the point of judgment to lead to destruction, or is there something more? After all, it would hardly be appropriate to laugh lightheartedly at the egregious sins of the false prophets and power-hungry leaders of Micah’s day. But is it too preposterous to think that underneath all the talk of God’s wrath and anger there might be some music?

Not so fast, say those who boisterously advocate for the oppressed. The rich who complacently abuse the poor and think they can rely on God’s favor should be punished. We need justice. Not so fast, say those who might be less concerned with the poor and more intent on desiring God’s vindictive wrath towards those who sin.

But true justice is far more than punishing the offenders. And it’s far more than needing an angry God to make things right. Micah, after all, is a true prophet. Micah might be naming the hard truth, but his end goal is neither retribution nor affirming the agendas of others. Micah is involved in a far grander project because he knows that despite the proliferation of mistakes, and as much as we might tend to keep score, it’s really all about the music.

Is judgment, then, a gift? If we were less serious and could laugh at ourselves occasionally, we might see this. If we weren’t so proud as to avoid naming our human frailty, we might hear the music in judgment. If we could understand what Jesus taught us, that our sins and failures do not define our identity as God’s children, then there is music to be heard. And if so, then our sins need not entrap us in quagmires of guilt and shame but instead can prick our consciences so that we are able to receive God’s love and mercy. They prompt us to hear the music once again. God judges for our own good: not to make us miserable but to ensure that no one makes crooked the straight path toward righteousness and equity.

With this good news, can we flip the narrative of the false prophets? The false prophets are constantly telling us what is wrong. The Church is dying. The Church is full of hypocrites and injustice. Our nation is falling apart. The world will never have peace again. It is a perpetual headline of bad news, of keeping score.

But if God’s judgment is a gift, then true prophets help us to hear the music beneath the litany of offenses. The Church’s present state is an opportunity to set human ego aside and reclaim the Gospel’s power. A nation’s political dysfunction can be a prompt towards reform and collaboration. And amid global conflict, relationships among enemies are possible, which will enable God to bring true peace. Sometimes our undoing is our remaking, and this can be a great gift.

Micah and all the other prophets dismantle our fragile egos and sinful human projects so that God can remake them in his image. The prophets bring the worst injustices into the light of God’s judgment, which is painful to us who continually walk in darkness. The only agenda of true prophets is to point to God’s mercy, love, and forgiveness. It might take harsh language to command the world’s attention, but the end goal is far beyond wrath and anger. The prophet’s job is not so much to keep score but to help us hear the music.

And to hear the music in the Book of Micah, we must jump to the end. After seven chapters of uncensored language, after accusing the false prophets of being merciless cannibals, and after foretelling the destruction of the holiest of cities, Micah ends with an exquisite ballad of love that will move any warm heart to tears. God will again have compassion on us, Micah says. God “will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” God will show faithfulness and loyalty to his people, as was sworn to “our ancestors from the days of old.” And that is how his book ends: with God’s gracious music of salvation.

Our sins are nothing to laugh at, but we ourselves are laughable. We’re so foolish as to think we can be perfect. We’re so ludicrous as to imagine we can save ourselves. We’re so judgmental as to think that we need an angry God to make everything right again. We’re so good at keeping score but so very poor at hearing the music of God’s love that surpasses our understanding.

But the music is there, behind all our sins and hidden within the disappointments of daily life and in our failures. The music lies as an invitation of grace to deliver us from our valleys of guilt and despair. So, laugh at yourselves. Laugh at the inept wiles of the devil, who would have us believe that our sins have more power over us than they do. Laugh and rejoice that when we stumble and fall, God will help us get up again and walk into his arms of love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
November 5, 2023

As Certain as the Promise of the Rainbow

Although it’s never happened to me, I know people who have received messages from the dead in their dreams. I don’t think this is strange, even though since Sigmund Freud’s work with dreams, perhaps we’ve tended to dismiss the spiritual power of dreams, consigning them to the realm of psychology. But Scripture testifies repeatedly to the vivid ways in which dreams are part of the spiritual life.

Some people say that loved ones who have died appeared to them in dreams and urged them not to worry. Everything is going to be okay, I’m okay, is often the theme of these dreamlike messages. Why is this so hard to believe? Since we say the dead don’t really die but continue to live in Christ and if we say that we can pray for the dead and that they can pray for us, why, then, shouldn’t they occasionally visit us during our sleep to give us hope?

Maybe it’s less about the dream being something fantastical and more that hope itself seems so unearthly. Hope itself seems like nothing but a dream these days, a dream that can never really be true. In a world so afraid of death, death is the ultimate enemy, because the one thing we know for certain is that we will all die. It’s the one thing we can’t control. And when a loved one dies, and especially when it’s an untimely death, the act of death can rightly seem like the end of the world. Death is the end of the story. It’s real, and hope is a mere dream. Considering this, is it so strange, then, that the dead might wish to visit us with words of comfort that are more than a dream, words that are actually true? Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

Dreams of reassurance about the destiny of someone who has died shouldn’t seem so odd at this time of year, which we say is a thin time when we’re especially attuned to the porous veil that lies between this world and the next. Any of us who have sat at the bedside of someone dying, know how thin that veil is. One minute there is breath, the next it is gone. “Our days are like the grass,” Psalm 103 tells us.

On All Saints’ Day, we celebrate the thinness of that diaphanous veil that separates this world from the next. We rejoice in it because it means that scattered throughout our mortal lives, we are given glimpses of that heavenly kingdom on the other side of the veil. These glimpses come to us rather like dreams where departed loved ones greet us with comforting words: Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

Such a dreamy scene is found in the Revelation to John when the curtain between heaven and earth is pulled back for just a bit. Cast away from your brains the tendency to decipher this strange book like a code or to predict the future, and instead, encounter it as a living vision, a dream of what is to come and a dream of what already is. Imagine it as heavenly reality breaking into our world for a fleeting moment.

Envision the comfort of John’s magnificent vision to an early Church held under the boot of a ruthless empire. Behold what blessed assurance this vision must have been to those trying to follow the way of the cross, where the meekest and quietest voices were drowned amid the cacophony of violence and oppression. It’s as if the company of saints were singing into their world: Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

It can’t be mere coincidence that the final word of the Christian Bible is that of the Book of Revelation, a word that essentially speaks to us as if in a dream: Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay. The evil you see daily, the innocent murdered victims who are the devastating casualties of human greed, the persistent naysaying voices of despair, the barbarous behavior of uncivilized civilians: yes, even all this horror is not the final word. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

Yes, everything is going to be okay because the saints teach us, even if as in a dream, that heaven is a celebration of the ultimate truth of God’s promises. This is no false dream; this is abundantly true. With the aid of the saints, we savor all those hints of hope that God has dropped along the pilgrimage of God’s people throughout time. Do you remember the aftermath of the great flood, when Noah, his family, and the animals exited the ark? God promised never to let such destruction happen again. God set the rainbow in the sky as a reminder that the final word of our collective story is not death but life.

One of the most moving pieces of liturgical art I have ever seen is a cope—the cape-like vestment worn on special occasions, such as at the beginning of tonight’s Mass. The cope of which I’m speaking is an exquisite black cope, which is intended for a Requiem Mass, and on its hood, blazing forth from deepest black, is a bright rainbow. The rainbow means that although we recognize the darkness of death and sin and evil around us, and although they threaten to swallow us up, the final word in Christ for us is that of the rainbow. Life, not death. Hope, not despair. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

Tonight, we bask in the promise of the rainbow, of which we catch a peek in the Book of Revelation, where a multitude of people beyond what we can count stands around the throne of God. They sing without ceasing, because making music is pure praise. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay. The curse of Babbel is undone, and all people—Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Greeks, sworn enemies of all sorts—all communicate in the language of worship and of heavenly song.

The blood-soaked clothes of martyrs like the apostle Paul and Perpetua and her companions and Lucy and Edith Stein and Jonathan Myrick Daniels and Óscar Romero have become blindingly white, washed in the eternal blood of the Lamb. In heaven, the slain Lamb is the true Shepherd because he gave his life for the sheep, and he continues to give life. The rainbow set in the sky is like encouragement in a dream. In God’s eternal realm where earthly values are inverted, death cannot have the last word. Death’s presumed power is laughable. Heaven’s dreamy message to us is the absolute truth: Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

Everything is going to be okay because the father of all lies, the one who has continually deceived God’s people, has already been defeated and he knows it. And we have all heard his lies and accusations: that the Church will die, that we will fail, that we are foolish to hope, that the death of our spouse is the end of our own happiness, that death itself is the end of life. But they are lies. This night, God invites us to listen to the dreamy message of truth that he sends us in the lives of the saints. Life continues on the other side of suffering, sorrow, and death. The song goes on eternally. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

We don’t need to worry because we can remember. Remember how God set his rainbow in the sky. Remember how when God’s people were famished, there was manna. Remember how when they were enslaved, God freed them. Remember how when Jerusalem was sacked, God brought the exiles back to rebuild their temple. Remember how when humanity had once again lost its way, God sent his Son to draw all people to himself. Remember that, even now, while missiles fly and bullets ricochet in schools, we should never forget that the veil between this life and the next is very thin and that the saints can speak to us in dreams. And that we can trust that everything will be okay because when everything seems lost and defeat seems near at hand, God will always make good on his promises.

The saints offer us a reassuring vision of continual praise and worship on the other side of that nearly transparent veil between this world and the next. They remind us that in our worship we are always experiencing heaven itself. In worship, we see God’s rainbow set in a sky that might normally seem as dark as night. The saints remind us that heaven will always surprise us with its capacity to include far more people than we ever can or want to imagine; it can include even us. The saints remind us that hunger and thirst and scorching heat will not conquer us because the Good Shepherd will bring us to springs of living water, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. This is more than a dream. It’s a dream that brings us the undeniable, living truth of God, which is as certain as the promise of the rainbow.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
All Saints’ Day
November 1, 2023

Somewhere between the Altar and the Door

As a child, I was obsessed with a series of biography books found in my local public library. The books in this series had red covers and included biographies of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Olympic athlete Babe Didrickson Zaharias, who was born in the same town that I was. I devoured these books, and relished their musty, old book smell. In my mind’s eye, I can still see that section in the library, my favorite place to visit in childhood summers.

And I still recall an image from one of those books, although I haven’t the foggiest idea about whom the book was written. I remember that the subject of this biography was an early American, probably living in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, most likely in a rural setting. And the scene from that biography which is seared into my memory is of a church service in what was probably an austere Congregational church. In that spartan religious setting, while attending a worship service, you were always supposed to keep your eyes directed towards the front of the church, presumably on the pulpit and on the preacher.

If, however, you had the audacity to turn around, say, to smile at a friend or check out who had just entered the door of the church, you would be chastised with a firm tap on the shoulder by a man standing at the back of the church wielding a long stick. I don’t know who this person was, although I imagine he was a sexton of sorts. In this church, you were never supposed to look behind you during the service. It was considered rude and a mark of bad behavior.

This image has stayed with me. I’m still hesitant to look behind me in church. But it occurs to me that maybe there was some hidden theological reality in that little red biography’s depiction of an early American church setting. Maybe the prohibition against turning around to look at the door of the church grew out of the piety of a particular brand of Christianity. If you can’t look at the door of the church or other parishioners in the room, then you can only look at the pulpit. You can only pay attention to the word proclaimed and the word preached. Your eyes are always and only on the front of the church.

Your eyes are decidedly not on other people. Not on your neighbor in the pew nor even on your parents who might be sitting next to you, and certainly not on the stranger walking in off the street. And for heaven’s sake, don’t ever look at the man holding the long stick. Does this speak to an individualistic piety that is more concerned with salvation and less attentive to the plight of those whose salvation is inextricably wrapped up with ours?

Such a piety is not mine, and such a piety is not typical of the Anglican tradition. Rather, our piety, our practice of being Christian, lies somewhere between two extremes. And in between two extremes we find the meaning of Christian love, agape love, that selfless, self-giving love exemplified by Jesus Christ in his life, death, and resurrection. Such Christian love takes root somewhere between the altar and the door of the church.

When pressed to name the great commandment in the law, Jesus invites us squarely into that holy space between the altar and the door of the church. Although Christians have for years erroneously tried to claim that Jesus was saying something radically new in this summary of the law, it’s more accurate to say that Jesus was trying to direct his audience back to the heart of the Law as he understood it and which he embodied in his own life.

Jesus brings us back to Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and the Shema, the commandment to the people of Israel to love the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and strength. The life lived in God starts by loving God. Even more than that, it starts with God’s first love of us. Hidden behind the Shema is that foundational love of God that takes us all the way back to the Book of Genesis when God called everything very good. To remember that love, keep your eyes on the altar.

But then, there’s a tap on the shoulder, not from a scolding stick but from the gentle hand of Christ who reminds us that while everything starts with the love of God, it doesn’t end there. It only begins there. Love your neighbor as yourself. Turn around, Jesus says, and look at the door. Look at your neighbor. Look at the stranger in your land. Look even at yourself. Without most people knowing it, Jesus has taken us back to the Book of Leviticus, chapter 19.

The injunctions in this chapter are concerned with love that’s formed in care of the neighbor. Don’t hold grudges. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. And while you’re at it, when you reap your harvest, don’t reap to the edges of your land. Leave some for the poor and the alien. Rather than fearing the foreigners in your land who might take your jobs, care for them. Keep your eyes on the door. But remember that first, your eyes were on the altar. They have to be on the altar first, because there you’ll remember that the Lord is God. The Lord is holy. And true love can only come from a love responding to the boundless love of God, who is holy, who is the saving Lord. Otherwise, any other notion of love will be false.

Somewhere between the altar and the door of the church is where true love starts to take on life in human flesh. That’s where it moves from the altar to mold lives of holiness to venture into the world to make that love concrete and visible. Its story begins way back when God created everything and then continued to shepherd God’s people from slavery into freedom. This love never stopped being love even when God’s people complained, grumbled, made idols, and turned away from God. That love was forgotten when people first began to look too long at the altar or too long at the door, and ultimately too long at themselves. People still forget such love when they fail to keep one eye on the altar and one on the door, because inevitably they end up looking too much at themselves. Inevitably, they become afraid.

When we lose sight of the altar, we become our own saviors. When we lose sight of the door, we become self-consumed and focused only on our own salvation. The Christian life starts with our eyes on the altar, where we see love given freely to us in the word proclaimed and the holy gifts of the Mass. But when our eyes are on the altar, and if we are paying attention, our gaze can’t help but shift to the door. The door is where we encounter the stranger. The altar is where we find love, not fear. If we start with the door, we will only see fear, because outside the church door, everyone seems so afraid. We must start with the altar, with love. And to walk in love as Christ loved us, our eyes must go constantly back and forth, between altar and door.

And when we lose our focus, which invariably we will, Christ offers us a saving tap on the shoulder. His tap is so very different from the punitive tap of the sexton in that biography I read as a child. Christ’s tap is always a reminder and expression of love, which is who he is. It’s the love summed up in that great commandment and the one like it. They are of one piece. To love God is to love the neighbor as we love ourselves, and to love our neighbor is to love God.

When our eyes are obsessively hungry for the Eucharistic bread but care nothing for the stranger lacking bread on the street, Christ taps us on the shoulder and reminds us to look at the door again. When our privileged guilt keeps our eyes too focused on those outside the door, Christ taps us again gently, inviting us to remember that the source of our salvation is the living word of God and the Bread of the Mass, which give us true life.

In this earthly life, we will always need the gentle taps offered by our Savior. He knows all too well our human tendency to drift to extremes rather than inhabiting that place in the middle. And so, constantly and lovingly, he taps our shoulders to call us back home.

 A stopped clock is always right twice a day, so there was something right in that little Congregational church in early austere America. First, look at the altar. That’s where it starts. But there’s more, much more. Christ’s merciful tap on our shoulders reminds us that there’s a door opening into a world desperate for the stream of love coming from the altar. And our true home is that holy place somewhere between the altar and the door. It’s right here. To live and breathe as people of love, we must first start with our eyes on the altar, and then we see Christ anew: in the jobless foreigner in our land, in the lonely coworker, in the enemy who votes differently from us, in the one who has wronged us, even in our own selves. And because we have seen Christ when our eyes were on the altar, we can then see him everywhere.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
October 29, 2023

Nothing Short of Exceptional

“He’s a nice guy, but a little boring.” Those were the words spoken about me to a friend of mine twenty years ago. My friend was a housemate whom I had only known for less than a week after his relocation to the United States from another country, but we had become fast friends. And we obviously shared a lot with each other, which is how I found out that I had been deemed boring.

It’s a testament to the human struggle to forget hurtful words that decades later, those words still haunt me, just as they were hurtful to me when I first heard them. They haunt me because I see that words like that retain a certain relentless power. If I still find hurt in them, then they somehow have found a home within my soul. And they have found a home within my own soul because I have inadvertently fallen prey to the spirit of our age, where individualism reigns, novelty is king, and standing out is how you survive. To be boring means to fly under the radar and resist the temptation to be radically individualistic.

By this standard, we might categorize the first-century church in Thessalonica, Greece, as boring. Consider the primary characteristics of that church as expressed by the apostle Paul in a letter to them. They have been faithful in their work and labored in love with a steadfastness of hope. They have imitated the self-emptying behavior of Christ. They have persevered despite trials. They have turned from idols to serve the true and living God. They have waited patiently for Christ’s second coming. They are bor- ing.

Now, hold on a minute, you might say. St. Paul is writing this letter because he has heard about the exemplary behavior of the Thessalonians. Indeed, others have learned of their behavior, too. Something about the Thessalonians must have stood out. How can the Thessalonians be boring if they have made such an impression on others?

True, but can we honestly say that a group of people behaving like the Thessalonians today would gain such recognition? To say the Thessalonians would be seen as boring judges them by modern standards. Faithful work, labors of love, and steadfast hope rarely make the news in our day. Imitation of others, especially good people, is hardly spectacular and terribly uncreative. You’re supposed to innovate not imitate. Turning from idols makes it very difficult to survive in the modern world. And waiting patiently on the second coming of Christ when centuries of people have promised it to no avail is nothing short of foolish in the eyes of many.

Practical theologian Andrew Root has suggested that the governing spirit of our own age is that of exceptionality, at least in much of modern Western culture.[1] It’s all about the individual, and the individual needs to be exceptional. Look at our schools, where getting a 4.0 grade point average isn’t enough and taking only a few AP classes is just boring and unexceptional. Look at the workforce, where there’s an incessant expectation of unparalleled creativity rather than consistent, faithful work. Look even at our churches, where it seems that to survive, you must stand out, not necessarily in good works and example, but in novelty. You must be doing things that no other churches are doing. Andrew Root would claim that this drive for radical originality in churches is just the backflow from a secular culture that is all about the creative, uniquely innovative, exceptional self.

And like many, I, too, am a product of such a culture, which is why it stung to be labeled as boring. It means that I long for self-recognition or affirmation. I long to stand out, because to be successful, you need to be unique. You need to have not just a good idea, but the best idea. You need to be gifted at not just one thing but many things. And the clencher to inhabiting a world built around “I” is that it knows nothing about “we.” In the world of “me,” the greatest fulfillment is usually found in the self, rather than in community.

So, yes, by contemporary standards, the early church in Thessalonica is boring. It’s not exciting or even exceptional to be merely faithful in your work. To labor in love hardly earns you recognition unless your labor is tied up with the latest fad. And to be steadfastly hopeful that God can bring something good out of bad smells of antiquated ignorance, because God becomes the actor and we become, well, boring. The Thessalonians are boring precisely because they are unlike the other churches to which Paul writes. Who wants to quote from Thessalonians when you can secretly relish the juicy immorality of the Corinthians or Romans?

The behavior of the Thessalonians might seem boring by modern standards, but that says more about our own skewed judgment than about them. It speaks to the relentless anxiety of our age, which explains why people act out or need to assert their individuality.

We’re all so very anxious, and if you don’t feel particularly anxious right now, I would bet that you know the anxiety of which I’m speaking. We’re anxious that what we do and who we are is not enough. We’re anxious that if we’re not recognized as exceptional, we’re losers. We’re anxious that if someone calls us boring, then others will also think we are. We’re anxious that if we trust God too much, we’ll be disappointed. We’re anxious that if we’re hopeful that God can bring good out of the worst situations then when we keep experiencing bad things, we’ll lose our faith in God. Ultimately, we’re anxious because we’re very afraid, and we’re afraid that in God’s eyes we’re not exceptional. We’re afraid that if we’re not exceptional, then we’re not really loved by God.

But any fear of being too much like those boring Thessalonians is more than just a fear of seeming unexceptional. It’s also a fear of giving up the things that have begun to rule our lives like the lives of the Thessalonians were ruled before they turned from idols. To be boring by modern standards is to turn from the idols of our own day, which feed our desire to be exceptional and falsely promise us security and worth. To be boring by modern standards is to sacrifice our self-consumed identity to our true identity found in Christ, where no one stands out because we’re all chosen and loved by God. And by that account, we are truly exceptional.[2]

The early church described by Paul, a church that was within spitting distance of Jesus’s death and resurrection, was a church so very different from the modern church. Our current anxieties of decline and relevance are nothing compared to the anxieties of imminent death for being a Christian and of sustaining a radically new movement with no roadmap. Maybe we struggle with faith, hope, and love because we receive so many messages that we aren’t worthy of love or that we’re not loved. And that makes it just too hard to trust in a God who supposedly loves us unconditionally and beyond our ability to imagine.

And this is why those early Thessalonians were indeed exceptional. By the standards of God’s kingdom, they were radically innovative because they upended a world centered on the self, much like ours is. They weren’t exceptional in our modern kind of way. Paradoxically, they were exceptional precisely because they are boring by modern standards. We don’t remember the Thessalonians for employing the latest fads in evangelism. We don’t even know anything about individuals in that particular community. We hear nothing of magnetic personalities or charismatic leaders. We only hear from St. Paul’s words that this collection of motley individuals found their deepest identity by being grafted into the living Body of Christ. By hiding themselves in Christ and sacrificing their individual identities for a larger corporate identity, their ordinariness was exceptional, and it changed the world.

This faithful, constant, hopeful, and loving ordinariness was so exceptional that it resounded beyond their own community. It didn’t resound because the Thessalonians were loud talkers or theatrical in their behavior; it resounded because the only thing that seemed to matter to the Thessalonians was trusting the Gospel. They trusted the power of the Gospel enough to know that once the bell of the Gospel was rung, all they needed to do was let its vibrations resound in their own lives and out to the ends of the earth.

And here’s the good news. The Gospel doesn’t need our exceptionality or our personality to make it work. Its voice alone is exceptional. The living Gospel of Christ is the most powerful thing alive if we can dare to risk being called boring, so boring that our work and our play and our speech become sympathetic vibrations of that beautiful Gospel that is nothing short of exceptional.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 22, 2023

[1] Andrew Root, The Church after Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

[2] See Andrew Root, p. 176.

Moving to the Right End of Things

Last month, some parishioners and I attended Bryn Mawr Day, an annual opportunity for local businesses and organizations, including churches, to engage with the local community. Those of us from Good Shepherd had set up a table with several flyers on it, including advertisements for our retreat house as well as our concert series. People would stop by and chat with us or share information about their own organization.

And this is how I came to have a brief conversation with a man associated with another local church who was handing out pamphlets. They were typical stock, evangelical pamphlets, intended to persuade people to accept Jesus into their lives. Maybe you’ve seen some of these before. Some have injunctions to obey Scripture. Others have calls to repentance. The little pamphlet in my hand had a picture of a building going up in flames. The message was clear: turn to the Lord or meet your fate.

The man was obviously excited about sharing these little pamphlets with the hundreds of people present. He asked me, with an earnest glint in his eyes, “You know what that is, right?” I was at first speechless, primarily because I was horrified. “Yes,” I replied, checking my initial urge to express how appalled I was. I nevertheless remained quiet because I was sure that whatever I said wouldn’t deter this man’s zeal. I winced inwardly at the thought of dozens of children enjoying their ice cream and suddenly receiving a pamphlet from that overzealous man.

It made me think, as I often do, about how we Christians can be prone to start at the wrong end of things. For centuries, the Church has led from an evangelical posture that is not dissimilar from the pamphlet-wielding man at Bryn Mawr Day. The threatening prospect of eternal flames has been used to motivate people to find Christ. And, paradoxically, maybe this is why so many people refuse the invitation.

It might also seem that St. Matthew often starts at the wrong end of things. This is the second Sunday in a row that we hear a challenging parable depicting the horrible fate of those who don’t accept Christ into their lives. There’s no obvious hint of forgiveness in the text. Instead, there are clear decision points, and if the wrong decision is made, one is doomed.

This doesn’t sit well with many people. It doesn’t sit well with me. And it’s not because I believe that following Jesus is easy or that judgment doesn’t exist. It’s because I believe that starting at the wrong end of things can distort our image of the One sent in love for the salvation of the world by God, who is love. Starting at the wrong end of things doesn’t mesh well with the constant message of God’s forgiveness and mercy that runs like a stubborn strand throughout the Bible, trampling over human fear of rejection.

When something disturbs me in Scripture, I see it as an invitation to wrestle with it and to probe it until it opens up. And that’s why I think Jesus’s parables, like the one we’re given today, are like autostereograms. If you don’t know what those are, I bet you’ve seen them. They’re two-dimensional images that can become three dimensional when you refocus your eyes. It’s what Elaine’s boss, Mr. Pitt, spent hours trying to figure out on Seinfeld. If you stare long enough at a surface image—often a series of random dots—you will eventually see another image not readily apparent to the eyes.

When we confront the parable of the marriage feast, the most obvious image is not unlike the pamphlet handed to me by that man last month. We see an angry king, who symbolizes an angry God. We see troops sent by that angry king or angry God to destroy those invited to the marriage feast who refuse the invitation and behave abominably. We see their city going up in flames that resemble the ones on the pamphlet given to me last month. We see a speechless, improperly clad guest at the marriage feast thrown into the outer darkness where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. All this, despite his having accepted the invitation in the first place.

Is it any wonder, then, that many, upon being given this image or, let’s say, an evangelical pamphlet, then throw away the pamphlet or walk away from the image? This parable seems to start at the wrong end of things to get people to do the right thing, but it might have the effect of enabling exactly what the parable decries. Those invited to the feast disregard the invitation or behave badly in response.

But what if Matthew’s parable is more like an autostereogram? What if we’re only seeing a surface image of flames of fire and wrathful destruction while another truer image lies hidden beneath? What if we could see that truer image by refocusing our eyes? What if that other image contains good news?

If you will, join me in refocusing your eyes on this image. True, you’re seeing a very challenging, even disturbing scene, but what we find revolting has caused us to look more closely at the image because it has now garnered our attention. And we have a hunch that there’s something more that we can’t yet see but are meant to see.

The hints of that new image, which is Christ’s good news, are, in fact, already present in the surface image. With time, we begin to discern a new picture that’s emerging from the flames and scene of destruction. We see a grand banquet hall, with table after table piled high with unending rich food and wine. We see a meal prepared by a king who has spared nothing to put on the best banquet imaginable. We see that uncountable places have been set at these tables, waiting to be filled by those invited. We see that this king has been utterly tenacious in summoning people to the feast. He never gives up. When some decline the invitation, he invites others, until finally, the most unlikely suspects are invited in, both good and bad.

But influenced as we are by human sin, our eyes soon lose their focus on the alternative, truer image, and we see only the faces of those who refuse the invitation. They all refuse for different reasons. Some feel unworthy of being there. Some are told they aren’t good enough to be there. Some never even received an invitation because the deliverers slacked off. Some feel they have better things to do, like putting more hours into the grind of the voracious beast of their jobs. Some are apathetic and uninterested in the invitation. Some have no clue how amazing the banquet will be.

And then, for a minute, our eyes settle on that poor fellow who accepts an invitation to the feast but isn’t properly attired. He’s the one who never passes up an invitation to the feast but whom the feast never changes. He’s the regular churchgoer who can still leave Mass and treat others like garbage. He’s the one who thinks mere attendance will save his soul although he never acts on his faith. He’s the one who has accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior and thinks he has an immediate ticket into heaven. Having lost our focus, we are rightly troubled by the fate of those in this first image because we sense this is not how things are meant to be. And we realize that we are once again at the wrong end of things.

Maybe this is precisely Matthew’s intention. Maybe he has deliberately created an autostereogram for us. He starts at the wrong end to wake us up to the fact that there’s a right end below the surface of what we’re seeing. We can’t deny the impoverished, horrible world we will inhabit if we refuse God’s invitation to the feast and turn inward on ourselves. But that’s not the end of the story nor is it what God desires for us. There’s a right end of things if we refocus our eyes. And if we do, here’s what we’ll see.

We’ll see a king who is not vengeful but infinitely loving, sitting at the head of a vast table with more seats than we can imagine, waiting for them to be filled by us. This banquet hall is, in fact, the only place on earth where no matter how many times through sin we refuse the invitation, we can always accept it again by turning to God for forgiveness. There’s no other place on earth where the food is available, all the time, free of charge. There’s no other place on earth where the food will change our lives forever. There’s no other place on earth where our income, status, or achievements have nothing to do with sitting down at the feast and where the unemployed feast together with the world’s wealthiest people. There’s no better place on earth to be than here.

We are at that feast, right now, although it’s only a taste of the eternal feast to come. Whether you’ve spurned an invitation to the feast before or do on occasion when you succumb to malaise, the invitation is always open. When you realize that you’re not properly clad for the feast, you can always turn to Christ so that he can clothe you in his righteousness. It’s never too late to accept the invitation, with all its costs and sacrifices, because there’s nothing else on earth that can be of more value for us. And once we get a taste of this feast, we will see that it’s an offer we can never refuse again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 15, 2023

Ripe for Flourishing

You know what they say: when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The teacher leaves the room, and the students start throwing erasers at each other. The dog owner leaves for the evening to go out for dinner and returns to find that the house is littered with toilet paper. The unattended child is left in his highchair for one minute, and when the parent returns, he has crawled into the kitchen and is opening all the cleaning supplies.

Scripture is full of such behavior. Moses leaves the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai to go up and speak with God and receive the Ten Commandments, and when he comes back down, the Israelites have made a golden calf. In one of Jesus’s parables, a man who goes off on a journey, leaving his property with his slaves. When he comes back, two of the slaves have made more money from the talents entrusted to their care, but one slave has buried his talent, instead of investing it, because he was afraid of his master. Preserving the talent was safer than the risk of investing it. And finally, when Jesus has died and been raised from the dead, the disciples retreat into an upper room and lock the doors, scared out of their minds. When the cat’s away, the mice will play, or at the very least, they will have no idea how to act.

And this is exactly what happens when a householder plants a vineyard and then leaves it in the care of some tenants. This vineyard isn’t a chunk of useless land that the tenants must work hard to cultivate so that it will bear fruit. The householder has already done everything possible to ensure that the vineyard will produce abundant good fruit. He has made sure that it’s protected from wild animals and has furnished it with a wine press to turn the harvested grapes into good wine. Every detail is set in place to facilitate an incredible harvest.

Having done all this, the householder entrusts the care of his vineyard to tenants, leaves the scene, and then the mice begin to play. We don’t know much about what transpired after the householder leaves, but I’m guessing that nothing happened. The mice slept rather than played. Or maybe they were lazy and acted horribly. I’m guessing that both might be the case because of Jesus’s challenging words to the chief priests and Pharisees to whom he tells this parable. Something has not happened in the landowner’s absence. Perhaps the vineyard was left to rot. Maybe the tenants were too overwhelmed by the task they were assigned. Whatever the case, not only are the tenants unproductive, but they also behave abominably. They harm the servants sent by the householder to gather the harvest, and finally, they kill the householder’s son, the one sent to be respected and revered.

Jesus tells this parable to convict the Jewish leadership, but it is most certainly not about God taking away the kingdom from the Jewish people. God’s kingdom is available to all. This convicting parable highlights the judgment present to anyone who fails to be a good steward of what God has entrusted to their care and who willingly rejects God’s gifts. It’s a difficult lesson for all who want to play, or sleep, while the cat is away.

It might as well be a parable of judgment told to the modern Church. We inhabit a period of waiting like that of the tenants. We live in the time between Jesus’s first coming to us and his eventual second coming. We’ve been entrusted with a tremendous responsibility, and so often, we treat it as another menial task. Or we sleep or refrain from working.

In John’s Gospel, on the eve of his death, Jesus tells his disciples that after the Holy Spirit has been sent to empower them for ministry, they will do greater things than he has done. It’s an astounding claim of which the modern Church usually seems ignorant. And so, like Jesus’s disciples after his death and resurrection, we retreat into our closed quarters, most often out of fear and anxiety. Or while the cat is away, we resort to gimmicks and cheap tricks to lure people back into the pews instead of being faithful with our prayers. Or we pitifully accept a doomed narrative of decline. Or we wring our hands and cry out that we don’t have enough to do what God has asked us to do. There’s not enough money or people or resources. The vineyard is riddled with too many insurmountable problems: with leaking roofs, aging buildings, and too much deferred maintenance.

Or even worse, when the cat is away, we grow impatient and distrustful, like the band of people led by Moses out of Egypt, who wasted no time in making a golden calf so soon after being delivered from slavery. Our anxiety forces us to turn inward on ourselves and to look only to our own efforts to make ends meet. We begin to think that what we’ve been entrusted with is ours to keep, and then we try to defend it at all costs. We become drunk with greed so that anyone who desires what we have, or anyone who asks for a share in the harvest entrusted to our care is a threat. And the cycle spirals out of control.

When the cat is away, and we’re left with our own narrow, self-centered worlds, the illness that strikes is another cause for a grievance against God. The financial pickle is one more reason to hunker down in fear. The possessions we have are just more things to hoard. As I said, when the cat’s away, the mice will play.

But maybe the problem is that we imagine ourselves as vulnerable little mice running from the predator cat. It seems that the tenants who abuse the householder’s servants and kill his son fail to trust and respect the householder. And their tragic attitude toward life is revealed in the judgment they offer against themselves when Jesus asks them the million-dollar question: “When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

All the tenants can imagine is that the householder will put them to a miserable death. Is this the reason why the tenants behave so badly while the householder is away? Do they believe that the householder cares nothing for their well-being? Can they only imagine a world without mercy and compassion? Do they fail to envision a world of abundance? Are they completely unable to trust that they could be good stewards of the vineyard? Are they so anxious that they can’t imagine that returning the fruits of the vineyard to the householder might not mean that they get nothing in return?

And do we also imagine God as a punishing householder who entrusts his vineyard to our care? Do we see ourselves as little mice, constantly running from a God who simply wants to capture and torture us if we mess up, and if so, is this why we misbehave when God seems to withdraw from us? And while we’re at it, why would we imagine that God leaves us to begin with? The only reason would be that have failed to trust. We have failed to hope. And without hope, we become like a child without a parent.

And so, to reclaim our trust and hope we need to return to the beginning of this parable, where we get a glimpse into God’s true nature. God is rather like that householder who doesn’t leave a stinking mess for people to clean up but who provides everything that is needed for a copious harvest of good fruit. In Christ, God has given us the confident assurance that no evil powers and no false lies from the evil one can undermine our holy work. God has strewn the landscape of our lives and our churches with abundant resources: with physical space, with beautiful people, with talents and gifts, and with money that sometimes needs to be coaxed into use.

God, indeed, has given us everything we need to fulfill the mission to which he has called us. And if we can’t see that, it’s because we could benefit from more trust and hope. When God seems absent, it’s only the accusing voices of our insecure minds and hearts that try to convince us otherwise. It’s a lie that we must always play it safe to come out okay. It’s a lie that we must cut our way to prosperity. Even when the vineyard seems like nothing more than a tangle of brambles, God has nevertheless prepared rich soil ready to be loved and tended into a fruitful harvest.

God doesn’t abandon us. Jesus doesn’t go to the Father to leave us with the dirty work. Jesus goes to the Father so that the Holy Spirit may come to us and propel us into works greater even than his. It’s an astounding thought that we can only cherish in trust and hope. And, yes, one day the householder will return to gather his harvest. Can we look forward to that day with joy rather than fear? The vineyard has been prepared for our work, and there is much work to do. God has given us everything we need. It’s time to work. And on that day when the householder returns in love, may we be ready to accept with joy our Lord’s praise when he looks at us and says, “Servant, well done!”

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 8, 2023

More Than Just a Game

When at some point I moved on from the innocuous Candy Land game as a kid, I became a big fan of Monopoly. To a young kind, it seemed like a grownup kind of game, and it was exhilarating to deal with all that paper money. The wispy bills came in all denominations and colors—gray, yellow, green, blue—and there were many of them. Each time you passed GO time, the banker doled out $200. Every player began the game with the same amount of money. What wasn’t there to like about this game?

As if that were not enough, in Monopoly, the bank never runs out of money! The banker only needs to create more money on ordinary paper if the bank goes dry. Now, admittedly, landing in jail or having to pay income tax is a drag, but stacking up piles of colorful money and using it to buy property like there’s no tomorrow more than makes up for it.

The most obvious reason the younger version of myself liked this game was that there was no real risk involved in it. The money was fake, even if its inauthenticity provided a strange thrill during the heat of the game. What was the harm in buying a string of properties on Park Place or Boardwalk? If you lost them, it was just a game. At the end of the day, even if you had to give up all your amassed property and fake bucks in Monopoly, chances are, there’s still the real home in which you’re playing the game. There’s still the checking account with money in it. The game was just a game.

Have you noticed that Jesus seems to have no interest in playing games? Now, don’t get me wrong. I happen to think Jesus had a great sense of humor. To see it, you must use your imagination when reading Scripture. But Jesus is not playing games when he’s grilled about the origin of his authority. And yet, I suspect there’s a wry humor behind his blunt unwillingness to offer any explanation for the nature of his authority. And when he asks a question of those who question his authority, Jesus receives no answer at all. So, perhaps with a glint in his eye, Jesus refuses to answer the demand made of him. You won’t give me an answer, then I won’t explain the origin of my authority. In the stage cue direction, Jesus winks at others in the crowd looking on.

Jesus might have a sense of humor, but he never plays games because his life and his witness and all that comes with it are no game at all. The characters in his life are not pawns but souls in need of a Savior. And as Jesus nears the cross in Matthew’s Gospel, it is evident that those around him, especially his very own disciples, still fail to understand that what might have seemed like a game before is no game at all.

As the cross looms on the horizon, the money put down on the string of houses on Park Place is looking cheap. When it runs out, people just handwrite new bills. To get ahead in the game, people say the right things to please the right people and avoid saying things that will offend those dealing in property on Boardwalk. And if they’re worried about committing to any answer, they say nothing at all.

Which is why Jesus suggests that it’s better to say no and change your mind than to say yes with fake money and then close the game when the going gets tough. In other words: put your money where your mouth is. Let your heart and your deeds demonstrate that this is no game at all.

Right now, in a world of conflicting messages, low commitment, cheap words, and shallow friendships, it’s easy to be a Christian dealing fake money in a board game. Jennifer Reddall, the Episcopal Bishop of Arizona, recently named this quite bluntly in a message to her diocese. Here’s what she said: “The skepticism of many young people in our nation towards organized religion often has its roots in the sense that churches are hypocritical–they profess faith in a God of loving relationships, but sometimes exercise behavior that is un-loving and abusive.”[1] To many so-called Christians, discipleship seems to be more than a riskless game. Bills can be printed on demand, and you can close shop when things get too risky.

Should we, then, be paying more attention to the ones who are saying no? On a first reading, the first son in Jesus’s parable who initially says no to his father’s request to go and work in the vineyard seems insubordinate. Why won’t he go to work? How can he be so disrespectful of his father? But the twist in this parable—and there’s always a twist in a parable—turns the screw in our gut. This first son ends up being the most righteous, not because he said no, but because he changed his mind. It takes a significant amount of humility, self-awareness, and courage to transform a no into a yes.

But the second son is dealing out fake money in a game where the stakes are abominably low. His yes is not really a yes at all. His yes is a no. Why not stay in the game until the fake money runs out? But of course, then, the banker can just create more. Stay in the game until it gets too boring or hard. Enjoy the allure of winning and calling the shots. But don’t risk too much. Say yes to save face, but then do whatever you want.

Perhaps we should listen, for a minute, to those who are saying no. Why are they saying no? And when we find out why, maybe it can help us understand the true meaning of Christian discipleship. Those who want nothing to do with the Church abhor the slippery feel of fake money doled out like there’s no tomorrow. They’re tired of hearing people quote the baptismal covenant and then treating others as pawns in an abusive game. They’re tired of seeing the Bible hijacked to beat people into submission. They’re tired, perhaps, even of well-behaved Christians who do not offend or hurt but whose lives have no spiritual seasoning or spice. They attend Church each Sunday, but as soon as the service is ended, they fold up the game as if it has no relevance to the rest of the week.

Even more shockingly, could it be that those who say no to laboring in the field say no not just because they hate hypocrisy and the proliferation of fake money? Could it also be because they have some instinctive idea of just how difficult discipleship is? Are they so in awe of what Christian commitment really entails that they’re worried about saying yes and then trading in fake money for the rest of their lives?

So, before we pass GO one more time, maybe we should look at the bills in our own hands. Is the money fake or is it real? Are we playing a game that we can end at any time, or is this the way of Jesus, which never ends? And when the tragedy strikes, or when we’re asked to put our money down to support ministry, or when we’re invited not just to sit in the pew but labor in the field, are we willing to do it?

Of the many things that I value about this parish, it’s that I don’t find it to be a place that deals in fake money. I see a profound movement of the Holy Spirit among us that is causing all kinds of people to take Christian discipleship seriously, whether those who’ve been here for decades or those who’ve been here for a few weeks.

Week after week, we find people coming to Mass, laboring in the vineyard of ministry during the week, going deep in formation, and giving sacrificially of their resources and time to enable God’s ministry to flourish here. Here, we strive to deal in real money. Here we try to avoid playing riskless games.

Perhaps at some point in your life, you’ve said no, but now you’re saying yes. And what about those who aren’t yet here? What about those who are presently saying no, those who would rather play no game at all than play with fake money? What can they teach us? And what would it take to turn their no into a yes? Because in the Christian life, an unwillingness to change one’s heart is perhaps the most chilling offense against God’s grace. And a meaningless yes is just fake money when heart and deeds don’t match it.

There is something incredible behind a no that understands the power of becoming a yes. Every time we fall into sin and then turn again to God, our no becomes a yes. None of us is immune from no, but thanks to God’s abundant and never-ending grace, every no can become a resounding yes.

And best of all, God always says yes to us. Sometimes, the response might seem like a no, but in the mystery of God, it’s always a yes. God’s yes is always available to us, even when we say no. No never has to be our final word, for sometimes a long period of no might result in the most genuine yes of all. As much as we might play games with our faith, God never plays games with us. God doesn’t trade in meaningless denominations of cash. And when our hardness of our heart is softened and our no finally becomes a yes, we’ll find that God’s eternal yes has never, ever left us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 1, 2023

[1] https://azdiocese.org/2023/09/decline-and-discipline/

An Equal and Similar Action

Two statements from high school are seared into my mind. One is from economics class, and it may very well be the only thing I remember from that class. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. I suppose it’s true, although I’ve been in some situations in my life where I did indeed feel like I was getting a free lunch. It was usually when I was the recipient of a free trip or a lavish gift of some kind from an institution with way too much money. But in general, and certainly where capitalism reigns, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I don’t think this is meant to be a pessimistic statement but rather a wise admonition. Wikipedia will tell you that it means that the universe is basically a closed system.[1] If you want that fancy vacation home, you will either have to earn more money or make some cuts to your budget. There’s a finite number of resources, and so something must be sacrificed for everything to equal out.

And this brings me to the second memorable statement from high school, but this time from physics class. It was not my favorite class, but I do remember Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If you push on a wall, it’s also pushing back against you. According to this law, the universe is definitely a closed system. There’s a finite amount of energy that must be conserved, hence the equal and opposite reaction.

Those two statements from well over twenty-five years ago have stayed with me not because I’m obsessed with economics or physics. I can assure you that I don’t miss those classes. But I remember those statements because they apply to more than just the physical exchange of money or the world economy or the daily gravitational forces we experience but usually fail to think about. Those two statements from high school imprinted on my brain also apply to human nature.

We humans are wired to operate within a closed system. Think about it. If someone is offering you an unexpected gift, your first reaction will probably be to assume that you owe something in return. What’s the catch? you might say. This is too good to be true. Someone could be giving you a free trip to Bermuda, but you’re going to have to pay somehow. Maybe you’ll owe them a favor, or maybe the trip comes with a whopping dollop of a guilt trip, but whatever it is, I’ll bet that you won’t think the trip is a free lunch after all.

Or think about this: if someone insults you or someone you love, I’ll bet that your instinctive reaction will be to respond in kind. We can write it off as righteous indignation or defending ourselves or someone we love, but at the end of the day, Isaac Newton’s epiphany extends well beyond the physical world. It reaches into the emotional and spiritual depths of our being.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus teaches us a very different way. Jesus seems to know very little of this closed system that we inhabit, which is why his way makes no sense to us. We’re wired to be suspicious of free lunches and to respond with equal and opposite reactions, but Jesus tells us that when someone strikes us on the cheek, we’re to turn the other cheek, not lash out in response. We heard just a few weeks ago that when someone sins against us, we’re not supposed to return the sin or to lick our wounds until they’re raw. We’re to name the offense and seek forgiveness. When Jesus heals, he doesn’t charge by the hour. When he invites people into a relationship with him, there’s no ulterior motive and there are certainly no strings attached.

I suspect that this is why people can’t understand Jesus or why he simply disturbs them. His actions, preaching, and teaching sound like fairy tales. And this is also why the parable of the laborers in the vineyard makes absolutely no sense. What did you think about it? Since I’m already on a betting streak today, I’ll bet again. I’ll bet you thought that the owner of the vineyard was ridiculously unfair. What kind of employer gives the same wages to those who work all day as she does to those who work only one hour? What kind of stupidity is this? The landowner sounds utterly capricious: can’t I do whatever I want with whatever is mine? How many of us would last more than a day working for such an employer?

But then, the landowner says something that cuts through the bone way down into the marrow: are you envious because I am generous? Or more literally in the Greek, is your eye evil because mine is good? Ouch. That one hurts. Suddenly, we have been extracted from a closed system and into a completely different universe, where the laws of economics and physics don’t apply, and we have no clue how to act.

We have, in fact, been brought into the kingdom of God. As we describe it in Godly Play during Sunday School, this kingdom is not like the kingdom we live in. It doesn’t sound like a kingdom we’ve ever heard of. This kingdom is utterly foreign to us because it’s so difficult for us to wrap our minds around the fact that God doesn’t work in the closed system in which we live.

And what a gift that is! It frees us from the closed system that turns us inward on ourselves and pits us against the rest of the world. In our world, there’s a limited supply of everything. If someone else gets the job we desire, we lose. If someone else gets into Harvard, our chances of getting in get slimmer. If someone else is given praise, then we are insulted.

But it goes deeper, because the closed system in which we live starts to eat at our trust and it injects us with a strong dose of fear. I’m underpaid at my job, so why should I advocate for salary raises at the non-profit for which I volunteer? I wasn’t given a pay raise last year, so why should I increase my contributions to that charity?

Soon enough, the closed system breeds entitlement. I’ve worked here for twenty years, she’s only been here five, and she got the promotion. I’ve been following Jesus for forty years, he’s a recent convert, and I have an incurable disease while he’s healthy. I’ve not missed a Sunday of church in all my life, but that criminal on death row finds Jesus at the last minute. You see how it goes. When someone else wins, we lose. It’s a closed system. And for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

Which is why I’m going to make another bet. Why not? I’ve been doing it all over the place for the past eight minutes. I’m going to bet that all these equal and opposite reactions are because most people can’t even begin to comprehend the extent of God’s love. Of course, how can we ever understand it? But then again, there are those who claim to understand it, and then live their lives as if in a closed system. They live with strings attached to everything: to their money, to their volunteered time, to their gestures of “love.” And this simply means that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And there’s certainly no such thing as a free lunch.

But let’s say that God is more like the landowner in the parable than like us. Or perhaps better yet, let’s imagine that God operates within an infinitely open universe that is based on the bizarre economics of that parable. When people rage against God and curse him and go after other gods, God still gives back infinite love. When a convicted murderer repents minutes before being put to death, God forgives just as much as he forgives the pious churchgoer of eighty years. When we hold back on our gift to the church because we’re too worried about our future, God doesn’t put our name on the chalkboard; God loves just as much as he loves the most generous donor in the world. God knows no equal and opposite reaction. God only knows an equal action extended to all his beloved children.

So, what if we could live in God’s open universe? What if we responded to every action with an equal action of love? What if when we see generosity we responded with generosity in kind, not with envy or resentment? What if the only reaction or action we knew how to take was that of love, generosity, mercy, or compassion? What if we let God cut all the enslaving strings attached to our relationships and money and gifts of time? What if we stopped keeping score? What if we forgave even when we’re not forgiven? What if we loved even when we feel unloved? What if we rejoiced in others’ successes even when we seem to be failing?

Maybe, just maybe, we could then catch a fleeting glimpse of an infinitesimal amount of God’s infinite love. The same is given to the first as to the last. Its abundance knows no end. And no matter how we act toward God or his beloved children in our distorted, closed world, God’s reaction is always the same: God’s reaction is no reaction at all. It is one wondrous action of pure, unbounded love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 24, 2023

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

A Hermeneutic of Trust

I don’t remember exactly when it was, but there was a point in my life when I realized that things are not always as they appear, that there are layers of meaning to what I previously thought were just simple things. Maybe it started with the learning of critical thinking skills in high school. Maybe it was when I learned that a pair of glasses in The Lord of the Flies was not just a pair of glasses but a symbol for something else. Or it might have started with a biology teacher who ratcheted up my intellectual powers to draw connections that were not immediately obvious in the natural world. Or it could have been just the inevitable reality of growing older and seeing that life is far more complicated than I had ever realized.

I didn’t know it then, but I was being taught a hermeneutic of suspicion. In some ways, it wasn’t all a bad thing. The universe began to light up with multivalency, my thinking matured, and life became richer in some respects. On the other hand, I began to understand how jaded humanity could be and how a tragedy might lead some even to blame God for evil or fail to see mystery in life or lose hope. The irony is that while a hermeneutic of suspicion is intended to expand critical thinking skills and open the mind to invisible things, it can, at the same time, cause people to lose their grasp on that invisible thing we Christians call hope.

And so, I was struck this past week as I watched a TV show featuring the case of a young woman whose tragic death by murder occurred over twenty-five years ago. I was surprised that there was no malice among the victim’s family members who were interviewed. I never once heard them say they wanted the perpetrator to suffer punishment. In fact, I never heard any anger at all. Although the family didn’t talk at great length about their faith, it was clear they were Christians, and it was clear that the bedrock of constancy in their broken lives was their trust that God was still with them.

And I was especially moved by the comment of the victim’s sister as the episode was winding to a close. By this point, the identity of the killer had been discovered, and he had been duly prosecuted and convicted. But without any visible ill-will towards her sister’s murderer, the victim’s sister said that even despite the sadness and heart-wrenching loss she and her family had experienced, she couldn’t ignore that so much good had come out of everything.

If the hermeneutic of suspicion is your modus operandi, then you might think the victim’s sister to be a simpleton. We are more accustomed to expecting rageful calls for someone’s suffering in return for suffering inflicted. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I couldn’t help but wonder what my own reaction would be if I had experienced such a tragedy. What is it that makes us think we’ll be at peace when someone who has committed a heinous crime is consigned to an earthly hell? On the other hand, what is it that allowed the family in question to avoid being caught in cycles of vengeful thinking and resentment? And what is it that allows Joseph, of technicolor dream coat fame, not to seek vengeance against his brothers who have wronged him but rather to provide for their families and be at peace?

It's one of the most well-known stories in the Bible, and I think one of the most engaging and compelling. And its ending, where we enter the story today, is a profound testament to the loving providence of God and the power of God’s mysterious ways. If you recall, back in chapter 37 of the Book of Genesis, seventeen-year-old Joseph has a dream in which he is to rule over his brothers. They, of course, become angry and conspire, at first, to kill him, and then to throw him into a pit, and finally, to sell him into slavery to some Midianite traders.

Fast forward some years later, and Joseph becomes a favorite of the Pharaoh of Egypt, primarily because of his ability to interpret dreams. Joseph has also been storing up grain, and when a famine comes into Joseph’s native land of Canaan, his brothers—sent by Jacob his father—come to Egypt to find food. Joseph recognizes them, he but doesn’t let on to this.

Finally, Joseph lets the cat out of the bag, and he shares his identity with his brothers. It turns out that Joseph is able to provide for the physical salvation for his family, as well as many others, all of whom benefit from Joseph’s store of grain during a famine. And this brings us to the final scene of the Book of Genesis, which we have just heard. Joseph’s brothers are terrified that, after the death of Jacob their father, Joseph will finally revenge himself upon them. To which, Joseph responds with one of the most moving lines in all of Scripture: “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”

This doesn’t sound like a hermeneutic of suspicion. It sounds an awful lot like the sister of a murdered woman who has the grace to say that despite the tremendous tragedy she experienced, there was still so much good that came out of it. It must seem incomprehensible to a modern, rational mind that when something horrible happens to us, and when we suffer, that good might come out of it. Maybe it initially sounds like we’re trying to justify evil. Or maybe it sounds like we’re suggesting that God will cause evil so that a greater good can come out of it. But I don’t think either of those is the point, and we should rightly balk at those suggestions.

What Joseph intimates to his brothers in their paranoid fear is that on ground level, we usually only see evil. In our quest to evaluate life critically, we can very easily—and rather ironically—lose sight of another invisible possibility that lies behind the horrible things we encounter. We, understandably, can’t get past what is bad because we know that there’s something sick, terrible, and wrong with evil. But Joseph, for whatever reason, which we can probably only attribute to God’s grace, Google maps out and takes us to God’s view. There, from out of what we humans intend for evil, God brings great good. This is how God’s power is revealed.

Remember that Joseph’s brothers are afraid. They live in a similar world to ours, where everyone must get their comeuppance, where we rejoice in others’ downfall, where victims are given permission to delight in the deaths of others, and where we live by transaction, tit-for-tat, and eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

And this, I believe, is why so many people simply can’t believe in a God of love, mercy, and compassion. They have wrongly assumed that God is just like us, that God seeks revenge and enacts justice by smiting some and consigning others to eternal punishment. Using a hermeneutic of suspicion, they have failed to see that perhaps God’s justice is to bring good out of what we have intended for evil.

Perhaps unintentionally, a hermeneutic of suspicion can suggest that evil is greater than good, that the presence of suffering means the absence of God, and that anyone who doesn’t desire a vengeful justice is soft and weak. Such a hermeneutic urges us to be wary of any happy ending and of seeing hope where reality lures us into fear.

But Joseph, and those who choose to forgive their enemies and who have risen above a transactional view of life, have opted for what some have called a hermeneutic of trust.[1] Those who use this way of interpreting life are hardly naïve. They aren’t stupid or foolish. They haven’t denied evil or their own suffering. Instead, they have realized that vengeance and retribution will give them no power but will instead eat them alive. On the contrary, they have chosen to adopt a posture that will help them begin to see things from God’s level, where what is intended for evil can be transformed into good, because with God, anything is possible.

What’s possible is what happened on the cross with Jesus, where a means of punishment became the path to eternal life. On the cross, Jesus prayed for his enemies. On the cross, a wide-armed posture that would cause physical death became the embrace to draw all people to God the Father. Through the cross, God swoops down to earth and lifts us up to see things from his point of view, not with a hermeneutic of suspicion, but with a hermeneutic of trust.

 A hermeneutic of trust tells us this: we should leave justice to God, because God will see that justice is realized. God will do an infinitely better of job of it, too, for what we imagine is justice is usually just petty revenge. A hermeneutic of trust invites us to try to begin to see with the eyes of Jesus, who reigns from the cross and cancels all our hermeneutic of suspicions and offers us the gift of hope. And if we choose to accept this gift, we will see that there is no evil that our gracious God can’t transform into good.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 17, 2023

[1] Some have attributed the coinage of this term to Hans-Georg Gadamer.

The Place to Be Found

The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow.” If you spend enough time with holy Scripture, you will find that it pierces the veil between heaven and earth. In ordinary, random moments, the Holy Spirit draws an illuminating connection between the word of God and our lives.

So it was on Thursday when I opened the church doors around 8:45 a.m. for Morning Prayer, and I noticed what seemed to be a lifeless baby squirrel just at the entrance to the bell tower. My heart sank as I stared at the little creature, and I hoped that he hadn’t suffered. All through Morning Prayer the sad prospect of digging a grave for the squirrel loomed over me.

After Morning Prayer, I went to get a shovel from the retreat house tool shed, and when I arrived at the door to the church, I discovered that the squirrel had moved. It was alive! I was momentarily overjoyed, but soon, a new worry fell upon me. I thought the helpless creature might be injured, and I couldn’t imagine what rescue organization would want to help a squirrel. Throughout the scorching day, our parish administrator, Chris, and I checked in on the squirrel and provided water for it, hoping it would survive the oppressive heat and the threat of predators. As I went to sleep on Thursday night, I was still worrying about the squirrel, because I hadn’t seen it before Evening Prayer.

On Friday, I opened the tower doors again for Mass, and the squirrel was once again by the Tower doors. I knew that another day in brutal heat would be disastrous for it, but I didn’t know what to do. It was at this point that a kind parishioner came to the rescue. After calling many vets to no avail, she found one that would take in a squirrel. So, she rushed over to the church with a cat carrier and whisked the squirrel away to safety.

Although I don’t know why this little animal appeared at the door to our church, I suspect that its mother had died, perhaps near the doors of the church. The squirrel was lost, not knowing where to go or even how to survive. It was trying to find nourishment, but it didn’t know where to find it. And although the squirrel would occasionally wander off to the bushes, it would always find its way back to the same spot by the welcome sign to this church, as if it were the only familiar place it knew.

I have been reflecting on why I was so concerned about that squirrel and why the animal even made it into my prayers. It sounds silly to say it; and maybe you think it’s ridiculous. Why would this little creature, often considered a nuisance, compel the time, attention, and affection of two busy staff members and a parishioner? Why did my heart break for the little thing? And then I realized that our collective attempt to aid the animal was emblematic of an instinctive human urge to provide for the helpless, especially the abandoned and lost. I wonder if that’s because each of us knows what it’s like to be lost.

By Friday morning, the rescue of a baby squirrel, ordinarily considered yet one more wildlife nuisance, had intersected in my mind and heart with chapter 18 of Matthew’s Gospel. What’s not clear from today’s Gospel is that immediately before our passage, Jesus talks about how God always seeks out and finds the lost. God is like a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the lost one, rejoicing when that sheep is brought back into the fold.

Jesus draws on this ancient Jewish imagery of God as a good shepherd to preface his instructions to the church in chapter 18, which is where we enter the Gospel today. Jesus’s words of wisdom to the church are concerned with accountability to one another and how to handle conflict and dissension. Go directly to the one who has wronged you, name the wrong, and seek forgiveness. And if it doesn’t work in private, broaden it to include more of the church. Finally, if you aren’t successful, take it to the whole church.

This isn’t shaming. It’s not revenge. It’s striving for forgiveness and reconciliation. It has to do with bringing the lost back home. Do you see what’s happening? Jesus is saying that the church can only be the church when her desire for forgiveness and reconciliation tries to replicate the tenacity and love of a God who always desires to bring us back to the sheepfold.

And this has everything to do with the community of the church. God said it in Genesis, and God says it again in Matthew 18 through the indirect words of Jesus: each of us is not meant to be alone. We are meant to be together. And the church is the place God has given us to find that community. However bizarre it may seem, my encounter with an abandoned squirrel at the door of this church emphasized for me the importance of being found. It reminded me that we are all lost sheep, or lost squirrels for that matter.

Why is it, then, that there are so many who believe that they don’t need the church? They look for community in all kinds of places, and while they may find some companionship there, they won’t find the community of which Jesus is speaking. The church is the place where we find our deepest meaning, because to be the church assumes that we are all accountable to one another. Jesus knows that if we try to go it alone, we’ll cling to our resentments. We’ll bind what shouldn’t be bound, and we’ll fail to loose that which should be loosed. Alone in our heads and in our private rooms, we’ll imagine that we’ve achieved forgiveness or reconciliation, but we won’t have sought them in the flesh. Apart from the church, we will scour the earth for bread that doesn’t nourish, because it will simply take our money and never satisfy. By ourselves and without the church’s community, we will demonize those with whom we disagree because we will refuse to look them in the eyes. Above all, in the community outside the church, we will be told that in our sinfulness we’re utterly alone and that we’re defined by our mistakes. Second chances are for wimps, and punishment equals justice.

But when we’re accountable to one another for our sins and faults, we find the greatest companionship of all, because our frailty is what binds us together. When we share the precious food of the Mass, we’re collectively made whole again by a God who simply wants us to accept his boundless love and who will never leave us abandoned at the door of the church.

The zinger is this: when Jesus says that God is like a shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, I know that the sheep is a sinner like me and you, but a sinner who is redeemed by the life and death of Jesus Christ. We’re not defined by our sins. The sheep is one who is often lost and doesn’t know it. It’s one who is hungry but doesn’t know where to find real food. Or maybe we could say, we are each like the little squirrel abandoned at the door to this church. When we are apart from the church, we’re like newborns without parents, not really knowing where to go or how to survive. But we’re not meant to be alone.

When two or three are gathered, God is there. Sure, God is with us in our private rooms and private prayers. But God reveals himself in an utterly profound way when we are gathered in this place, in God’s presence, before God’s altar, in the breaking open of Scripture and bread. Here we seek eternal food and forgiveness. Here we vow to find those among us who are lost.

That baby squirrel couldn’t have known that it had found the right place to be rescued. Whether you are new here or whether you have been here for ages, in this church, you will be found when you are lost. I can tell you that. In my short time here, I have been amazed at how lost sheep always arrive at our doors. Some have a past here, others are new. And when I myself have been lost, someone among us here always brings me home.

If two or three of us will not rest until a baby squirrel finds help, can you then imagine how present God is to us when we are lost? In the human hands of this church and of churches throughout the world, God brings home the lost. And this is why we need the church. This is why coming here, week after week, is the most important thing we can do in our lives.

The door to the church is the door to our true home. Outside the door, each of us may be regarded as little more than a nuisance, but inside the doors to this holy place, we’re loved beyond measure. Outside the doors we may starve for food, but inside we feast on the bread of heaven. Outside the doors, we’re defined by our frailties, but inside we’re loved into forgiveness and reconciliation. Outside the doors, we’re divided and scattered, but inside, we’re brought together into a fellowship that surpasses all understanding. And outside the doors, we imagine that we know what love is, but when we walk inside, we will be surprised by a love that we never knew was possible.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 10, 2023