Compassion from the Inside Out

I’ve told this story before in a sermon, but it’s been a few years. Maybe you’ve forgotten it, or perhaps you never heard it. So, I’ll share it again. I think of it often, with some sadness and poignancy. And even now, I find myself plumbing the depths of what it means.

In a previous parish, I was leading a discussion of today’s Gospel parable with a youth group. I was a rookie priest, eager to pass on the good news of one of my favorite stories from Scripture, and I was incredibly naïve. The father in the story, I explained to the youth, is like God. Notice how he’s already waiting for his youngest son as he returns with his tail between his legs from his time of profligacy. Notice how the father embraces him and welcomes him eagerly back home. God is like that, I said. God is always waiting with arms wide open for us to return in repentance back to him. Isn’t that amazing?

But the youth before me had blank and skeptical expressions on their faces. If there wasn’t literal eye rolling, there was inward eye rolling. There were no smiles, just hard, cold stares. One youth surprised me with her interpretation, which she offered in an edgy, precociously jaded manner. “The father’s son wasn’t even really sorry,” she objected. “He just realized that he'd reached rock bottom, and so, he decided to take advantage of the situation and return home to ask his father’s forgiveness. It wasn’t genuine.”

I was flummoxed, realizing that my passionate interpretation of the parable had fallen like a lead balloon on the ears of these teenagers. I don’t recall how I tried to salvage the conversation, but the perspectives of those youth have troubled me even to this day. They irritatingly announced that it was unfair that the prodigal son was welcomed back while the dutiful and obedient elder son hadn’t even received so much as a roasted goat in return for his hard work.

I’ve heard versions of this sentiment many times since and from people of all ages. I’m sure I’ll hear them until I take my last breath. It’s not fair that the death row inmate finds Jesus before his death and receives forgiveness even as the victim’s family continues to suffer. It’s not fair that God’s forgiveness is doled out to lifelong churchgoers and newfound converts with the same liberality. It’s not fair that the day laborers in Matthew’s Gospel who worked only an hour received the same compensation as those who labored all day. It’s not fair that the person who’s been in the parish for only a year gets elected to the vestry when the fifty-year parishioner doesn’t. You know how this goes. In our usual theological marketplace, the more you put in, the harder you work, and the more faithful you are, the more you receive in return.

Except this is not how things work in God’s economy. But those youth studying the parable of the prodigal son couldn’t see that it wasn’t God’s ways that are unfair; it’s our ways that are unfair. And it has troubled me in all those years since that those youth couldn’t see past their own suspiciousness to rejoice in God’s boundless love, mercy, and compassion.

And why? I wondered. Was it because the high-pressure schools in which they relentlessly labored measured everything through the economy of equitable exchange? You study hard, you get a good grade. Was it the same at home? Were they trying to please parents with insatiable appetites for success? I don’t know, but as I encountered the parable of the prodigal son in preparation for today’s sermon, I had a new insight.

I was struck this time by the father’s reaction when he spies his son returning home. We’re told that the father had compassion when he saw his son, making his way back in a sorry state. The father doesn’t receive the son’s return with a perverse eagerness to make him pay for his sins, nor does he punish him with an icy greeting. The father is moved deeply within, in his very gut. I wonder, what was there in the father’s past that summoned such a feeling of aching compassion for his returning son?

Had the father been lost when he was younger, just as his son was? Is it possible that the father knew in a painful way the wretched emptiness of reaching the hard, cold bottom of a dark hole and then having to crawl back up to the light? Or was the father just remembering the day his son was born, when he took his first breath outside of his mother’s womb and let out a sharp wail? Did his father recall the days when he taught his son how to walk and tend to the fields and shared with him all the lessons of life? Whatever it was—and we’ll never know what it was, so we can only imagine—the father’s very insides trembled with compassion, love, and mercy as his son trudged back home.

Maybe those youth with whom I worked some years ago were missing that sense of throbbing compassion that the father could recall. Those youth could only see the parable as a distant story from the ancient Bible, unrelated to their innocent, privileged lives. Perhaps they were too young to have enough life experience to know what it was like to have lost your way entirely and then be found by someone seeking them out with such surprising tenacity. Maybe they’d never had the misfortune of losing everything and then being rescued. Or were they simply too ashamed to admit their waywardness in a culture of perfectionism? Had they been tragically lost and no one came to their aid? Who knows—and like the story of the father in the parable, we’ll never know—but this, I’m convinced, was the missing element in those adolescents’ interpretation of the story.

And it’s the same for us. When I feel satisfaction that someone who had previously been riding high is brought to their knees, then I’ve failed to remember the times when I’ve reached rock bottom. When I’m irritated that the reprobate who finds Jesus at the end of her life is showered with the same forgiveness that I the lifelong Christian receive, then I forget the sweetness of being forgiven for an appalling wrong committed. When I want the person who has wounded me to receive their comeuppance, then I have amnesia about my own many sins and how God hasn’t counted them against me but forgiven me before I ever opened my mouth to confess. Only when I can go deep enough into my belly, where past hurts and wounds are still held, can I ache with compassion for my neighbor, who is lost and needs to be found just like me. And this is the call of the Christian, to be so interlinked with humanity that we will inwardly share their pain and then rejoice when they’re found.

In this, the prodigally loving father is an echo of God the Father, who in Christ, has shared our pains and sorrows. If God could be represented in our human terms, his very bowels would be aching when we wander astray and when we’re lost. God would feel such interior resonance with us, whom he breathed into existence, that God would be standing at the gate of heaven, waiting for us to walk right into his arms of love.

And we see all this on the cross. We see that God always goes above and beyond our sense of what is fair. God doesn’t match our behavior with like response. God’s grace exceeds our own repentance. God’s love exceeds our hatred. And while hanging unjustly on the cross, where Jesus willingly gives up his life for the sake of the world, he forgives his enemies. God’s way of saving humankind can never be a mere transactional affair. God’s response always preempts and exceeds ours.  

So it is that our own human responses must transcend the world’s distorted values of what’s fair and unfair. And to do so, each of us must go to that frightening place within, where our gut summons aches of our past wanderings and misdeeds and where those inner pangs find resonance with all who are lost and deserve to be found.

The journey of Lent isn’t wallowing in our past misdeeds or carrying a self-inflicted cross of guilt. The journey is to be honest and vulnerable enough to know when to turn around and walk back home, right into the arms of God who has been waiting for us ever since we left his embrace. But the call of Lent is yet more. Once we’ve returned home, we must never forget the sensation of being lost. We must never take for granted God’s mercy and compassion that exceed any of our expectations. Because only then can our bodies be tuned to the aches and pains of this hurting world. And out of this pain, when our lost neighbor is found by the relentless mercy of God, we’ll hear the music from the celebratory party and be glad. We won’t stay outside in sulking resentment. We’ll enter in, so that we can dance and sing and feast forever in the unending banquet of God’s love.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 30, 2025

The Stubbornness of Love

Is it possible to train a chicken? Some cursory internet searches suggest that it’s really not that difficult, but you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. According to a good friend of mine, chickens are tricky to train. It’s possible, but it takes great patience. My friend is an excellent dog trainer, and some years ago, she went to a training workshop where her primary task was to train a chicken. It sounds strange, but the point was that if you can train a chicken, you can definitely train a dog. Or probably more accurately, if you can train a chicken, you can train the owners of the dogs. That, according to my friend, is a large part of her task. The dogs are more receptive than the hard-headed owners usually are. Apparently, dog owners will spend good money on a trainer only to tell the trainer how things should be done.

It’s no surprise that Jesus frequently resorts to agrarian imagery when trying to make a point, and for many twenty-first century Americans, those images may ring hollow for us. But do you ever wonder whether Jesus was making a more biting point by using animals as examples when talking to humans? And maybe this is lost on those of us who spend more time in front of computers than milking cows or collecting eggs from chickens. To Jesus’s audience, it’s possible that the image of a hen gathering her delicate brood of chicks under her wings would have been both a beautiful image of maternal protection as well as a judgment of humanity.

Think about it. We sophisticated moderns have the benefit of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but we have the disadvantage of thinking we’re far superior in every way to lesser animals. If Jesus is using the image of a mother hen protecting her vulnerable brood of chicks as a metaphor for God’s boundless paternal and maternal love, then a first-century farmer would have understood just how tenacious the mother hen’s love was. And that farmer might have recoiled at an insinuation that we would miss. Though little chicks know exactly where to go for nourishment and protection, we humans often run in the opposite direction. We run away from God.

Now, imagine how further convicting Jesus’s image should be for those of us who have a far better understanding of genera and species. If we have so much more knowledge of how life works, then it’s even more tragic that we twenty-first humans are perhaps even more inclined to eschew the loving, protective arms of God than our forebears. And that realization hurts like a hen peck to our ego.

We forget how vulnerable we really are, or it may be that we choose not to recognize our vulnerability because it makes us seem less powerful. Little chicks, fresh out of their safe eggs, hardly know how to walk. They’re potential prey for any number of vicious creatures. They waddle around comically like their heads are cut off. But one thing they do know, quite naturally, is that the place of safety, comfort, nourishment, and love—if we want to call it that—is under the generous wings of their mother. And should a fox appear on the scene, the mother hen will become feisty with a natural sense of instinctual, maternal care. She’ll use her beak and wings to shield her chicks from harm. She’ll cluck them into safety. She’ll stand between the fox and the chicks, just like a good shepherd stands between the wolf and the sheep.

How complex Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem is! He’s steeped in that ancient Hebrew tradition, where plaintive songs of prayer arise in the face of disaster, such as the exile in Babylon. Jesus mourns over Jerusalem as a typical Middle Easterner would have wailed and still does wail loudly at a funeral, while we Americans hide our tears behind handkerchiefs.

And our risen Savior still laments both over Jerusalem and over our many cities. Surely, Jesus continues to mourn and weep, as he did at Lazarus’s tomb, at the senseless violence and seething hatred among us. He weeps because humanity, as enlightened as it may be, refuses to care for the stranger or provide for the least of these. Surely, he weeps at a global family that is rent apart by unhappy divisions. Surely, Jesus’s heart breaks at those who think they can live life without God, as if God somehow is responsible for the daily terrors of which we’re all too aware. Surely, Jesus is upset by Christians who rejoice in their own thanksgivings but fail to weep with those who are suffering terribly. Surely, Jesus weeps at our many gods, at our idolatrous bowings to corrupt worldly rulers, at our stubborn refusals to turn and see God’s great love. And perhaps most of all, surely Jesus laments when we, God’s adopted children, lack the courage to take responsibility for our own sins and turn back to God, who always waits for us as a mother hen. God is ready to spread his maternal wings over our frail bodies, to give us warmth from the cold, dead world, to sate us with the nourishment of eternal food, and to provide us with a place of safety and rest.

It’s as if at some point—was it at the Fall?—we failed to imprint on our heavenly Father, which a far less intelligent little chick knows how to do. It’s as if we thought ourselves too smart for school and could figure things out for ourselves, but when we wandered too far away from the nest, we found ourselves surrounded by foxes. We trusted those foxes at first, until we realized that they were just predators and were about to eat us alive. Maybe even now, we’re desperately wondering how we can return to the shelter of those widespread, warm, maternal wings.

Your house is forsaken, Jesus says. It’s judgment but not abandonment by God. As we’re probably wont to do, we make God into a superhuman bully, and we imagine Jesus’s words as an eternal censure of the human race, as if God has left us behind because we were so recalcitrant. But the forsaken house is a part of Jesus’s long lament. Our house is forsaken in the sense that our poor choices have confronted us with savage betrayals and grieving neighbors and starving children and cruel divisiveness. This is the self-judgment wrought on us by our willful wandering away from the nest.

But this powerful image of a protective mother hen that Jesus offers is nothing less than a glimpse into the heart of God. Here, we see God who is beyond human emotions and beyond our time and space. But lest we imagine God as a distant clock winder, St. Luke gives us a profound image into the heart of God in Jesus’s lament. In human time, we see the heart of God in turmoil over our stubborn refusal to admit the wrong we’ve done and left undone. Because if we could only admit that, we would be waddling right into the ample wings of God, the mother hen who calls us home.

In our seemingly infinite human sophistication, we’ve rejected God because we imagine God as a paternal or maternal figure gone wrong. God is like the father who was cold and absent, scolding, and harsh. God is like the mother who would protect but only with heavy strings attached. But precisely because God is not like us, in Jesus’s lament, we see the eternal nature of God revealed. Jesus laments not because God can’t control his children but because he won’t. God won’t force us under the shadow of his wings. The depth of God’s love isn’t revealed in smothering us with his wings but in the death and glorification of his Son on the cross. It seems no coincidence that we’re given Jesus’s tender lament before the agonies of the cross.

Jesus as the visible expression of God’s infinite love will be the mother hen on earth for the lost chicks, not by forcing the chicks under his wings but by going to the cross. Jesus will be the protective mother hen who stands between the Herods of this world, the foxes who don’t care for the chicks but will abuse, use, and neglect the chicks. Despite the Pharisees’ warning to him, Jesus won’t skip town because Herod the fox is after him. He’ll stay and continue his work of casting out demons and healing the sick. Jesus is so tenacious in his love, as a mother hen, that he goes to the cross rather than coercing the chicks into his care. On that cross the stubbornness of love defeats the stubbornness of human sin.

And on that day, a day we’ll celebrate just a few weeks from now, we’ll finally see who Jesus really is. We’ll welcome him into Jerusalem with a cry, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” We’ll truly see him as he is, dying and yet reigning from a cross. There, with arms outstretched, he will gather his little chicks—us—under the warmth and shelter of his wings. And then we’ll gain our own wings, fly away in freedom, and finally be at rest.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday in Lent
March 16, 2025 

Beyond Temptation

Of all the artistic renderings of the devil, the least convincing are those that portray him as a red-suited guy with horns and evil eyes. That’s far too comical and could lead us not to take the devil very seriously. We ignore the devil at our peril. The most convincing images are those that depict the devil as “an angel of light,” as St. Paul once described him. In these portraits, the devil is remarkably handsome, fair-haired, looking like a movie star or a magazine model. These portrayals of the devil get under our skin because the devil looks unnervingly human, a bit too much like us. It’s an eerily human kind of representation of the devil that surfaces in Jerome Witkin’s painting The Devil as a Tailor, where the devil is a man sewing uniforms for the Nazis.

But I know of no depiction of the devil as a rather ordinary looking human being playing a game of cards. I don’t mean this in a facetious way but in a very real way. We shouldn’t make the devil into a joke. So, imagine the devil sitting at a round card table with all of humanity, playing a game with us, and keeping his cards close to his chest.

In this game, as in any card game, there’s a finite number of cards. Some cards outrank others. The cards are dealt according to chance and luck. Some people get a good hand, while others are saddled with a bad one. In this imaginary setting, as in real life, the devil is wily and cunning. He knows intimately the rules of the game, and oddly enough, he plays by the rules. That’s how he operates. It would be too obvious if he were to break them. The devil operates quite efficiently in our world, which we usually view as nothing more than a zero-sum game. And appropriately, as the devil is comfortably seated at life’s card game, he emblemizes one of his Scriptural names. He’s the adversary, the one playing against us, even though the terms and conditions of that game are no more than the status quo of life.

The problem with imagining the devil as a red-suited guy with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork is that it’s so obviously farcical. But the devil is no farce, and as wise Christian interpreters have known, the devil has been quite adept at assimilating himself into our finite, fallible, broken world.

This is why we could picture the devil sitting at the game table of life, holding his cards close to his chest, playing along very nicely with the usual rules of the game. He has an excellent poker face. He relishes the limited number of cards, and it works in his favor that the distribution of the cards is uneven. Some people are given a bad hand. Others seem to win all the time, as if they’re indestructible, unable to lose, always getting ahead, always trampling over others.

Don’t you see how this works? We know as well as the devil the rules of the zero-sum game, and this way of thinking is seductive because it’s so real. It begins to shape our idea of what’s fair and unfair. Our perception of justice is based on this zero-sum game, where life is nothing more than a bunch of fallible, weak, and love-starved people seated at a card table, where, of course, the devil is seated, too.

Based on this view, the one who cheats at the game or abuses the rules must pay. In this world, it’s an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In this view of the world, God gets drawn in to sit at the table with us. And soon, God becomes another person, just like us, playing the same old game of cards, whom we can manipulate just like the rest of the people at the table.

Now, we must treat God like a dispenser of magic tricks. Now, God must bring justice on our terms, not on his. Now, we test God with our prayer and make deals with God. God, if you take away my illness, I’ll never miss a Sunday service again. God if you get me that new job, I’ll serve you the rest of my life. We idolize our earthly rulers, equating their authority with God’s authority so that they can make things right as we want them to be. We even live recklessly, betting that God will save us every time.

But others respond differently. They can no longer remain at the card table because they see God sitting right there next to them. They believe that God is the one dealing the cards, where some get a disastrous hand, and others get a good one. Evil people have a hand of cards stacked with aces, and consistently good people lose every time. Those who leave the game are tired of things being so unfair. They’d rather God turn stones into bread so that there would be no hunger or third world poverty. They want God to prove himself.

When Satan appears to Jesus in the wilderness, he sits down at the game table of life to engage in a round of cards. For forty days, Jesus’s humanity is tested and tried, and Satan utilizes all the tactics in the usual rule book. Jesus is hungry and so are others. It would be easy to turn stones into bread, to do the right thing for the wrong reason. The Roman Empire was the inflictor of searing injustice and blatant evil like so many earthly governments. It would be tempting for Jesus to usurp earthly authority from abusive hands, although the cost would be high.

And the last temptation may be the most significant of all. I suspect that it’s more than a mere invitation for Jesus to hurl himself down from the pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple. Jerusalem is where Jesus is headed in Luke’s Gospel. It’s where he’ll suffer and die, but it’s also where he’ll rise again from the dead. Jerusalem is nothing less than where God shows exactly what kind of God he is. Jerusalem is where the truth of salvation confounds all our expectations and upends the card table of life. The devil really wants Jesus to ask God to save him from an ignominious future, to take the easy way out for our salvation.

But Jesus’s perfect humanity shines through in all this. Jesus doesn’t leave the table. Jesus doesn’t scream at the devil. Jesus doesn’t fight him. Jesus stays in the card game, willingly sticking with the hand he’s been dealt in his earthly life. In fact, unbeknownst to the devil, Satan’s hand has already been revealed.

If the traditional understanding of the devil as a fallen angel is true, then he’s been cast out of heaven. Based on his arrogant and preposterous claim in that second temptation, the devil does have some power in this world, which is dominated by corrupt rulers. It’s a perpetual card game where the odds are always stacked against the least of these. And yet, we can also rest assured that the devil is ignorant of one very important thing that we should know because we live in Christ.

If the devil knows this, he acts as if he doesn’t. God isn’t sitting at the card table with us and Satan, engaged in a competitive exchange of limited goods and tit-for-tat thinking. God, who’s beyond time and space and our fragile understanding, knows exactly what’s in the devil’s hand, and God knows exactly what’s in our hands, too. God knows that our life is more than just a whimsical stack of cards dealt out randomly. And God invites us to remember that he’s not like us. God is not one more person seated at a card table, enticing us to fall for the cutthroat competition of a zero-sum game. God is drawing us into the divine life of ceaseless love. In this divine life, there’s enough love for everyone. There’s enough blessing for everyone. There’s enough forgiveness for everyone. God himself is more than enough for everyone.

In the three temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, Satan tempts Jesus, just as he tempts us, to reduce the loving infinitude of God to the misshapen finitude of human existence. And in doing so, in a profoundly ironic twist, Satan has inadvertently shown us the startling, marvelous truth of who God really is. We learn from Jesus’s temptations that God doesn’t divvy out answers to prayer based on the deals we make with him. God’s relationship is far deeper and far more loving than a needy codependency where God dishes out kneejerk responses to our passionate requests. God is incapable of being gambled with, even though we might believe he only responds to our good behavior. God doesn’t make us choose between feeding the poor and trusting him alone. God doesn’t need earthly rulers to defend his honor as they persecute their enemies. God doesn’t need us to jealously protect him either. God doesn’t need to prove his power through magic tricks or excessive miracles.

God doesn’t need anything at all, even though so much of the world’s evil is based on making God like us and in being overzealous for God’s sake. No wonder the account of Jesus’s temptations occurs at the beginning of Lent, for it’s all about letting go, letting go of our need to control and letting go of our disastrous attempts to make God in our own image. God’s image needs no help from us, but if we go deep enough within ourselves, we’ll discover the image of unbounded love which has been there all along. And no one, not even the devil, can take that away.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2025

The Priceless Gift

I first met Stella ten years ago. She was one of several hospice patients with whom I visited while in seminary as part of a class in practical theology. Even after that seminary requirement was finished, I continued to visit Stella until she died.

I don’t know how long Stella had been in hospice care, but she was too young to be there. I’m guessing she wasn’t more than fifty years old. She was dying of cancer and had been in hospice care for a while when I first met her. The nursing home where she lived was a grim place. It must have been a lonely one, too.

Stella and I would usually make small talk. She would tell me about places where she had lived over the course of her life and about her son and her church. But sometimes, she would ask me to read from her Bible. She’d point to the leatherbound edition on the bedside table, and then she’d cite a chapter and verse of a particular book for me to read. When I opened the well-worn Bible, I saw that the white margins were completely filled with handwritten annotations. Stella had little else in that bleak nursing home room, but her Lord and his precious words seemed to mean everything to her.

Stella could recall Bible verses with eerie precision. Even as she lay as a prisoner to her hospital bed, she knew what words from Scripture she wanted to hear when she asked me to read to her. On one Saturday when I visited, she told me to open to a passage in St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, a few chapters after the reading we just heard. The passage Stella wanted to hear was similar to today’s reading. In both passages, St. Paul speaks in graphic detail about the sufferings that accompany discipleship.

It might seem like Paul is boasting, even bragging about how much he has endured as a follower of Christ. But there’s irony in his speech. If we want to boast at all, he suggests, we can boast in how poor we’ve become for Jesus’s sake. And in this, there’s really no boasting at all. There’s no suffering simply for the sake of suffering. Far from it. The point is that when we become poor for Christ’s sake, whether materially or spiritually, we learn just how much we really have.

Of all the passages Stella could have asked me to read on that Saturday nearly a decade ago, she chose one in which Paul recounted all the beatings, lashings, dangers, and persecutions he’d experienced in following Jesus. Stella could have asked me to read Psalm 23 or an account of Jesus healing the sick. But she didn’t. She asked me to read that rather torturous passage from Second Corinthians. I think she understood something that, at the time, I couldn’t comprehend.

Suffering quietly on that uncomfortable hospital bed in a dreary nursing home, Stella seemed to have nothing, at least by the world’s standards. There was no question that she was dying. She had few possessions of which I was aware. But I’m confident that despite her seemingly dismal state of affairs, Stella knew that she actually possessed everything. She had even more treasure than others who could easily boast of earthly riches, material power, and good health. Stella possessed everything because Christ reigned in her heart. She had everything because she understood from direct experience that even when we’ve lost our homes and our health and our security and our comfort, we’re still the recipients of Christ’s inestimable gift.

Our increasingly secular culture has an odd fascination with Ash Wednesday. Is it a macabre obsession with our mortality? Is it a grim preoccupation with our sinfulness? I don’t think it's either of those things. I suspect that in an ineffable way, when we’re reminded of what we’re lacking in life, we discover just how much we have. When we seem to have nothing, we have everything in Christ.

We distort this day of fasting and penitence if we wallow in our frailty, human fallibility, and sinfulness, and we misunderstand this holy season if we imagine Lent as the opening of a great chasm between ourselves and God. And yet, we can’t deny the starkness of this rather somber day. We receive ashes on our foreheads. We hear that we’re dust and to dust we shall return. In a death-denying world, we can’t escape the unavoidable reality of our own eventual deaths, nor can we escape the fact that none of us knows when we’ll die and that, ultimately, our own existence is beyond our control.

Perhaps, too, on this day, we bring an acute spirit of repentance not only for our individual failings but for our collective refusal to care for our neighbors. We carry the leaden weights of our own many sins of omission, when we failed to speak up in the face of wrong, or when we dishonored God’s image in another, or when we were so filled with hatred, that we committed murder in our hearts. Whatever they are, we carry all these sins to God’s altar this day. And for a moment, we sense just how poor we are. We’re reminded of how much grace we need to turn again to the Lord and find forgiveness. We’re reminded of the heavy cost of following One who gave his own life that we might have life.

Having emptied ourselves of all conceits and all prideful comforts, we suddenly find ourselves poor. And when we become poor for Christ’s sake, just as he became poor for ours, we see just how much we have. We no longer see things from a human point of view but from a spiritual one. The world’s favor no longer animates our lives, but God’s grace does. The awareness of what we lack isn’t a curse but a profound gift in which we’re split wide open to receive what God alone can give us.

By the world’s standards, we might seem like impostors, but so be it if we can catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God. We might be unknown to many if we live humbly and simply, but every hair on our head is counted and known by God. We will all face death one day, but we also know that physical death is not the end of the story because in Christ, we shall live forever. We might be hated by the world because our mind is Christ’s, but our persecution can never take away our dignity in God’s eyes. We might be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, but we can rejoice that the risen Christ is walking right beside us.

And in the sober realization of the poverty of our mortality, we’re reconciled to God and one another. Amid our many differences, our shared poverty is the one thing that unites us. We’re dust, and to dust we shall certainly return, but one day, God will raise even that dust to a new, resurrected life.

So, beloved in Christ, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation in which we celebrate that nothing can separate us from the relentless love and forgiveness of God. And although everything be taken away from us, there’s one priceless gift that will always be ours.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2025

Into the Silence

Have you noticed the absence of silence in public places these days? It seems like most of them can’t hold silence, except for libraries and churches. And even those are becoming louder. But there are certain places where you’re guaranteed to be held hostage to a blaring TV with endless news reports from anxious news sources. I’m thinking of the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices and airport terminals and car dealerships.

Why are they such apt venues for nonstop television broadcasts? I suspect that those are the places in which people are terrified of being alone with their thoughts. We might say that most of the time we’re afraid of keeping company with just our thoughts and ourselves, but that usual fear is exacerbated when waiting for medical results or when we’re about to board a flight that might be delayed or, worse yet, crash. And of course, in the car dealerships, everyone is afraid of what the price tag will be on the oil change and battery replacement. Most of us, at least in this nation, seem to be woefully afraid of silence.

It pervades even the Church. I once served as an organist in a deeply troubled parish. At some point, parishioners made it quite clear that I was to fill every second of silence in the liturgy with music, what we often call “traveling music” or “noodling.” There was to be no silence. A seminarian stationed at the parish wisely observed one day that the parishioners were scared of silence. And in hindsight, I wonder if that explained much of the parish’s difficulties.

But why are we so petrified of being alone with our thoughts? Are we fearful of being besieged by haunted memories from our past? Are we too frightened to look deep within ourselves to see where we might need to change? And most chilling of all, are we uneasy about what God will say to us if we can manage to be silent for a time? Will God ask us to repent and seek forgiveness? Will we be transformed?

One way of looking at the story of Jesus’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor is to see it as a moment of glory, a mountaintop experience of compelling drama. It is, of course, all those things. Jesus’s transfiguration is nothing less than an earthly glimpse beyond time and space, through the thin veil between this world and the next. On that mountaintop, Peter, James, and John begin to see who Jesus really is. The experience itself is a Christological statement. This man isn’t just their teacher and friend; he’s the Son of God. This man will not just work miracles, feed the hungry, and heal the sick; this man will go to a gory death on the cross. Indeed, his glory will be in that moment of suffering and complete self-offering on the cross. This is uncomfortable news that should elicit sheer silence.

And this brings up a second way of looking at the transfiguration account. The transfiguration is a moment so mysterious and transcendent that it takes away the speech of Jesus’s disciples. But they appear to struggle with silence. Their experience in ministry with Jesus until this moment has been exhilarating and fast-paced, and despite all those hours spent with their Lord, they’re still not clear about what kind of Messiah he is. They’ve brought too much baggage onto that mountain. All their hopes, dreams, and presuppositions follow them up the mountainside. They’re convinced that they understand what discipleship really is, but they have no clue.

They’re so weary from ministry and being with Jesus that they can hardly keep their eyes open on the mountaintop. And when they finally do open their eyes, they’re bewildered. So, Peter in his usual impetuous way, starts talking. Peter can never keep his mouth shut, can he? He immediately wants to do something. He wants to encapsulate for all time this incredible experience.

But just as he does, a cloud overshadows the disciples. It’s as if God is telling Peter to be quiet. Stop talking. And then, the disciples are afraid and confounded, in the throes of a situation over which they have no control. They can hardly see two feet in front of their faces because the enveloping cloud is so dense, and it’s at this moment that God finally speaks, audibly. God not only tells them who Jesus is. He tells them to listen to Jesus. And when the cloud dissipates and God has finished speaking, they’re left alone with their Lord. And finally, there’s a beautiful moment of breathtaking silence.

There’s no other proper response to the epiphany they’ve just witnessed. Talk would be too cheap. Action would be too hasty. They’ve now been invited into the silence in which God speaks most clearly. Their world has been reduced to nothing so that Jesus can be everything to them.

But there remains a dilemma for those of us over two thousand years later who inhabit a noisy, chaotic world. Our task of keeping silence has been made more difficult by technology and social media, which add to the chattering voices in our heads. Text messages with their nagging dings intrude on our lives unless we choose to silence them. The obsessive urge to scroll through social media is an addiction that assails us in the grocery store line or even at a restaurant dinner table. We know we can’t tune out the world, for to do so would be irresponsible, a shirking of our civic duty to respond to injustice. To ignore the world would be a neglect of our Christian obligation to be mindful of the needs surrounding us. What is there to do?

One obvious response lies right before our eyes. We are, in fact, availing ourselves of it right now. In coming to this Mass, we’ve allowed ourselves to be silenced for a time. We’ve come here, dragging along all that weighs us down from Monday to Saturday. We bring our unshakable anxieties, small and large. We carry on our shoulders the weight of a world being frayed apart. We lug behind us the sadness for family and friends in distress. We come, trudging up the side of the mountain, weary and afraid.

And we enter a cloud, as it were. Here in this church, our concerns and our lives matter deeply, but we bring them here mindful that there’s nothing we alone can do to change our circumstances. We feel the unbearable weight of wanting the world to be transformed but vexed by our paltry efforts. We come to the mountaintop, wanting desperately to follow Jesus obediently and yet not fully comprehending the mystery of his presence or knowing what we are to do.

And as the Mass proceeds, we realize that we’re not in control. We submit ourselves to a time-tested rhythm, as ancient as the Church herself. We listen to Scripture readings selected by others, readings that comfort but often challenge and bewilder us. We sit next to individuals we know well, some with whom we disagree, and others we’ve never laid eyes on before. Now, God is the host and we’re the guests, and it’s supposed to be that way.

The closer we get to Communion, the more we seem to be losing our grip on life. All our human projects and aspirations are rendered futile, like Peter’s hasty words on Mount Tabor. In the Mass, our worldly chatter and pride are reduced to silence. All the certainties that we had outside the Church flee away. All our stubborn refusals to hear God’s voice are softened. All our attempts to separate our religious lives from our secular ones are judged. All our attempts to hear only what we want to hear are chastened. We must leave everything at the foot of the mountain to come close to God.

This is the paschal mystery at the heart of our salvation. We simply can’t run from almighty God, from whom no secrets are hid. God is drawing us closer and inviting us into silence. And so, we stop speaking. We stop doing. And we listen. We give up all that has defined and enslaved us before, and we submit to the unfathomable silence of God’s love. And we listen to God’s chosen Son, the only One worth listening to. We’re reduced to nothing so that he can be everything to us.

Before our eyes, on the altar, ordinary bread and wine, are transfigured before our eyes, a supreme gift that eludes our manipulation, which we can only receive with thanksgiving. The Bread is broken, and we keep silence because this gift is beyond our imagining. Suddenly, we’re awake—truly awake—and we can leave the mountain with ears better sharpened and hearts better tuned to the grace of God.

To survive in the ceaseless, chaotic chatter of our world, we need to learn to listen again, and there’s only one voice that can help us become better listeners to God and one another. We need to learn to sift through an excess of speech to find the still, small voice of Christ speaking to us. He’s the One who will teach us. He’s the One who will help us respond with courage, wisdom, and grace to all that we want to see transformed in the world around us. If we can enter the silence, below the wildly conflicting and lying voices of our world, there’s always a steady, constant voice speaking ultimate truth to us. If we listen to it, we, too, shall be “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.” And before the unspeakable loveliness of our Savior’s voice, we have no words of our own. His words have become ours.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
March 2, 2025

Words from Another World

In an essay on reconciliation, the late Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote about a mother in South Africa whose only child had been killed. She spoke directly to the man who had murdered her child, and she told him that she hoped he would spend the rest of his days in prison and that he would rot in hell after death. Archbishop Tutu observed that such a reaction from someone who had experienced a heinous loss in her life doesn’t seem odd to us. In fact, it seems normal.[1]  

If we’re honest with ourselves and can try to imagine being in that poor mother’s shoes, don’t you think we all might have reacted in the same way? Don’t her actions toward her child’s killer appear natural, normal, even just, to us? How do you feel toward people who seem to have no moral compass and commit wanton acts of cruelty? Perhaps in your own life, you’ve experienced a wrong so grievous that you harbor nothing but hatred towards the perpetrator. I think Archbishop Tutu was right. Our human reactions of loathing and unforgiveness toward those who have done evil are simply part of our normal human speech. We’re conditioned to excuse hatred or unkind words as appropriate—even equivalent—responses to evil.

But Archbishop Tutu told two other stories in that same essay that emblemized what he called the “magnanimity of reconciliation.” One involved a Mrs. Savage, who was the victim of a hand grenade attack at a golf club dinner party in South Africa. After spending six months in an intensive care unit, she was discharged with shrapnel remaining in her body. She needed assistance bathing, putting on clothes, and eating. And yet, Mrs. Savage told South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of which Archbishop Tutu was the chair, that that experience had “enriched her life.” Indeed, Mrs. Savage wanted to meet the person who was responsible for her injuries as an act of forgiveness. She not only wanted to forgive him; she wanted to ask him to forgive her.[2]

And then there was former South African President Nelson Mandela, who, after twenty-seven years wrongly spent in prison, called for reconciliation, not revenge, and for forgiveness, not retaliation. After he was elected, Mandela invited his former jailer as a V.I.P. guest to his inauguration. Likewise, Mandela extended a lunch invitation to the prosecutor who was responsible for putting him in prison, even though he’d sought a life sentence for Mandela.[3]

Let’s look deep within ourselves again and be truthful. Are we bothered by what we might consider to be easy forgiveness? Are we troubled by a seeming lack of justice in these accounts of extraordinary acts of love? Would we have preferred that Mrs. Savage tell the person who so grievously injured her that she wished he would suffer immensely for the rest of his life? Would it have seemed fairer to us if Nelson Mandela had used the authority of his office as president to exact revenge on those who’d put him in prison?

If truth be told, I don’t think we know what to do with acts of generosity and love as astounding as those of Mrs. Savage and Nelson Mandela’s. We understand quite well how to speak in our native language, where an eye is demanded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But we simply have no clue how to handle actions and words from another world, when a victim not only refuses to return evil for evil but goes the extra mile and offers love and forgiveness in return.

But our Lord knows all too well that our normal language is not the language of the kingdom of God. And as much as we usually try to foist our own brutal language onto God by making him more and more like us, we simply can’t change who God is, which is infinitely perfect love. Jesus assumes that our normal language will be that of retribution, retaliation, and quid pro quo. Surely this must be why in Luke’s Gospel he immediately follows his delivery of the Beatitudes—the blessings and woes we heard last week—with a conjunction like but. But I say to you that hear. . .

Everything lies in that coordinating conjunction that poses a contrast between what comes before and what comes after. What comes before is left unspoken in the Gospels, but we know it all too well. What comes before Jesus’s but is our normal human way of speaking. We might call them words and actions from this world.

Jesus says, you will be tempted to do all these things, but I say to you, live differently. Jesus knows that we’ll be tempted to pray for a life to be taken from one who took a life from us. He knows that we’ll say that we shouldn’t pray for someone we hate because it would be to side with evil. He knows that we’ll tell ourselves that we shouldn’t love our enemies because that would be to condone their behavior. He knows that we’d prefer not to do good to those who do horrible things because that would be a travesty of justice. He knows that we’ll continue to convince ourselves that only Jesus can really love his enemies, bless them, and curse them.

But Jesus anticipates our own objections by prefacing his own words with that contrasting coordinating conjunction. But. . . I say to you who hear. And what follows could be seen as the Gospel’s unique claim, words that will shock us and might seem foolish, ridiculous, probably even unfair. What follows are not words from our own sinful, distorted world but words from another world altogether.

And when that world breaks into our own world from an eternal place, a place that is nothing but an infinite sharing in love, we are puzzled, put off guard, even offended. We haven’t a clue how to handle them. And yet, there are times when that other world slips into ours, and we catch glimpses of heaven. In those glimpses, we see a God who isn’t like us, and thank God for that. We catch glimpses of that other world here at Mass when God still comes to us in bread and wine even though we come to his altar refusing to pray for our enemies and harboring hatred in our hearts. God still showers us with his love even when we withhold that love from someone who has offended us. God still offers unconditional forgiveness to us even when we won’t forgive someone who has wronged us. These are all glimpses of a God who isn’t like us because he continues to love and bless us no matter what we do and no matter who we are.

Over two thousand years ago, humanity saw in the flesh the words and actions from another world. Those listening to Jesus who had ears to hear what he was saying heard him say, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Those were words from another world breaking into our own. And on a hilltop outside Jerusalem on the hard wood of a cross, there was no clearer message from another world than that of the expressed forgiveness and perfect self-offering of One whom the world rejected. That scene on Calvary was the perfect image from another world played out on the screen of this broken, sinful world.

But although two worlds collide as Jesus offers his words from another world, he knows us so intimately that he understands where we’re coming from, and he meets us there. Jesus knows that we’ll make every excuse not to love our enemies. He knows that we’ll struggle all our lives to operate in a different paradigm from that of this world. He knows that we’ll never fully understand the shocking generosity of God and the infiniteness of his mercy and compassion. And so, he tells us to do something. Even if you don’t like your enemy, do something good toward them. When you’re tempted to curse them, bless them instead. When the devil tries to persuade you to avoid praying for someone who does evil because it would be to side with injustice, pray for that evil person anyway. Even if you hate what they’re doing and believe it’s evil, do not return evil for evil. Stand up against the evil itself, but ask God to help you love the one who is captive to it.

And when we’re incapacitated by our hatred and don’t know how to respond to evil, then we can always pray. Pray that God will move us to greater love. Say the names of our enemies, and let God do the rest. Do something, but know that God understands exactly where we are. For us to speak and act as if we’re from another world, we must start in this world.

If we dare to be imperfect in loving our enemies, then we’ll have put our whole trust in God, who will forgive us even when we fall short. Jesus asks us to perform the supreme act of letting go. Let God be God. Let God bring his justice to this world. Let God speak his words from another world into this one. And if we have ears to hear, we can let those words from another world become our native language.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany
February 23, 2025

[1] Desmond Tutu, “The Magnanimity of Reconciliation,” in I Have Called You Friends: Reflections on Reconciliation (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2006), 3.

[2] “The Magnanimity of Reconciliation,” pp. 6-7

[3] Ibid., pp. 5-6

On the Level Ground

Some of Jesus’s words should come with caution statements: Read at your own risk. They’re so fragile and yet so powerful, that if we don’t handle them carefully, much harm can be done. We’ve seen what happens when verses are cherry-picked and used as weapons. We also know what happens when people take hard-edged sayings and turn them into sugary candy.

St. Luke’s version of the Beatitudes should come with a caution statement. Read at your own risk. Handle with care. Fragile material inside. Maybe this is why Jesus descends the mountain before opening his mouth to teach. His words are so precious that he must be close to the people when he delivers them. He can’t throw them down the mountain, for they will break. He must gently hand them off, with the eyes of the giver meeting the eyes of the receiver. Teaching up on the mountain might give the wrong impression, especially if he were speaking only to his chosen disciples. What about all the people on the ground?

And sure enough, when Jesus comes down from the mountain to that level place, the people arrive from the four corners of the earth. The sick come. Those who are troubled by unclean spirits come. The poor come. The sorrowful come. The hungry come. The persecuted come. But the rich come, too. Those who are well-sated also show up. The ones who are laughing end up on that plain, as do those who are popular in the world’s eyes. They come from both Jewish territory and Gentile territory. They come to get close enough to touch Jesus, because he has great power, and they know it.

Our Lord’s words are too delicate to be delivered on a remote mountain top. These words are meant to be voiced on the level ground to all who come and stand near Jesus. And as he speaks, he raises his eyes and stares intently at his disciples. It’s as if he’s saying, listen to these words at your own risk. Handle them with care. Exercise caution when applying these words to your own lives.

First, he speaks to the social outcasts. They have dragged themselves up from the valley of despair to be with him on the level ground, and he’s come down to meet them. They need a good word. Jesus directs his words to the materially poor, not just the spiritually poor. He makes eye contact with those who can’t afford to put food in their mouths and those who are on the verge of losing their homes. He speaks to those who simply can’t keep up with the ruthless pace of life and who are foreclosing on their houses or mired in debt and can’t find jobs. He comforts all those whom society is ignoring, both in his day and in ours. He offers balm to those who are so downcast that they can hardly get up in the morning and whose silent language is tears. He gives hope to those who are being pummeled to death by a world that hates them because Jesus’s name is the only thing that matters to them.

To all those who came to him on the level ground that day, and to all the ones who still come, day after day to ask for his healing—to them, he announces that the kingdom of God belongs to the forgotten ones. To them, he declares that they have a future, a future when their injustice will be righted.

But Jesus isn’t finished, because this isn’t a one-sided sermon. The good news isn’t only for the troubled. It’s for the comfortable ones, too, however much the good news might upend their world. Jesus speaks incisively to the materially rich, especially the ones who’ve placed their whole trust in the gods of this world rather than in the kingdom of God. Jesus doesn’t equate wealth with evil, but he does suggest that those who are rich must use their wealth rightly. He locks eyes with those who are well-fed at the expense of the hungry. He has convicting words for the ones who are laughing because they have drowned out the cares and sorrows of the weeping. He offers a strong warning to those who possess earthly fame and popularity, because such praise is of no value in the kingdom of God.

No one is unaffected by Jesus’s preaching. And now, we need to remember the cautions that come attached to his words. We must interpret his teaching at our own risk. If we’re not closing off our ears, Jesus’s words will indeed challenge us. They will disturb us. They will unsettle us. We must handle these words with care, because beneath the surface of this language, there’s a deeply fragile truth.

For those of us who long for justice and for the full realization of God’s kingdom—which I’m assuming is all of us here—then we may be tempted towards Schadenfreude. Do we celebrate because God’s judgment is coming for those who have amassed wealth at the exploitation of others? Do we secretly hope that God will give them their comeuppance? Do we feel self-righteous because those who are luxuriously content will soon be hungry? Do we long for those who are laughing at the expense of others to choke on their tears? If so, then we have carelessly handled Jesus’s precious words. We have failed to heed them at our own risk and honor their fragility.

Jesus’s woes are not offered to vindicate the resentments of those who cry for justice. God’s justice transcends the pettiness of human retribution and vengeance. Jesus’s woes are given as timeless words of warning to those who have failed to put the kingdom of God at the center of their lives. The balance and symmetry of this juxtaposition of blessings and woes—or perhaps we should say encouragements and cautions—are a visible literary representation of God’s justice. The blessings and woes are not a further division of an already deeply-divided world, because in the complexity of life, we can’t neatly divide humanity into one of two categories. Many of us live on both sides of the line.

We must handle Jesus’s words with care, for they carry a delicate message, and to heed them in a right spirit and to decipher our Lord’s good news, we must be on a level ground, standing with our feet firmly on the earth and our eyes fixed intently on Christ, who’s gazing upon us as well. But our eyes must also be fixed on those we might rather not look at. On the level ground, we can’t avoid the eyes of anyone. On the level ground, we must not exist as a self-righteous crowd that rejoices in the downfall of the unjust or tunes out the tribulations of our neighbors, but we must stand with those who desperately need to hear Jesus’s words as much as we do. We may find that all of us need to hear both the blessings and the woes.

Jesus is holding before us an eternal gift that’s so breakable that we must be close to him and to others when we dare to receive it. His gift is the kingdom of God. This kingdom operates beyond our human sphere of resentments and retribution. This kingdom functions in the eternal mind of God, where justice is not meted out with misshapen delight in the downfall of the unjust. God’s justice is like a scale precariously trying to find its balance. And for this kingdom to be realized in all its fullness, we must all stand together on the level ground.

In the kingdom of God, the poor and the rich both converge on the level ground. The hungry and the well-fed come. The weeping and the laughing come. The persecuted and the popular come. In the center of this crowd stands our Lord holding out his priceless gift, which we should only handle at our own risk, with caution, because the contents can shatter when we grasp them too tightly.

For the poor to thrive, the rich must learn to be poor. For the hungry to be fed, those who are well-satisfied must know what it’s like to hunger. For the weeping to rejoice, those who are laughing must weep with those who suffer. For the persecuted to find comfort, those who are well-praised must know the cost of following Jesus to the very end. It’s only on the level ground that shared suffering and shared joy find their meeting place in the gift of God’s kingdom.

And that level ground is the Church. We come here, those of us who struggle to pay the bills, and those of us with generous checking accounts. We come, those of us who live day to day in deep anxiety over our security and those of us who sleep easily at night. We come, those of us whose hearts are breaking and those of us who would prefer not to be bothered by the aching hearts of others.

And when we come to this level ground, the only thing that matters is our Lord’s beautiful gift, the gift of God’s kingdom. That kingdom belongs to the poor, to the hungry, to the weeping, and to the persecuted, but not only to them. With humility and reverence for Jesus’s words, that kingdom can also be received by the rich, the comfortable, the joyful, and those who are immune from trouble. It can be theirs, too, when they remember the downtrodden who also come to the feast with them, when they learn to be poor as our Lord was poor.

So, come to the feast on this level ground. Approach our Lord’s gift at your own risk. Handle his words with care. And above all, know that if we can empty ourselves to come down from the mountain and trust God enough to ascend from the valley below, on the level ground, we will find the eyes of our Lord, looking on each one of us in love.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 16, 2025

Dangerously Close

The first scene is on a lakeside, with a crowd of well-meaning but still uncommitted group of people, pressing in on Jesus to hear the word of God. There are also a couple of sad-looking boats and some weary fishermen washing their nets. There’s a poignant, tragic desperation to this scene. The fishermen have weathered a long, hard night of fruitless work. They have nothing to show for many exhausting hours of repeatedly casting the nets, and they’ve given up. The crowds who come to Jesus are likewise probably weary, weary of life with all its troubles and sorrows, hungering for a good word. Maybe this man can do something for them. They press in on him to find out.

But then, something strange happens. Jesus moves away from them. He steps into Simon’s boat and asks him to push off a bit from the land. And from there, he begins to teach. The action is moving from the shore out into the water. It starts in the shallow water as Jesus teaches, even though we don’t know its content. Don’t you wonder what he was teaching them? Don’t you wonder why, when Jesus had finished, the crowds weren’t running to jump into the boat with him? Maybe they didn’t do that because of what he was teaching. Maybe it was all just too much after all. It would be safer to remain on the shore.

But Jesus is headed even farther out. He tells Simon to put out into the deep and let down his nets for a catch. Poor Simon is weary of a long night that has produced no results. His arms are tired, and he’s emotionally exhausted. He just wants to go home to sleep. His whole body aches, but skeptically, he obeys Jesus’s request. And before too long, his nets are bursting with the catch of fish. Soon another boat of fishermen is summoned to assist with the marvelous catch. The boats are starting to sink. The nets are beginning to break. Simon knows that he and his companions can’t do this alone.

Simon no longer finds himself in the tame, shallow waters but in the wild, scary deep. He can’t do this alone. He’s been called into community. The scene has panned from a multitude of intrigued, passive people to a handful of brave, active souls who venture out into the deep waters at a mere command, despite their fatigue and any possible excuse not to do it. And from that point forward, the lives of these hardy fishermen will never be the same again. The world will never be the same again.

The second camera scene opens on a church entrance through which a group of people are moving to hear the word of God. Like the crowd in the Gospel story, these people have heard of Jesus and are interested in him. Like the fishermen, many are worn down by life. They’re tired of navigating a world in chaos. Some gladly leave, for a couple of hours, jobs that suck the life out of them. Others are less happy to be there, but they’ve still come. Some feel as if their lives are futile, unproductive efforts, working tirelessly for little money or excessive hours for a lot of money but with little reward. They wonder about the purpose of their lives. On this morning, they can leave their cares at the door of the church, hoping that Jesus will give them a good word. They come to the lakeshore.

But they soon find themselves surprised. Before long, Jesus has stepped into the boat and moved out into the water. And after they’ve listened to his teaching safely on the shore, they experience another invitation. Now, Jesus is inviting them to respond, to do something. Put out into the deep, he says, and let your nets down for a catch. Go with me farther out into the deep. Leave everything and follow me.

Things are no longer safe and comfortable, and so there’s some resistance. The people thought they were merely coming to the church to hear the word of God, feel some sense of peace, and then depart. But now, Jesus is calling them into the deep. Let God change your mind, repent, confess your sins, but also receive God’s forgiveness. Leave your pew at its safe distance and approach the altar. Pray for your enemies. Walk side by side with those who are still strangers to you. Move from head to heart. Make amends with those whom you have wronged. Come to the altar and get as close to me as possible, dangerously close. Leave the shore and step into the boat.

And soon, these faithful followers are too close for comfort. They’re kneeling at the Communion rail, they’ve stretched out their hands, and they’ve come so close to Jesus out on the deep waters, that they’ve taken him into themselves. His Body and Blood are mingling with theirs.

What once seemed impossible now seems possible. When before they thought they were incapable of being loved or forgiven, they now realize that they’ve always been loved, and they’re always forgiven. When before they thought that differences could only divide, now they see that unity is still possible. When their last ounce of hope was taken away from them by a cruel world, they found yet more life in themselves to go on another day. When their nets seemed to be sadly empty, they found them filled to the brim with a catch so huge that they began to break. God’s grace had miraculously filled their lives once again, and now they could never be the same again. We can never be the same again.

But perhaps like Simon, we’re terrified to be so near to the living God. We’re incapacitated by the awe of meeting our Lord face to face, of taking him into our bodies, of the awareness of his gracious condescension to be among us in such a palpable way. We fall on our knees, unsure of what to do next except worship. In truth, we’re afraid of that next step, and ironically, we try to put more distance between ourselves and God, even after receiving his remarkable gift.

Into this fear, Jesus speaks. Do not be afraid, he says. Now, henceforth you will be catching people. You’ve come this far, Jesus says, and now, follow me away from the shore. Go out into the deep, cast your nets, he says, and bring the lifeless world to me.

The third camera scene is really a series of different scenes on a Sunday morning, once again on the unthreatening lakeshore. In one, a family is dispersed among the rooms of their vast house, kids with faces aglow as their cell phone screens cast an eerie light on their faces. The parents sit numb faced before the TV news in another room, wondering if there’s any good in the world anymore. In another house across town, a family sleeps in because it's been a long week. In yet another, a person stays at home because the dreary weather is a convenient excuse to do so. They’ve all heard of Jesus, but it’s easier to be intrigued by him and yet keep him at a distance. They will stay on the shore and merely listen to the teaching. But for whatever reason, that teaching doesn’t motivate them enough to run and jump into the boat with Jesus. The shore is safer than the deep waters.

Sometimes, in the Church, it does feel as if we’re on the shore after a long night’s work of hopelessly casting our nets with no results to show. We’re certainly told enough that our casting efforts are futile. There are no more fish to catch. Or rather, the fish that are there are not coming to the nets. When’s the last time we felt that our nets were breaking?

Do you wonder why some filter in through the doors to hear the word of God, but stay only on the shore? At what point does Jesus’s invitation become too demanding to move any farther? At what point do we lose the courage to venture out into the deep? At what point do we stop believing that if Jesus tells us to cast our nets we might actually catch more fish than we can handle?

The truth is that it’s usually easier to stay at home on the shore. At times, it’s more comfortable to be anywhere than here, dangerously close to the living God. We can find any reason not to be here, where Jesus invites us into the deep. It requires very little to listen to Jesus’s words but move no farther than the shallow end of the pool. It’s more comfortable to show up and listen but refuse his constant invitation to leave this place and cast the net to bring others here. It’s much harder to jump into the boat with him and push out into the deep, leave everything, and follow him. To go with Jesus out in the boat means that we must leave one way of living behind and move into another. To follow Jesus, means that it’s not we who live but Christ who lives in us, as St. Paul says.

But those of us who come here week after week know that once we pass the point of no return, once we’ve come so dangerously close to Christ in the Sacrament, our lives must change. When we walk through the church doors, we bring the lifelessness of the world with us. But when we leave, we’re stewards of the life that Christ has given us, a life to be shared with all whom we meet. Although we might be dead when we first come here, when we leave, we’re alive once again.

If we know the energy of that life, then how can we not follow Christ’s command? How can we not go into the deep and cast our nets into a world that’s struggling to breathe? We’re catchers of people, not to snare them into our nets but to invite a lifeless world into the only place that will give it true life. Although the call is daunting, we have no reason to fear. Jesus is in the boat with us. He will always be in the boat with us. And if we can summon the courage to obey his command, our nets will never be empty again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 9, 2025

Writing with Light

In a recent photography class, my instructor showed us a photo he had taken at night with a very slow shutter speed, which was necessary to capture as much light as possible. The photo consisted of a black background, against which was written in the dark night sky the word “love.” The instructor had literally written with light. He lit a sparkler and wrote the word “love” in the air in cursive script, and by using a slow shutter speed, he was able to capture a still shot of something in motion.

I’ve been learning a lot about how to capture light in this photography class. One of the first things we learned was that the word “photography” means writing with light. The amazing thing about photography is that you can capture light in almost any situation. There’s always some light available. At night and on gray days, the light is less present, but the light is still there, and the task of the photographer is to channel this light and write with it.

At night, the photographer must slow down the shutter speed to allow as much light into the camera lens as possible. If a photo doesn’t come out quite right, it’s usually because the light hasn’t been captured properly. When the photographer learns to move away from the camera’s automatic mode, she has great power. She has the power to write with light, even in a very dark setting.

The feast of Candlemas comes at a fortuitous time of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. The sun usually doesn’t rise until 7 a.m., and it’s dark by 5:30 p.m. A feast that celebrates the light is just what the doctor ordered. Indeed, the light seems to take on greater meaning when the days are so dark. But it’s extremely difficult to capture the light during the winter. And metaphorically speaking, it’s challenging to harness the light when our world seems dark, too.

We must assume that the world of Anna and Simeon had plenty of darkness, just like ours. I only wish we knew more about Simeon and Anna themselves. St. Luke provides a few details from which we can glean something about their lives. Simeon must be old, since he’s waiting to die until he sees the Messiah. He’s awaiting the consolation of Israel, which also suggests that Israel must be experiencing some sort of desolation. Things are not as they should be. God’s people have been waiting a very long time for their Messiah to come and reign. Meanwhile, justice is sorely lacking. The people may have been brought out of Egypt, but they still aren’t entirely free.

Simeon is faithful and devout, waiting in the darkness with confident expectation for the coming of his Lord’s light. He’s like the long exposure of a camera, a slow shutter speed of a life desperately trying to capture the light as much as he can. His life is shaped by his religious faithfulness, presumably comprised of constant prayer and faithful worship in the temple. Surely this long exposure of a life lived dutifully towards God helped him discern the Spirit’s guiding hand when he was finally led to the Temple to meet his Lord.

And then there’s Anna. We know she’s old, although her exact age is somewhat uncertain depending on how you translate the Greek text. Her life has been a long exposure, too. St. Luke tells us that she never left the Temple. She worshipped and prayed and fasted day and night. She’s a steady presence in the Lord’s house, waiting patiently and faithfully to capture the light when it comes. But her presence there seems to surpass mere duty and obedience. Like Simeon, she’s also waiting expectantly for the redemption of Israel. Her life is permeated with hope. Once again, we’re led to believe that things aren’t as they should be among the Jewish people. And Anna’s life must have had its sorrow, living for so long as a widow. In the world of Anna and Simeon, darkness must be more prevalent than the light. But Anna and Simeon seem to know, like a good photographer, that the light is always present. What matters is what you do to channel it.

And so, on that day of Jesus’s presentation in the Temple, the moment is ready for a glorious photograph with the perfect exposure. The child is brought into the Temple, and because Anna and Simeon are patient and faithful and expectant, and because they’ve been so molded by the Holy Spirit that they know when to show up and what to do, Simeon and Anna are poised to capture the light. And when the light comes to them, they write with it. Gazing upon their infant Lord, they capture in their hearts and minds the perfect image of the living God.

But this light is so powerful and so illuminative that it can’t be held inside the hearts and minds of Anna and Simeon. Most certainly its intensity would have shattered the lens of any camera. This light is meant to be shared. It’s meant to be written on the darkness of the world as a sign of hope for its consolation and redemption, like the word “love” written on a dark night sky.

When the times are spiritually dark, the light seems elusive. The easy solution is to devolve into panic because we can’t seem to capture the light. We might be tempted to throw up our hands in defeat, to despair of ever writing with light again. We live in an impatient, confused, and cruel age, but I suspect the world has always been so. And it’s very difficult to get a perfect exposure in such times.

And yet, there may be an invaluable lesson in the art of good photography, the art of writing with light. The more darkness there is, the longer the exposure must be, because we need to let in as much light as possible. And the longer the exposure is, the more essential it is that the camera is held as steady and still as possible.

If Simeon and Anna were like spiritual photographers of their day, it was because they knew how to capture the light. The Temple and its worship were at the center of their existence. They understood how to be still in the presence of God, unshaken by the restlessness of the world. They understood that their constant, regular presence in the place where God was most truly worshipped was the way in which they could capture the light. They knew that they needed a perpetual open-eyed watchfulness to take in as much light as possible. But above all, they were deeply aware that to write with light, you must first believe with all your heart that the light is there, even in times of overwhelming darkness.

This feast of Candlemas is a celebration of the marvelous good news that the light never goes out, no matter how dark things seem to be. Even forty days after Christmas, we still keep alive St. John’s words that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can’t overcome it. And not only is the light always present for us to capture. It’s meant to be shared as a light that will enlighten every corner of the earth.

The Church has been called a hospital for sinners but in times when the darkness becomes oppressive, maybe we should think of the Church as a school for learning how to write with light. It’s in the Church that each week we take Christ into our arms—literally into our bodies—and then in turn, we move outside of the Church to bless the world, just as Simeon blessed Joseph and Mary. It’s in the Church that when we encounter the presence of the risen Lord, we speak to all whom we meet of the redemption of our Lord, just like Anna. It’s here in the Church that we’re formed to write with light, especially when the light is hard to find.

In the Church, we’re reminded that there’s always light to be found. The darkness can’t comprehend this light. And while Jesus’s disciples have been called fishers of men, maybe we’re most appropriately called writers of light. A long exposure in the darkness, a steady presence in times of anxiety, and eyes that are constantly open will enable us to capture the light and find the perfect image of God. And the Church is where we learn to do this.

My dear friends in Christ, never relinquish the hope that permeated the lives of Anna and Simeon. Never forget that our redemption is always drawing nigh, and our consolation is always on the horizon. Never give up on the possibility of writing with light, because although everything may appear to be darkness, the light is always there. And with God’s grace, we can capture it and write a love message to the world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple
February 2, 2025

Back to Our Roots

Family reunions on my father’s side were like civic meetings of a small village. My father was one of eight children, and his mother was one of fourteen. There were people on my dad’s side of the family that I didn’t even know existed, at least not until I went to our family reunions. I suspect that it was because my family was so large that we needed those family reunions. Hundreds of us would gather in a fellowship hall somewhere, and there would be games, a festive lunch, and dancing. And there would always be Mass. The local priest would come with his Communion kit, a linen was thrown over a folding table, and we all shared in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers.

As I grew older and got above my raisin’, as we say in the South, I had less and less time for those family reunions. In my youthful arrogance, I thought I had moved on from the insularity of southeast Texas to the sophistication of the east coast, from guitar folk Masses to pipe organs and choirs (well, truth be told, I think I was right about that last one). My personal perspective had expanded from local to international, but when I was home for the summer, I still went to the family reunions anyway.

I’ll never forget one reunion when we were gathered for Mass. I looked over at Big MawMaw and Big PawPaw, my gentle and loving great-grandparents. I saw their clear blue eyes. Yes, that was certainly a reminder of where my own blue eyes came from. I noticed their tears as the priest spoke of the Blessed Sacrament, and I was reminded of my own love for the Eucharist. I had come home to my roots, and there was no way around that fact. My roots were in this huge, down-to-earth Cajun family and in the sacramental life of the Church. I was the progeny of two devout, big-hearted people whose children had spread out across the nation. No wonder we had family reunions so often. Our immensity risked diluting us into a diffuse, scattered lot. We needed to be concretely reminded of our roots.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes home to his roots in Nazareth right after a period of testing in the wilderness by the devil. He moves from a confrontation with the mystery of evil back to the specificity of his hometown, a small hamlet far from Jerusalem. The local boy who is beginning to amass a favorable reputation comes home. It’s his custom, after all. Week after week, without fail, Jesus, like his fellow faithful Jews, shows up in the local synagogue.

Jesus hasn’t gotten above his raisin’. He’s not above ensconcing the beginning of his mission in his small hometown. The global thrust of his Gospel isn’t too large to come home for a bit, to a local context, nor is it too universal or general to be incisive and specific. Jesus is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and with laser-sharp focus he sifts through the scroll until he finds the one passage that is for this day, this time. But it’s also for every day, every time. It’s as if he says, it’s time to be specific, lest we forget our roots.

Before his mission really begins, he needs to give a summary of it, a precis for a confused world. In such a world, with problems as intractable as our own, Jesus stands up to read from the scroll, and he needs to be perfectly clear. The unspoken question to him is, who are you, really? What are you really about? And then Jesus stands up to read.

He reads the specific words of God’s eternal promise of release and freedom, of forgiveness, and of God’s unbounded love and care for his children. And now, in the hearing of this local family reunion, as the vibrations of Jesus’s voice resound in the cochleae of their ears, they begin to understand who he is and what he is about. So, now we should be specific about what the Gospel really is. Let’s come home to our roots.

In Jesus, good news is preached to the poor, not just the spiritually poor, but to the materially poor struggling under the boot of the empire. In him the captives are released, not just those enslaved to sin but the real prisoners, the ones to whom Jesus offers a second chance of redemption. In him, the blind recover their sight, and physical and spiritual healing happen. In him, freedom is given to those who are oppressed, the marginalized, the stranger, and the forsaken. Yes, this is the acceptable year of the Lord. Not tomorrow or at the end of the age, but now, today. Let’s be specific.

Jesus tells the family story, the story whose specific thread is woven throughout the epic story of God’s people from creation until Jesus stands up in that synagogue. But the thread has become confused over time, splayed and frayed, and the people have often forgotten their roots. This is why Jesus must be utterly clear with them before he even begins his work. This is my mission, he says. This is your story. And when he sits down, all their eyes are fixed on him. In him, they see the hope of their family story manifested in a human being. In him, they see who they’re called to be. Now, it has become specific.

And that family story is ours, too. We, the Church, are heirs of that story, which gives hope to the poor, the imprisoned, those in need of healing, the oppressed, and the forgotten among us. But as inheritors of this story, there’s more, so let’s be specific. We’re Christ’s body on earth. The mission God has given us is as specific as Jesus’s was in that synagogue in Nazareth. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are the ones God is charging, with his help, to turn what can seem like empty words into a reality.

At the present time, the Church seems to be grasping for a mission. Maybe we’re overwhelmed by the problems and complexities of the world and don’t know how to respond. Perhaps we feel inadequate for the task. But maybe we’ve forgotten something else that’s highlighted in today’s story from Luke’s Gospel. Maybe we’ve forgotten to come home, as should be our custom, week after week, not on the Sabbath but on the Lord’s Day. We’ve forgotten our specific roots in this grand story of God’s unbounded love, mercy, and tangible power to bring righteousness to pass. It’s here, in our family in Christ, that the seeming vagueness of our mission finds great specificity, a clarity that might make us uncomfortable at times. Let’s be clear. It’s here, in the Word proclaimed and in the Bread broken and shared that we fix our eyes on Jesus and discern what God is asking us to do.

Let’s be specific. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by life and are grasping for next steps, come here. Week after week. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Let him teach you. Let him remind you of our collective story, a story that isn’t too broad to be specific, a story that the world so desperately needs to hear. Let’s be clear. Our mission is not limited to empty speech. It’s not judging or condemning others. It’s not vilifying our enemies and taking sides. The Gospel is none of these things because the Gospel can only be good news. Our task is one thing: to fix our eyes on Jesus and the Gospel, and then to live as if its words are really true, not only in the future, but right now, today.

So, let me be specific. Here’s the mission entrusted to us by God.  By his power, we must proclaim good news to those who can hardly pay their bills and to those have no homes and are looking for shelter in the frigid cold. And we must help them. We must work to find forgiveness for our enemies and work towards the freedom of that forgiveness in the justice systems of our own society. We must work for the physical and mental healing of those who suffer. We must work tirelessly to advance freedom for those who are the most ostracized and marginalized among us. We must offer a home for those who seek safety and refuge.

But let’s be specific. We can only sustain this work if we come here, week after week, on the Lord’s Day, to be nourished in our true home. We can never get so above our raisin’ that we can’t come back home, to the local context, where things get specific. We should never take our eyes off the One who will give us life and who sends us out in his name to give life to others.

When I went back home for those family reunions, even when I didn’t feel like it, I learned something about myself. I learned that I was a larger person than I thought. I belonged not only to myself or to my immediate family but to a giant, extended family. I was reminded of my specific roots in an anonymous, nameless world.

It’s the same with us. When we come here, week after week on the Lord’s Day, we’re nourished with heavenly Food and given the strength and wisdom to learn that we’re so much bigger than we thought. We’re reminded of the universal family of God of which we’re members. And together, with our eyes fixed on Jesus, we remember the heart of the Gospel. In this worldwide family, if we remember our story, the impossible is possible. Let’s be specific: if we fix our eyes on Christ, the world will never be the same again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 26, 2025

The Best Is Yet to Come

When did we stop telling our stories? When did the Church begin to question whether she could speak convincingly enough of what God was doing among her members? When did Scripture become the only story to tell and our lives become just ordinary, boring events, seemingly devoid of the Holy Spirit’s fire? When did the Church start to focus more on judging and indoctrinating and operating like a business rather than telling that sweet, sweet story of Jesus and his love, of Jesus and his glory, to quote an old hymn.[1]

I’m not exactly sure when we stopped telling our stories, but Jesus certainly taught by telling stories. He told parables to give us glimpses of the kingdom of God. And of course, we’ve been given the stories from the Bible themselves, real stories of Jesus’s life and ministry, like the story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. That story is a true story from the past, but it’s a story that intersects with our lives, too.

Today, I want to tell you a story that intersects with the story of the wedding in Cana of Galilee. That’s what Christians do; they tell stories. Many of you have probably heard this story in some form before, but I want to tell it again because this story echoes so many different stories from the Bible.

Once upon a time, there was a priest who was quite happy in his church, but he felt a growing, mysterious call from God to explore ministry elsewhere. It wasn’t because he needed to leave his position. The nudge he felt was a peculiar push from comfort into discomfort, from impossibility to possibility, but with no certainty of a secure future.

As he explored this potential new call, he met with the leadership of that church, all three of them. A folding table was set up in the Choir Room, which was also a makeshift parish office. It was a cold winter’s day, and the priest was a bit uneasy. Some people thought it was foolish for him to leave a vibrant, growing church to consider leading a church on the rocks, struggling to keep the lights on.

So that priest listened to the parish’s leadership, to their ideas and hopes for the future. He asked questions. He tried to gather all the right data, just like you do in an interview. Is there real potential for growth here? What are the people like? How many are there? What are their dreams? And then, he asked the clincher. So, if nothing changes with this parish’s financial situation, how many years do you have left? And one of the vestry members held up his hand. Five. Five years. Five years and the good wine would run out. Five years to fill the jars to the brim with water and pray for a miracle.

Admittedly, the priest’s heartrate went up. Maybe this was a bad idea after all. Why risk a salary and a career on a mere nudge? But the tug on his heart persisted. The priest, against the judgment of some, decided to accept the call to serve that small parish.

When he first arrived, there was a shared fear that the good wine was running out, leaking out heavily from cracked jugs. But before long, people in that parish began to discern that Jesus was telling them to do something. It was as if the Blessed Virgin herself, long an intercessor among the parish’s members, was saying to them, “do whatever he tells you.”

They did. They prayed and listened. And they gathered as many jars as they could—many of which were cracked and leaking water—and they filled them to the brim. They dipped into their endowment—which was small and leaking water itself—and poured money into ministry. Those outside the parish would have considered this a fool’s errand, but they were simply obeying the risen Lord.

And behold, after some time, the parish began to grow. New ministry was created by putting more and more water into questionable jugs. The tenor of conversations among leadership changed from assuming the wine would eventually run out to assuming that the feast would go on. Now, maybe the wine wouldn’t be as good after a while, but at least there would still be some wine to serve. This wedding party didn’t have to stop. Just do what Jesus tells you, and then be surprised. This parish had decided to serve the good wine first, but not to skimp at the end. This parish had chosen to serve the good wine and keep serving it, world without end. And sure enough, the wine that kept appearing was even better than at first. What happened to this parish was a sign of great hope. It was a sign of Christ’s new creation, of a rising from death to life, of God’s abundant provision when scarcity had been the primary narrative. It was a sign of the future hope of glory breaking into the present and renewing the broken past.

That story is my story, but it also belongs to you. Some of you are in it, but most of you aren’t. But it’s still your story because I’ve told it to you, and now it’s about you, too. And this is how stories work. They’re personal, and only I or you can know how my or your story is a striking example of God’s action in my or your life. Only from my own experience can I share authentically with you how God turned water into wine in my life when the good wine had run out. And only you can do the same with your own experiences.

In the beloved Scriptural story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee, Jesus performs a miracle, turning water into wine. But he does so much more than that. He reveals his glory, which is manifested in the new creation he brings, not only in that wedding at Cana in Galilee and in his death and resurrection but also in our own lives, day after day.

But this marvelous sign defies any attempt to be a parlor trick. It misses the point to command Jesus to turn water into wine because we’re desperate, and it’s irreverent to treat him as magician. No, Jesus won’t operate in that way. In Cana, he seems wary of working a miracle until the people become involved, too. Do whatever he tells you, Mary tells them. And the people trust that even though they engage in an ostensibly futile endeavor of filling stone jars with water to the brim, Jesus will do something for them. They don’t at first know what, and when Jesus does change the water into wine, it’s more and better wine than they could have expected. They could never have controlled or predicted the results. Jesus surprises them.

But there’s an important detail hidden in the extravagant working of a miracle. There’s an inside group that knows more about what happened than anyone else. They’ve witnessed firsthand what occurred. It’s only the servants who know that Jesus turns water into wine. Everyone else just knows that when the supply of good wine had run out, more wine—even better wine—suddenly appeared. They don’t know the secret behind this story.

It’s the same with us, in our own stories. I imagine that each of us, if we see with the eyes of faith, has a story of how and when Jesus turned water into wine for us. Was it when your last ounce of energy had given out and you thought you couldn’t go on but suddenly God gave you the strength to go on yet one more day? Was it when you took a chance to leave a ruthless, unhappy job which had drained all the joy from your life and then God led you to something much better to fill you to the brim with delight? Or was it when you’d lost all your faith and reached rock bottom and then felt that prompt to find a church, and when you did, all the tasteless water of your life became rich, delectable wine? Only you know your story, and it’s up to you to tell it.

The story of the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee, and my own story of coming to this parish as a priest, and your own stories of water changed into wine, are all challenges to a pessimistic world. The Biblical story and our own stories are evidence against the tired narrative that the Church’s wine has all run out, and there will be no more left. If Jesus truly inaugurated an eternal wedding feast when he was raised from the dead, why should we assume that the feast needs to stop when the wine appears to have given out? Why do churches panic and cut budgets and conserve resources as if that will produce new wine?

This is why we must tell our own stories. It’s the work of the Gospel. It’s our call as followers of Christ to testify to the signs of Jesus’s glory in our own lives. We must tell all the world that when nothing but water was left and the jars were all cracked and the party was grinding to a halt, we remembered the voice of the Blessed Mother: Do whatever he tells you. And we prayed and listened, and we heard Jesus’s voice.

We ran and found all the stone jars we could find, and we hauled buckets of water, and filled them all to the top with bland, tap water, with the most ordinary things we could offer. It seemed reckless and futile, but we were simply listening to Jesus. It was a response to Jesus in faith. And then, we waited and were surprised, because although it seemed that all the good wine had given out, the best was yet to come.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 19, 2025

[1] “I love to tell the story,” A. Katherine Hankey and William G. Fischer

Counted

Harry Ashfield is one of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River.” He’s four or five years old. No one seems to know, and that meshes with the child’s unfortunate family circumstances. Harry lives with his mother and father in an unnamed major American city in a nondescript apartment filled with odd, abstract art. And Harry is neglected.

When we first meet Harry, he’s being picked up by Mrs. Connin, a babysitter. She’s clearly from the country, not the city. And when she appears at the door of the Ashfields’ apartment, which is dark and colorless, his father can hardly get him into a coat properly, and his mother is in bed with a hangover.

The father doesn’t seem to care where Harry will be taken by Mrs. Connin, nor does he care when he will return home. The later the better, as far as he’s concerned. He’s not perturbed when Mrs. Connin, the babysitter, announces that it will probably be later than eight or nine o’clock at night, since she’ll be taking little Harry to a river in the country for a healing service by a preacher named Bevel Summers.

Mrs. Connin and Harry leave the dimly lit apartment and venture out into the gray city, dark at that early hour. On the way to Mrs. Connin’s home in the country, she suddenly asks Harry what his name is. Until this point, she only knew his last name. “Bevel,” Harry answers, which is strange because it’s not his name; it’s the name of the country preacher they will soon meet. But it’s also the first indication that something significant is about to happen to Harry Ashfield. Mrs. Connin has no clue that Harry’s name isn’t really “Bevel.” Nevertheless, off they go to Mrs. Connin’s house out on a farm.

When Harry first enters Mrs. Connin’s house, he soon notices a picture hanging on a wall. Unlike everything else in the story until this point, the picture is in color, and it features a man wearing a white sheet, with long hair and “a gold circle around his head,” who is sawing some wood while children watch him. It’s clear and simple, unlike the abstract art in Harry’s parents’ apartment. Harry doesn’t yet know it’s Jesus in the picture, but later, he would learn that “he had been made” by this “carpenter named Jesus Christ.”

After some time at the farmhouse—enough time for Harry to be teased by Mrs. Connin’s wild children, who turn a pig loose on him—the whole family makes the journey down to the river to the healing service led by Bevel Summers, the preacher. When they arrive at the river, Preacher Bevel is standing out in the river with water up to his knees. He's no more than nineteen years old. He sings, and he preaches. He talks about the River of Life, the only river that matters, the one that comes from Jesus’s blood. It's the river that can handle our pain, he says. It's the river in which we can be cleansed. It's that river that leads to the Kingdom of Christ, says Preacher Bevel.

Eventually, Mrs. Connin raises Harry up above the crowd and announces that this boy has probably never been baptized. The preacher invites little Harry forward, and the child tells him that his name is Bevel, but of course it isn’t. He has no idea what baptism is, but when the preacher asks him if he wants to be baptized, he says yes. Before, in his life with his parents, everything was a joke. But Harry now realizes that this event at the river is no joke. Harry thinks to himself, “I won’t go back to the apartment then. I’ll go under the river.” The preacher says to him, “You won't be the same again. You’ll count.”

Harry is dunked in the water, and the preacher affirms, “you count now. You didn’t even count before.” It’s what Harry later affirms, too, when he returns to his colorless apartment in the city and his mother asks about what the preacher said to him. Harry replies, “He said I’m not the same now. I count.”[1]

This is, of course, what we say about Christian baptism. After we’re baptized into Jesus’s death and resurrection in the water of the font, or the water of the River of Life as Preacher Bevel would have said, we count. Unlike little Harry whose name changed at baptism, our name remains the same. But we are different after baptism. We count in a unique way.

But it's not as if we never mattered before. It’s not as if we aren’t children of God before the water hits our head. It’s not that God doesn’t love us or protect us before we’re baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that after we’re baptized into Christ, we aren’t the same, as little Harry said. We can never be the same again, because in the sacrament of baptism, God has done something to us that’s real and mysterious and wonderful. We count. We’re marked as Christ’s own forever. We’re destined for something different. And we’ve been immersed in a way of life that does turn our world from dull gray into color, from a joke into something real and true.

But at its core, today’s feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ isn’t really about us and our baptisms, oddly enough. And this is such a novel concept to our self-obsessed culture. This feast is about Jesus and who he is. He alone is the Son of God. He alone is sinless with no need to be cleansed from sin. He alone is the Christ, the Messiah, the Word made flesh, perfect man and perfect God. And yet, Jesus submits to baptism as an identification with all of humanity, not to wash away sin but to allow for this moment of epiphany, the moment where he’s manifested to the world as God’s beloved Son.

Unlike us, our Lord doesn’t need to count in a different way after baptism. He’s always been the Son of God and always will be. But when he springs up from the water of the River Jordan, it is as if things go from grayscale to full color. The heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove, and the voice of God the Father is heard proclaiming Jesus as his only-begotten Son. In human time, in a brief moment of spectacular color and sensory perception, it’s as if the life of the holy Trinity becomes visible and audible to mere humans.

Yes, this feast is really all about Jesus and not about us, even though we want to make it about us. It’s about who Jesus is, because if he isn’t the beloved, unique Son of God manifested in this baptism at the Jordan, then we can’t be counted as we know we are. If he isn’t the Son of God, wholly different from us and yet fully identifying with our human condition except sin, then our own lives remain in grayscale, and they’re drab and lifeless. They’re a joke. Jesus’s baptism is not our baptism and yet it has everything to do with our baptism.

But here’s the wonderful irony of today’s feast. When we make today all about Jesus and not about us, we most fully discover who we’re called to be. When we focus on who Jesus is, then we learn who we are. We see that we’re only truly ourselves when we’re baptized into the One who makes us count.

We can’t help but talk about our own baptisms on this day, but only after we’ve talked about the baptism of him who turns the story of our lives from grayscale into color, from a joke into something real, who makes us count in a way we can never make ourselves count. And yet, this is precisely the modern temptation. We try to make ourselves count in all the wrong ways. We relentlessly climb social ladders. We fight our way to success in our jobs. We live vicariously through our children’s triumphs. We try to make ourselves count in ways that will only change the lighting in our world from color to grayscale, from real into a joke.

But when we focus on Jesus's baptism, and when we’re united in prayer with the One who lived, died, and rose again so that we might be baptized and count, we’re scandalously brought into the divine life. We find ourselves listening in on a conversation between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And we realize that, because of Christ, we count more than we ever imagined. We count because we have the extraordinary privilege of calling God Abba, Father.

There’s nothing else and no one else that can make us count. Only Christ can do that. And this day is all about him. But when we make it all about him, we discover, incidentally, that it’s about us, too. Because of him, our life is transformed fully into color. Because of him, we aren’t the same as we were before. Because of him, now, we count, and we are his forever, and that’s no joke.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 12, 2025

[1] Flannery O’Connor, “The River” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), Kindle edition

Salvation's Footsteps

When I was a newly ordained priest, I served in both a parish and as choir director at St. James School in north Philadelphia, a place well known to many of us. Each summer, the entire school would spend several days at an outdoor adventure camp in northern Maryland, which was a hands-on learning experience for the students and several days of unharnessed fun. But the camp was more than an excuse for a vacation in the northern Maryland woods. It was an opportunity for students to gain self-confidence as they navigated various challenges with courage and grace.

And this is how I found myself standing in line for a ropes course mounted high in the trees of a section of northern Maryland forest. As a school staff member, I was assigned to accompany a group of students in their scheduled activities each day. At this camp, staff members participated as fully as the students. Everybody was in it together, and apparently this shared participation included walking on tree limbs hundreds of feet in the air, with nothing but a harness and helmet for protection.

As I stood in line, my heart began to race. I don’t like heights. I wondered how I might gracefully avoid the ropes course while still supporting the students as they walked out on limbs. Could I just cheer them on and not move forward in the line myself? But I watched as one student after another, some of whom sang in my school choir, literally went out on a limb, encouraged by their fellow classmates.

It was exhilarating to see each student bask in the victory of completing the challenging ropes course, however torturous it was for an acrophobic. Soon, it was my turn. How could I, as their teacher and elder support them with words and not action? They were waiting for me to join them in this test of emotional bravery. So, I stepped up to the course attendant, saddled myself with a harness, and walked out on a limb. Behind me, the students cheered. I went farther and farther out on the tree limb. The ropes course got trickier with each step. My hands sweated. My knees trembled. But the students cheered me on, and when the nightmare was over, the students congratulated me, too. We’d all been in it together.

While I hope never to undertake such an obstacle course again, I understood the impression this whole experience had on the students. They needed their teachers and mentors to share this experience with them. The relationship between teacher and student was one of mutual investment. Students invested trust in their teachers, and teachers invested themselves fully in their students. It was an inspiration for the students to see their elders facing their own fears, just like them. Everyone was in it together.

One of the most common reasons people give up on God is that they don’t believe God is in it with them. They think that God isn’t fully invested in the human experience. God has failed to prove his benevolence, they say. God reigns on high while below children starve, airplanes crash with hundreds of people on board, and terrorists drive cars through crowds of innocent people celebrating the holidays. Meanwhile, God does nothing, say those who have given up on God. Why should they go to church and worship a God who seems distant and removed from the human condition, who isn’t in it with them? To their eyes, God is far away, and we toil here below. We’re not in it together.

To those who think this way, I’ve never been able to provide a convincing argument for belief in God. I suspect that no theologian has or will either. I’ve learned that silence before the mystery of suffering is the most genuine response. It’s often what garners the most respect, even among those who want nothing to do with God.

The Gospels themselves fail to address the problem of suffering and evil in a systematic way. It’s not what their aim is. And yet, if we steep ourselves in the Gospels, they do have something to say about God’s involvement with evil and suffering—quite a lot, actually. And it’s no small comfort to hear St. Matthew the Evangelist assure us that our Messiah and Savior is named Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Surely, Matthew knew suffering in his own life. He knew what it was like to be a reviled tax collector-turned-Christian. He knew what it was like to give everything up to follow his Lord. Unsurprisingly then, at the heart of Matthew’s Gospel, we discern the unspeakably good news that even though bad things happen all the time to good people, our God hasn’t forsaken us after all. And God certainly hasn’t caused the evil and suffering himself. God has been with us in the most intimate way in the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, God with us.

Without this deep conviction that God is really in it with us, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt makes no sense. St. Matthew is indeed the only evangelist to give us this story. Practically speaking, I suppose the Holy Family had to flee to the most remote place possible, far from the jurisdiction of Roman tyrants, and certainly, Egypt was high on that list. But what Jewish person would have wished to go back to Egypt, the place from which their ancestors had fled so many years before? Who would have wanted to make that long and arduous trek through hazardous conditions? And even after the Holy Family departed Egypt, the journey was still filled with uncertainty and the specter of yet another tyrant to avoid, which explains how they eventually ended up in Nazareth.

At first glance, Matthew’s story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt simply provides more fodder for those who want nothing to do with God. How could God allow the Savior of the world to escape Herod’s wrath while all the Holy Innocents were slaughtered? And was all this simply to fulfill Scripture?

But Matthew doesn’t try to explain the massacre of the Holy Innocents, nor do I think he intends to literalize Scriptural fulfillments in a rigidly providential way. St. Matthew is telling us something profound about salvation in his story of the flight of the Holy Family to and from Egypt. The infancy of the Christ child retraces the footsteps of God’s people, in thick and thin. Our infant Savior is taken by his parents into the land that enslaved his own people in the past. And under his parents’ care and God’s providence, the holy Child is brought once again into freedom. The One who comes to make his home with us and within us, becomes for a time a homeless person, wandering like many today. The One for whom John the Baptist prepared a straight path, is carried by his family through a circuitous desert excursion until they finally make their home in Nazareth. The Holy Family must meander its way around the traps of imperial oppression. The Word doesn’t become flesh in a distant, straightforward way, but in a human, intimate, and complicated way. God hasn’t removed himself to a remote corner of the sky. God, in Christ, has been through it all with us, to Egypt and out of it again.

God in Christ, in human time, has gone where our spiritual ancestors had already traveled and suffered and been liberated, and God in Christ, in human time, goes where his beloved children will yet venture in the future. And in between Good Friday and Easter, the Son of God goes to the depths of hell to ensure that not one corner of the earth is left untouched by his saving power. As the Gospels tell us, Jesus sent his disciples out into the places where he himself would go. Our Savior doesn’t leave us to experience hell alone. He’s been there, too.

On this twelfth day of Christmas, as we continue to celebrate the coming of God-with-us in Christ, no amount of Christmas cheer can turn our faces from the horrors around us. War continues in the Middle East. Families of those killed in random acts of violence mourn their beloved. Refugees risk their lives to seek better futures for themselves and their families. People still worry about their next meal. Friends and family are separated by unhappy divisions. Bad things still happen to good people.

St. Matthew doesn’t explain any of this. We can’t explain it. But St. Matthew suggests that we can trust that the God we worship and adore, who has come to us in the most intimate way, has not left us to our own devices, nor does he treat us like puppets on a string. In Christ, God has been where we’ve been, and God will go where we’ll go, too. Christ has been homeless. He’s thirsted on the cross. He, too, has shed human tears. He, too, has lived with the poor and as one of the poor. He, too, has gone from slavery into freedom. He, too, has suffered and died. But he’s also been raised again so that he can reign in glory. And where he’s gone, we shall go, too. And no matter where life will take us, we know that he’s been there, too.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 5, 2025        

Incomprehensible Grace

One of our young acolytes refuses to let his light go out. I’m referring to the torch that he carries at Mass. Once we’ve processed out of the church and are saying the final prayer outside the Tower doors, he frantically cups his torch with his hand. The wind is furiously raging against the light, doing its best to extinguish it. The tiny flame shakes violently, and our acolyte redoubles his efforts to keep the light alive. Our young acolyte usually wins. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.

Our young acolyte has been formed through the Godly Play curriculum that we use in Sunday School, where each week we light a candle to remind us of God’s presence with us before we pray together. And each week after prayer time, a child is invited to change the light. They don’t extinguish the light; they change it. The light simply morphs into smoke that spreads throughout the room, so that anywhere we go in the room, we can be close to the light. The light changes, but it doesn’t go away. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.

But there’s another way of translating that verb which is usually rendered “overcome” in the Prologue to John’s Gospel. The King James Version of the Bible says that the darkness comprehended it not. Now, that’s an interesting translation, which I rather like. We might even say that the darkness can’t overcome the light because it can’t comprehend the light. The darkness hasn’t a clue how to deal with the light, as much as it tries.

For centuries, Christians have tried to explain the darkness, which we name as sin and evil. Evil is a privation of good, St. Augustine of Hippo suggested. Our prayer book’s catechism tells us that sin’s power lies in taking away our freedom.[1] Sin and evil seem like powers and forces. They appear real to us. St. Paul understood this when he said that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. We all know our own besetting sins, our proclivities towards gossip, prejudice, envy, and those things we know we shouldn’t do. We know we shouldn’t malign that person, but we do it anyway. We know we should return curt words with kind ones, but we refuse to do so. And evil is at work among us. We only deny it at our peril. We see it plastered all over the headlines of the daily news.

But our young acolyte who won’t extinguish his light after Mass must intrinsically believe in the simple but profound truth of St. John’s words. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The darkness comprehended it not. No matter how much we are subject to sin and evil, they can’t hold a candle (pun intended) to the light that continues to shine.

Maybe the truth about darkness is that it makes us feel like it has power. It dupes us into thinking it’s stronger than it really is. And it functions, primarily, by taking things away. Sin takes away our freedom by tempting us to put distance between ourselves and God. Evil assails us with doubts and deprives us of our confidence. Darkness attempts to wear us down gradually, a death through a thousand small cuts.

How many of us can withstand all these tiny deaths? Our perennial temptations do wear us down and lure us into sin. The systemic evils in our world conscript us into their schemes, and before long, we’re under their sway. It certainly seems as if darkness has an intrinsic power, and yet, the nasty secret about the darkness is that it only gains power by taking things away.

But St. John, in the exquisite Prologue to his Gospel, explains how the light works in contrast to the darkness. John focuses on the light, like our young acolyte tenaciously guarding the light of his torch. John reminds us of the light that shines in the darkness but which the darkness can’t overcome, indeed, can’t comprehend. It’s through this light, manifested in Jesus, the Word made flesh, that we receive grace upon grace. And this is how grace works. Grace heaps more grace upon grace. It gives without ceasing because its very nature is to give. Grace functions in a sphere of infinity, where in love God the Son is begotten of God the Father, and where their endless love is shared in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Grace never runs out. Grace is constantly being poured out upon us. We’ll never receive enough grace because there’s always more to receive.

But the darkness doesn’t understand this. In fact, it can’t comprehend it. Darkness operates in a zero-sum world, where supplies are limited and everyone and everything is in competition. It feeds on the deprivation of good. It chips away at freedom, and it whittles away at good. And as long as we’re operating with the same zero-sum mentality, the darkness will have power over us.

For centuries, the spiritual tradition has told us that in our holiest moments, we’ll feel most vulnerable to the darkness. As St. Paul said, when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. And so, at holy times in our lives, we’re vulnerable to the darkness that assails us in small ways. One nagging doubt is enough to push us away from a good decision. One more taunt from an ill-meaning person lures us into a less than charitable response. An ill-timed inconvenience destroys our last ounce of patience. We can’t explain how darkness finds us when we’re at our holy work, but it does. And to explain it and ruminate about it is to give darkness too much power. In some sense, it only has as much power as we give it. Darkness grows when we react against it and when we try to fight it. Oddly enough, the more we believe we must fight the darkness, the more unwittingly we can come to personify it.

Renounce the darkness and reject it, but don’t fight with it. The light always shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t overcome it. It can’t comprehend it. And from the fulness of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, we’ve received grace upon grace. There’s no end to this grace. In every moment of sin, grace can be found in forgiveness. In every instance where evil divides, grace continues to restore relationships and draw our eyes to the light that still shines in the darkness. Grace never ceases to find us, and so the light can never be extinguished.

And this is why St. John’s Gospel takes us back to the beginning, where everything is light and infinite gift and goodness. Before the darkness tried to take it away, the light was always offering itself in love. And even now when darkness tries to take it away, the light always continues to give its radiance to a bleak world. But the darkness hasn’t overcome the light because the darkness can’t comprehend it.

What the darkness can’t comprehend is that on Good Friday, when it tried to do its worst against the light, it was bested by gentle, strong, courageous love. When darkness tried to take away the life of the world’s Savior, the Savior nevertheless gave his life willingly on the cross so that all might live. And through that gift, we continue to receive grace upon grace.

When our kindness is rebuffed, we receive grace upon grace and give more kindness in return. When life throws us yet another curve ball, we resort not to bitterness, but we’re given grace upon grace to strengthen us with peace. When it seems like we just can’t go on another day and when all seems like darkness, there’s always more grace for us to receive from the eternal light, the Word made flesh, who always comforts us with hope.

I wonder if we might reimagine St. Paul’s belief that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. The truth according to St. John is that when darkness lies close at hand, there is yet more grace upon grace. And like our young acolyte we, too, can keep the light shining in the darkness, asking for more grace upon grace until we’re saturated with it.

This grace upon grace is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the mystery of Christmas. It’s the light that shines in the darkness. And although the darkness will constantly try to put it out, it can never overcome the light. It can’t overcome the light, because it can’t comprehend the light. There’s always more grace upon grace, and despite the efforts of the darkness, this grace will last forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas Day
December 29, 2024       

[1] The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 849.

Music for Strings

At Christmas, music for strings seems more apt than music for brass. Don’t get me wrong. I love brass music. Each year, I listen with great pleasure to the spine-tingling brass arrangements of Christmas carols by the late Sir David Willcocks. But at Christmas, I really prefer music for strings.

It must be the intimacy of string music that I associate with the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the eternal Word of God becoming flesh and dwelling on earth. String music is chamber music, music for close quarters and cozy spaces. Brass fanfares are for palaces and cathedrals. Brass instruments seem to herald the coming of a king with the acclamations of crowds of people. And a King does come to us this time of year, but this King comes with little fanfare. He comes quietly in a manger, unknown to the crowds outside the stable. He comes with human tendons and sinews flexing into new life. He comes with the music of strings that are energizing themselves into the frequences of music.

Have you ever watched a string musician making music? As a keyboardist and former trumpet player, stringed instruments fascinate me. I do have a sense of what it’s like to know one’s instrument, of forming one’s mouth into an embouchure to send vibrating air through brass piping, or of resting one’s fingers on the keys of a piano or organ, feeling exactly where middle C is. I can recall sensations of instruments that just didn’t feel right, of horns that produced a dull sound or of pipe organs where the keys resisted a precise touch.

But I know nothing of the relationship between a violinist and her violin, where her head rests gently on the chinrest, inevitably feeling the resonance of the instrument. I know nothing of the way a violin would sound with an ear so close to where the music is coming alive. The connection between a violinist and violin is so close that many violinists bear a visible mark of that proximity on their skin. While an unmusical pianist could stoically run his fingers over the ivories, how can a violinist not feel the intimate connection with her instrument, as her head snuggles up to the sound of wood and strings vibrating with life?

In the beginning, there was divine music, a perfect music of love between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It was always there, beyond time and space, and it will always be there, beyond time and space. But on a certain day in a certain year and in a very specific place on earth, this music, always present within the life of God, was perceived within human time and space. It was like music composed within one’s head that was notated and played in audible form for the very first time. It’s as if God lifted his bow, cradling all of creation next to himself as intimately as possible, in the crook of his neck, and the bow touched the strings. And the music sounded forth.

It was perfect music resonating within the soundwaves of imperfect time. For once, humanity could hear the perfection of this music, if it chose. The divine music came so close to creation that creation  was inflected by true life, and yet creation refused to receive this life. It’s almost as if this life was rejected precisely because it was so close. It was so near to human beings that they missed it.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. All of creation resounded with the glory of God in audible form when the bow touched the strings. But God came so close to his beloved children that they pushed him away. Maybe they couldn’t believe that God Almighty would deign to cradle them in the crook of his neck and play his divine music on the strings of their lives. And when the first prayer seemed to go unanswered, it was assumed that God had lifted his bow from the strings. When the first instance of suffering happened, it was because God was playing humans like a fiddle, manipulating their lives and yanking them around arbitrarily. When more and more tragedy occurred, it meant that God and his divine music were removed to a remote corner of heaven while humanity was left with cold silence below. Or could it be that God swooped down from on high in that year when the Word became flesh, playing the perfect music for thirty-three years until the world cut the strings of the violin and shattered its wood? Perhaps, people speculated, the music ceased, and God went back up into the sky. The divine music was so unbelievably close that the world couldn’t hear it, like our own heartbeats in our chest.

And yet, despite the world’s deaf ears, the incomprehensible mystery of Christmas remains, which is that the divine music never stops even in our time and space. It has never stopped. It will never stop, although it seems unthinkable to us that God would continue to cradle us near his heart, that he still allows our warped strings to resonate with hints of his divine music. It’s inconceivable that God would touch his bow of life on the reluctant strings of our own frail humanity to make music through us. Can this happen even after the crucifixion? Can these broken strings still produce the music of life?

In our loneliest moments or in the most difficult times of our lives, we may feel like warped wood, like strings that won’t flex, or like a cracked soundboard on a violin. God’s perfect music is inevitably distorted when sin damages the material of our lives. While the truth of Easter is that nothing in our lives is beyond repair, the truth of Christmas is that the restoration of divine music is possible even in the brokenness of our lives, all because God is closer to us than we care to perceive. With God’s grace—especially if we recall how close he is to us—our strings can soften and flex into divine music once again. Our soundboard can be mended. We can give voice to the music that God is animating from within us.

In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John makes a claim so astounding that it’s frequently tuned out by much of the world. Because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we have the miraculous power to become children of God. Because we are God’s children, God’s Church, God’s beloved ones enlivened by the power of the Holy Spirit, St. John tells us that we are capable of doing greater works than we can ever imagine. Even on the cracked soundboards and brittle strings of our lives, God can make wondrous music.

Living as if we have the power to become children of God is the art of music, but it’s more than honing technique or blindly observing rules. It’s living as if the true Light of the world has enlivened every fiber of our being, warming cold strings to vibrate with the glory of God. It’s living as if we do believe that God continues to cradle us in the crook of his neck, close to his bosom, settling his bow on the strings of our lives.

We can feel the warmth of his love against our skin. We can sense his divine bow not coercing us into life but drawing life out of the hardened strings of our existence, mending the cracks in our soundboards, and coaxing sweet sounds out of bitterness. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God’s bow touched strings of flesh, and divine music resounded.

On this Christmas day, we celebrate the nearness of the divine music, so near we might refuse to hear it or might be prone to ignore it. But however dark your world may appear right now, however warped the wood and however calcified the strings of your life are, you’ve been kissed by grace. You’re still cradled in the bosom of God. You’re still granted the power to become children of God, made to bring forth divine music, despite your imperfections. So, nestle yourself in the crook of God’s neck, let his bow draw glorious music from your lives, and let them resound with the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 25, 2024        

Finding Our Way Home

It was sometime during the Twelve Days of Christmas, and he was standing by the crèche, gazing adoringly at the sheep and the donkey and the ox. He was making cooing noises, admiring the cuteness of the animals as they reclined before the baby Jesus. He had found his way to the church in the middle of a bustling urban center. Truth be told, it was a home of sorts for him. To my knowledge, he had no other home, but he frequently showed up at the church for daily prayer and Mass.

He was a character, to say the least. He’d been known to wave a Mexican flag at the peace during Mass on Cinco de Mayo. At other times, he could be seen striding up to Communion, with large designer glasses on and a scarf wrapped luxuriously around his neck. He knew the church was his home, because on the day that he was beaten up on the streets, he headed straight for the church, where he was lovingly embraced by the parish priest. The church may have been the only place on earth where he felt loved.

As he stood before the crèche on one of those Twelve Days of Christmas, admiring the animals in the nativity scene, he turned to my friend and asked, “Do you think the animals knew it was the baby Jesus?” Now, that’s a theological question if I ever heard one. It’s a question that most of us would be too embarrassed to ask. We don’t often think of the animals in the manger as having so much sentience. To be honest, no one really knows how the sheep, the donkey, and the ox came to be associated with the nativity scene. The Gospels say nothing about them at the manger. The sheep, we could reason, found their way there with the shepherds. But the donkey and the ox? Who knows? And yet, it would be an anathema to have a crèche without them.

Tradition tells us that these animals were introduced into the nativity scene because of a mysterious line at the beginning of the book of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah says that “the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” This is Isaiah’s prophetic judgment on our spiritual ancestors. He sharply suggests that, despite God’s gracious care, his people were so stubborn and willful that even an ox and a donkey would have a better sense of obedience. We might say the same of ourselves. An ox recognizes the feel of its owner’s pull on a halter, as well as the standard verbal commands. A donkey must sense the pressure on his back as its owner leads it where it should go. A cow clearly knows where the feeding trough is. Even Scripture tells us that the sheep will answer to the voice of the good shepherd. But many of us refuse to follow the lead of our true Master, nor do we really understand who’s leading us at times.

Animals know sometimes. They just know. They have a sense that someone can be trusted. They know where food is. They know where home is. My father-in-law recently told me a story about a dog he had when he was young. One day my father-in-law, his brother, and mother went over to the site of their future home in the town where they lived. And the dog went with them. But when they opened the car door, the dog jumped out and ran away.

They searched and searched for a couple of hours, but to no avail. They couldn’t find the dog, and so they eventually started home, worried about where he was. But when they arrived back home, several miles from where they’d been searching for him, the dog was already there, sitting patiently outside the house. For whatever reason the dog ran away, he knew where home was, and he found his way back there.

So, I wonder: did the ox and the donkey and the sheep know that it was the baby Jesus? We’ll never know, of course. But they did know where home was. The donkey knew the stable as his home. The ox knew it, too. And the sheep must have followed the shepherds, because wherever the shepherds were present to protect them, it must have been home to them.

That urban church of which I was a member years ago was also home to a restless soul who asked my friend a rather perceptive theological question. He knew that the church was home, where Jesus was always enthroned in the tabernacle on the altar. He knew that it wasn’t silly to query whether the animals at the manger knew it was the baby Jesus, because they at least knew where home was, through obedience and familiarity. And that sense of knowing is too often lost on us, however advanced we might be on the evolutionary scale. Maybe the animals did somehow know it was the baby Jesus.

In those days when a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled, the edict from on high was that every citizen should go home. Each was to go to his own city, which is how Mary and Joseph ended up in Bethlehem, the city of David. It was a nondescript place, a tiny hamlet not far from Jerusalem but worlds removed in terms of sophistication. To Bethlehem they went because it was home. Well, technically speaking, Nazareth was home, but from God’s perspective—from a spiritual perspective—Bethlehem was really home. From the viewpoint of salvation history, Bethlehem was where it all began. It was the city foretold by the prophets as the home of the Messiah. Bethlehem was home.

And through a marvelous intersection of history and divine providence, a stable became a throne. A sweeping decree from a worldly ruler enabled the true King of the world to begin his reign in the back room of a country lodge. A homeless family found a home in a stable that wasn’t technically home to them. And yet, it was home.

The manger was home for the animals, because there they found food. For the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know who its true King is. The sheep knew to follow their shepherd, even if thousands enrolled in an imperial census were led by bad shepherds, who for reasons of greed uprooted them and sent them each to their own cities. For Mary and Joseph, the stable was a home, because the baby was there, the Word was made flesh there, the Bread of Life was born in the House of Bread, which is what Bethlehem means.[1]

And on this night, we, too, have come home. Something other than Christmas cheer must have brought us to this church. I suspect that more than a few of us are struggling to find Christmas cheer, but we’re in this church for more than simple happiness. So, like an ox finding the comfort of its master’s lead and a donkey recognizing its master’s crib and a sheep following the guidance of its shepherd and a dog finding its way home again, we have found our way here. We must know this is home. Like that man who found his way to the church when the world beat him up, we have made our way here, to the crèche, to adore the newborn King, the Prince of Peace. He is our home.

On the other 364 days of the year, we might feel as if we have no home. We are frequently strangers, wandering all over a planet where there seems to be no peace, searching for our true home. We’re led by bad shepherds at times. We’re force-fed food that doesn’t nourish us. But tonight, we must return home to be quickened by the life of the Word made flesh.

For earthly homes aren’t always the places we think they’ll be. Earthly homes aren’t always happy. Going home can feel like a regression, backsliding from maturity into immaturity. But on this Christmas night, we can rest assured that this place is more than a mere earthly home. It’s an earthly home touched by heaven itself. It’s a home of peace, love, and joy. Perhaps, once again, we need to become an innocent child or take a cue from animals who can’t solve math equations but who at least know who their master is and where home resides. Tonight, we’ve come home.

And the marvelous mystery of Christmas is that home isn’t only in Bethlehem. Home isn’t only at the crèche at the back of this church. Home isn’t only before the altar of God where Jesus reigns in the Sacrament. No, because of the mystery of the Word made flesh, home has spread to the ends of the earth. Home is taken with us in our hearts, where Jesus also reigns in glory. Home is anywhere, in the grimiest alleyways of cities or in the feeding troughs of country villages. Home is where we know the love of our Lord, our true Shepherd, who leads us, guides us, and protects us forever. Home is where he feeds us and promises us eternal life, so that one day, we’ll abide with him in the heavenly mansion.

So, come, let us worship the newborn King! Come, let us adore the baby in the manger! Come, let us kneel before him and offer him our hearts, so that in them, he will make a home and abide there forever!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2024

[1] This play on words has roots in the patristic tradition.

A Song, a Dance, and a Question

How many children do you know who refuse to sing? Singing is just what little children do. They sing as they play. They sing in front of adults without a second thought. Even the ancient chants of the Mass have a melodic resemblance to the sing-song intervals of children at play. And we adults aren’t usually surprised when children sing. We expect them to sing. We smile and laugh as we witness the carefree, joyful singing of children. It would, in fact, be odd for a child not to sing. It would be bizarre if we never sang to a child when she was sad or when we wanted to coax him to sleep.

Children dance, too. I used to watch with glee as my niece and nephews danced to music on TV. We adults would laugh, good-naturedly, as they danced, not laughing at them but with them. We didn’t think it strange that they would dance. Like singing, we would find it strange if they didn’t dance. And it would be equally unusual if we didn’t dance with babies, too, bouncing them on our knees while singing and comforting them and gladdening their hearts in play.

In case you haven’t noticed, children like to ask questions, as much as or more than they like to sing and dance. Children can ask some of the most theologically astute questions of all. Will we ever see him again since he died? Why did Jesus have to die on the cross? What happens to our tattoos when we die? I’m not kidding. I’ve heard all these questions at one point or another, and there may be no truer test of our own grasp of the Christian faith than to respond authentically to the questions of children.

But there comes a day—and I’m not sure when it happens—that shame enters from stage right or left in the drama of our lives. Is it in adolescence, or is it before? I don’t know when, but the day inevitably arrives when we feel that pang of embarrassment to sing or dance or question in public. We might sing privately in the shower or dance in the isolation of our rooms when no one is looking. And we certainly always continue to question in our hearts, wondering why something has happened to me or someone I love. But the song, the dance, and the question always remain, even if we hide them from the public eye.

Maybe someone tells us that we don’t have a good musical ear, and that callous remark stops our song. Or we become so self-conscious that we can no longer dance with others, and so we sit on the sidelines at the wedding reception as everyone else gyrates and busts a move while we watch, saddened by our inability to participate. We laugh at those who sing spontaneously in public, saying that it makes us uncomfortable, and so, we stand with hymnal closed as the rest of the congregation belts out the hymn. We laugh at the silliness of those who dance when something wonderful happens to them.

I can remember when I stopped singing in public; it was too embarrassing. I still refrain from dancing in public, because I’m too self-critical. And at some point in school, I stopped asking questions aloud, although I had plenty of them. I was worried that others would think I was unintelligent. Do you relate to this? What was it that made our songs cease and our dancing shameful and our questions anathema? Who told us that our questions were ridiculous and shut us up?

Maybe it’s actually the question that muffles our song and stills our dancing. We question why life has taken a turn for the worse. We question why a parent is terminally ill. We question why children starve and others have too much to eat. We question why we pray so hard and our prayers aren’t answered. With all these questions, how can we sing? How can we dance?

And yet, the story of the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth wouldn’t be the same story without song and dance. At first glance, we can only see why Mary would break into song as she greets Elizabeth. At a superficial level, we can easily grasp why John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. Mary has become mysteriously pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit, and Elizabeth is also great with child, although like Abraham’s wife, Sarah, she is far too old to give birth. Of course, there would be singing and dancing at this news. Mary and Elizabeth have both received extraordinary blessings.

But there’s also every good reason that there should be no singing or dancing. If we can move past a greeting card’s romanticizing of this Biblical scene, we’ll discover that things were much more complex than the Hallmark company’s estimation. Mary was no more than a teenager when Gabriel announced to her that she would bear the Son of God. Undoubtedly, she was scared and frightened at her unexpected pregnancy. Can you imagine the shame she would have felt to be visibly pregnant with a child that was not Joseph’s? Do you remember how ancient society treated women in such situations? And what about Elizabeth? She was in her golden years, preparing for death, not birth. Did she have the energy and stamina to raise a child? What would people have said about her? Surely, she must have been wary and frightened, too.

As St. Luke gives us this story, at the center of this touching scene between two cousins, both surprisingly pregnant, there abides a question. It’s a wondrous question and less of a cynical, skeptical one. It’s a question of marvel and awe, and Elizabeth gives voice to it. Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Why indeed! Why should the elder woman be blessed by the greeting of the younger? Why should the Son of God be born into her biological family? How was Elizabeth pregnant? How was Mary pregnant? Why was the Son of God coming into the world as flesh and blood? Why indeed!

Elizabeth’s profound question could have justified every effort to stifle a song or to quell a dance. The question could have internalized an obsessive rumination about how things would be and about what burdens both Mary and Elizabeth might have to bear because of their startling news. But the question only elicits a song from Mary, and an intrauterine dance from John. The mystery of God’s unspeakable blessing to both women evokes a song and dance in the face of a very good question.

To live as part of the human condition is to accept that shame will find us. We’ll be privy to jadedness and loss of innocence as we get older. There will always come a day when the real questions of this world will overwhelm us, and with that sense of being overwhelmed, it will be natural to stop our singing and dancing. Indeed, in the face of the manifold problems of human existence in a world influenced by sin, it will seem unnatural—even inappropriate—to sing and dance.

How can we sing when others are given no voice to denounce their oppression? How can we dance when so many are shackled by human cruelty and violence? How can we even appear to be joyful when there’s so much sorrow and when others suffer because of our own privilege? These are the intractable questions of growing older as fallible human beings.

But Mary and Elizabeth witness to a joy and trust that persist despite the tangible realities of a broken world. Mary and Elizabeth find song and dance even amid their momentous questions, even as they wonder how such things could happen to them. Mary’s song testifies to the fact that God’s blessings and grace come to us from within the trials and tribulations of human life. As it was true for Hannah who first voiced that song so many years ago, it was true for Mary. And as it was true for Mary and Hannah, it’s still true for us.

God still brings righteousness. God still lifts up the poor and casts down the powerful. God still fills the hungry with good things. God still helps his people and remembers his mercy promised of old. Even as things seem so incomplete and our questions remain unanswered, God is still working and bringing all things to perfection and completion.

We sing and dance not because we experience completion or know all the answers. We sing and dance because we have faith that God is showering blessings on us and on the entire world even though sin is all we can sometimes feel and see. We sing because the question of Elizabeth is our question, too. Who are we that our Lord should come to us and visit us with his blessing? Who are we? We are God’s beloved children, still this day and forever, adopted by his grace and made heirs of eternal life. And that’s a truth in which we can have faith. It’s a truth that should make us sing and dance.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 22, 2024

All from Love

Everything from duty, nothing from love. That was the striking title of a chapter in a novel I recently read. I was hooked. I went on to read about the misery of a woman in a loveless marriage. Her life was full of wearisome tasks that wore her down. She had always been a dutiful person. She’d excelled in school. She’d held great promise, working hard to overcome a difficult childhood, until her life was derailed by an unexpected pregnancy and she was forced to marry at eighteen. Day after day, she fed the crying baby, washed the clothes, cleaned the farmhouse in which she lived with her husband, looked out at the loneliness around her, and despaired of her loveless marriage.

She found herself dreaming about creating more time so she could keep up with all the tasks demanded of her life. But each day, she got out of bed earlier than the day before to add more productive hours to her day. It seemed that more and more was required of her, and getting up earlier was the only way to cope. It never ceased. She was feeding a beast that couldn’t be satisfied. She couldn’t find love because duty was eating her up.[1]

Duty isn’t a bad thing, in fact, it can be a very good thing. I am, by nature, a dutiful person. The language of the Mass even tells us that it’s our “bounden duty” in all times and places to give thanks to God. Duty is an integral part of being a Christian disciple. Indeed, I often wonder whether the Church would be better off if more Christians had a sense of duty.

But duty can be stifling when it becomes the end and not the means. Duty is imprisonment when its aim is to please something or someone that’s never satisfied. So many strings can be attached to acts of duty. The duty-obsessed parent says to the child, “I raised you and cared for you and paid for your college education. I did what a parent is supposed to do. How dare you move out of the house and have a life apart from me!” Some churches say, “Your salvation is assured if you are in this fold and you simply follow these rules. If you’re obedient and dutiful and observant, you will be blessed. But should you leave the fold, you are anathema.” Yes, duty can be divorced from love. Duty can be the string that is attached to conditional love, which really isn’t love at all.

Everything from duty, nothing from love. Maybe this chilling statement summarizes the mindset of the crowds that approach John the Baptist. They’ve heard of a wrath to come, and they don’t want to meet that wrath. Perhaps they feel that the clock is ticking, and the alarm will go off soon. Maybe they need to make up for lost time. There’s a God who needs to be appeased, and they’d better hurry. And so, they arrive at John’s feet, by duty, we might say, rather than by love. John himself seems to encourage such duty as the proper response of a faithful child of God. Bear fruits that befit repentance, he says. Don’t rest on the laurels of your status as children of Abraham. Be dutiful, you brood of vipers!

But the crowds who come to John seem stuck on duty. And John’s exhortation to behave as if they are repentant also seems stuck on duty. The crowds don’t know what to do. There’s an urgency to John’s message, and they’re anxious, which is even more of a reason to demand specificity from John. “What then shall we do?”

But did John’s advice help the eager crowds, or did they become more stuck after John addressed them? Surely, those who had two coats went to share one of their coats with the unclothed. Surely, the tax collectors changed their extortionary financial practices. Surely, the soldiers tried to be a bit more just in their dealings with others. Surely, they all heeded John’s good advice. But did they become unstuck? Was everything still from duty? Was anything from love?

How often do we, too, get stuck on duty? Maybe in our own lives, we’re stuck right now. We get out of bed on Sunday mornings, pile on layers of clothing against the cold weather, and we show up here. We’ve heard there’s a wrath to come, and it sounds terrifying. The visions of hell, fire, and brimstone that we’ve heard about from TV preachers or that we’ve read about in Scripture sound a lot like words from the mouth of John. They’ve been used as sticks to beat people into submission. In gentler moments, they’ve been used as guilt-laced carrots to lure people into duty. But the duty that’s elicited by such tactics is based on fear, not on love. And once again, we’re stuck. We don’t know what to do about the state of our soul against the reality of future judgment. Duty seems the only answer when up against the specter of winnowing forks and an unquenchable fire.

And so, we show up here, or we kneel by the side of our beds at night, and we ask, “What then shall we do?” Perhaps it’s the threat of condemnation that has driven us through the doors of this church or to our knees by our beds. We want answers. What then shall we do? And the unspoken part of that sentence is the elephant in the room that we never want to name but is crystal clear. What we shall do is anything that allows us to escape the wrath of God and the flames of hell. Anything at all. Just tell us what to do. Everything is from duty, and nothing from love. We’re stuck.

Good works become the ticket into heaven. We use duty to get something, and love is nowhere in the picture. Let’s face it. In this earthly life, it’s so easy to become stuck. We’re stuck between the rock of God’s assumed wrath and the hard place of our compulsion to live and act justly. What then shall we do?

Maybe the answer lies in rescuing the image of John the Baptist and his fiery speech and his pointing hand from a crude summons to duty. Maybe the answer lies in following the pointing hand through duty to its ultimate reference, which is, of course, Christ, the Messiah. And if we follow John’s hand to Christ, we might be able to discern a deeper message beneath the call to duty, one that is indeed—as St. Luke’s words tell us—good news for us.

John isn’t pointing to good works themselves, which are bound up with Christian duty. John isn’t simply pointing to the good fruit on the tree as the end of all things. John is pointing to the image of God within each one of us that naturally bears the fruit of good works done faithfully and dutifully. John is pointing to the healthy root of the tree that will enable it to bear good fruit. John is pointing to the source of that tree’s life. And in this realization, we learn who we are and who we’re called to be. By virtue of our baptism into Christ in the Spirit’s power, we’re made children of God and heirs of eternal life. And through that same Spirit, God can raise up from our hearts of stone new hearts on fire with the love of God.

John calls the crowds to repentance not simply for the sake of duty; he calls them to repentance so that they can make an about-face in their lives and turn to see the wide-open arms of a God who has always been waiting for them to discover his infinite love. This God whom we worship and adore isn’t a hungry beast, demanding more and more good works. There’s no ticking time bomb of which we should be afraid. God doesn’t ask us to add more hours to our days to do more good works so that we can appease him. Through God-directed duty, God invites us to discover his love that frees us from the shackles of the machinery of all loveless duty that drains away our life. And it’s through repentance that we turn from our idols and misdirected duty to God, who desires love more than duty. With this God, because he loved us first, everything really is from love rather than from duty.

So, follow the hand of the prophet one last time. Don’t be put off by his fiery speech and rough appearance. Move through his words of repentance to notice where his finger is really pointing. It’s pointing through the duty of faithfulness to Love himself, Jesus the Christ. It’s pointing to the Son of God, who by virtue of taking on human flesh and defeating death through his resurrection from the dead has given us the power to become children of God. If we follow John’s finger, we will see more clearly who we’re called to be, which is a people growing more and more into the likeness of God. For John is pointing to Christ who was and is and is to come, who by the power of his Holy Spirit, reigns within our hearts and calls us to new life. And in him, we find that our bounden duty, however very meet and right it is, has now all become love. You see, although duty has its place, everything is really from love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 15, 2024

[1] Chapter three from Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004)

How the Word Slips In

One of the treasured items in my office is a religious icon recently given to me by the wife of my former spiritual director, who died a year and a half ago. The icon is mounted in a glass box, preserved as if it’s a museum piece, although the icon is really a living vehicle of prayer that leads us to deeper union with God. The icon in my office dates from the fourteenth century. It may even be older than that.

The story behind this icon is fascinating. On the back of the box in which this icon is displayed is a typed note, explaining its history. It was purchased at a gallery in Philadelphia and given to an Episcopal priest, who bequeathed it to my former spiritual director. And then, it was kindly given to me. Supposedly, this icon was found strapped to the back of a Russian emigrant to this country at the time of the Russian Revolution. This emigrant was fleeing the unstable political scene there.

When gazing upon this icon, you can feel its age, so much so that I get little prickly goosebumps when I gaze upon it. It’s in the form of a triptych, like a miniature version of the triptych found behind the altar in our Lady Chapel. Two smaller outer panels frame a larger central panel. The outer panels can close inwards like doors, but in the icon’s current framed box, they remain open, fastened to the central panel with rudimentary wires.

It's difficult to tell exactly which saints are depicted on the outer panels because the layer of paint is rubbed off in many places, revealing the old wood beneath. But the center panel is almost fully preserved. In the center of this central panel is Christ himself, sitting, as if teaching, holding a book with Greek lettering, his hand raised in blessing. Mary and John surround him, gesturing to him with their hands. Christ looks straight at you, the beholder of this gorgeous icon.

Whether the legend of how this icon was transported to America is true or not, it’s an intriguing story. Imagine fleeing a country in turmoil and feeling compelled to bring an icon of Christ with you. Of all the things you could bring, why an icon? Did the emigrant sneak onto a boat crossing the Atlantic? Did he come by way of the Bering Strait? But the fact that this icon was supposedly strapped to the body of a Russian emigrant suggests that the endeavor had to be furtive. It’s as if this emigrant needed an image of Christ held close to his body to give him hope. It’s as if Christ were smuggled into this country, under the radar of authorities, and Christ’s visage, with hand raised in blessing, continues to bless those in possession of the icon. An image of the Word of God—capital W—entered this country on the back of a Russian emigrant.

It’s a strikingly good image for the way in which God’s word—lowercase w—seems to come to us. Through the ages, God’s word has come to dozens of prophets, alighting on them, unbidden and unsolicited, by surprise, slipping into their lives. Some of those prophets were called to give the people of Israel a good talking to. Others were called to encourage and comfort when times were rough. But through the ages, in a great succession of unlikely individuals, God’s word was smuggled into human time, and then passed on down the ages.

It's no different with how God’s word comes to John the Baptist. St. Luke the Evangelist seems to be making such a point as he lays out a litany of worldly authorities exercising power in the time when John the Baptist received God’s word. In the reigns of Caesar and Pontius Pilate and Herod and Philip and Lysanias and Annas and Caiphas, who all hold either earthly or religious power, John’s name is dropped in by Luke as an absolute nobody. He’s simply the son of Zechariah. He has no territorial jurisdiction. He’s not even in a city of great magnitude. He's in the desert, the wilderness, a wild and dangerous place that people generally avoid.

Into this unruly place, to a man of no fame, God’s word slips into human time. It seeps into human history from beneath the eyes of those wielding worldly power and abusing it all the same. God’s word enters the human story in a particular place and time, while rulers hold sway who would later be responsible for the death of Jesus, the Word of God—capital W. This is how God works. This is how God’s word—lowercase w—enters human history. God may be outside human time, but God works in our time.

But there’s more. The word comes to John as a chosen prophet. He has no claim to fame, except that we know him as the cousin of Jesus. But when God’s word comes to John, his mission doesn’t remain local. The word spoken into human history isn’t trapped in John’s head or heart or in his hut in the wilderness. That word is carried by John, as if strapped to his back like an ancient icon, and it goes into the region around the Jordan.

In this ungovernable region, into which only brave souls would tread, there’s no territorial jurisdiction by a Caesar or Pilate or Herod or Philip or Lysanias or Annas or Caiphas. It’s the wilderness, wild and free. It’s the area around the Jordan, where God’s people made their final journey from their wilderness wanderings across the Jordan River into the Promised Land. It’s the region that will be the site of Jesus’s own baptism. It’s a land of profound freedom.

Into this place, God’s word is carried by John, close to his heart, and then announced to all. It’s a message that might first seem about condemnation, but it’s not. It’s about freedom. It’s a call to be freed from sin and to live in the newness of that freedom and life. And like an icon that was smuggled into freedom and passed on from person to person, God’s word would be handed down from John through the centuries to us.

It was a word that made it to Jesus’s ears and called him to baptism. It was a word realized and fulfilled perfectly in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. It’s the word that alighted on the apostles at Pentecost and drove them to the ends of the world. It’s a word that has been taken into every corner of history in every time and place, to those who were willing to receive it. It’s the word that gives life.

The paradox of this holy word is that it’s always available. It’s the most transparent and open declaration imaginable. It’s a word that liberates people from secrecy and releases them from bondage to oppression. And yet it’s so frequently stifled or overlooked or rejected. In the face of human sin, this word must emerge from beneath the smothering effects of earthly might and human deceitfulness. But it always finds its way to us, not to trick us but to woo us in love.

No valley of pain and sorrow is too deep to escape the balm of this word of God. No mountain and hill of human hubris is too high for God’s word to humble it. No crooked path of life’s surprises and disappointments is immune from the reach of God’s comforting word. No rough patch of challenges is left untouched by God’s word of grace. God’s word always finds its way in to call us to repentance, forgiveness, and new life. And just when we think that God’s word has been snuffed out or drowned out by our cares and preoccupations, it comes to us to bless us and invigorate us. We only need ears to hear it.

The advent of God’s word to John was merely a precursor of that great advent of God’s Word—capital W—into human time, when Light and Life were smuggled into history in a dark cave in Bethlehem. But that’s for a few weeks from now. For now, it’s enough to prepare and make our hearts ready, and to clear an open path for God’s word to reach our ears and our hearts. It’s enough to welcome this word and treasure it and strap it to our bodies, like an ancient icon making its way from one continent to another. It’s enough to let Christ be on the central panel of our lives, to gaze upon his image, and to let it invite us to grow more and more into his likeness. It’s enough to know that God’s word will always find us, call us to repentance, forgive us, and set us free. And it’s enough to carry this good news into every place we go, proclaiming the timeless word that nothing can destroy: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 8, 2024

Watching and Praying

Alexandre Schmid is the night watchman of Lausanne, Switzerland. Five nights a week, he climbs 153 steps to his perch at the top of the cathedral tower and announces boldly to the city that he’s there. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix!” “It’s the nightwatch! It’s 10 o’clock! It’s 10 o’clock!” The night watchman has been on guard in the cathedral tower since 1405, following a disastrous fire. The position was created as a means of security for a pre-industrial age, a proactive response to a crisis. In former times, the night watchman would survey the horizon for fires or invaders, serving as the first harbinger of danger. He would also announce the time of day and ring the cathedral bells.[1]

But this position is, of course, a modern-day anachronism. We now have technological means of sensing fires and alerting others to their danger. Bells in church towers can be run on automated timers—that is, if they’re working, unlike ours! Few cities are worried about bands of threatening invaders approaching, and if invaders did show up, they would be detected by national security agencies, not a night watchman on top of a tower.

For the citizens of Lausanne, the night watchman may be an anachronism, but the position isn’t pointless. The night watchman is an institution, a valued part of society. Perhaps the real value of the night watchman isn’t practical but emotional and symbolic. The voice of the watchman crying out each night at the same time, regardless of the weather or wars or a pandemic, is comforting. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix! Maybe it’s like falling asleep in a thunderstorm, where the patter of rain on the roof is soothing and one is assured that inside the warm, dry house, all will be just fine.

The night watchman seems to thread a needle between overreaction and apathy. He will, of course, sound a warning should there be real danger, but he must also be careful lest he sound a false alarm. Nor should he become distracted or disinterested. No one wants a night watchman sleeping on the job. The night watchman is the bedrock of stability, of reliability, of vigilant presence. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix! In feast or famine, the voice continues to cry out.

 The night watchman is a helpful metaphor for the ideal posture of Christian discipleship. The spiritual tradition has always invited us into a median place, where we must thread the needle between severe anxiety and chilling listlessness. A look at the contemporary Church isn’t always encouraging in this regard. We hear, more often than not, cries of alarm. The night watchmen of the Church are usually not simply announcing the hours with patient confidence; they’re frequently crying out in alarm. The Church is dying! The Church is dying! It’s the eleventh hour! Save yourself! Maybe this is simply an overcompensation for decades of malaise—the other extreme.

This alarmist desperation has hardly been helpful. For decades, this anxiety within the Church has fed a strange sort of neo-Pelagianism, in which we’re supposed to pull more and more rabbits out of hats so that the people will show up to church. We’re supposed to be endlessly creative, and perpetually novel. It seems that someone is always crying, fire, fire,!, and we must react. Those who are part of the supposed problem—that is, the ones who have left the Church—have been equally reactive. They’ve abandoned the pews because of one crisis after another, having lost faith in the ability of the Church to do anything good. The ones who flee and the ones who stay are equally reactive.

But on the other side, there are those who have failed to react. They’ve even failed to respond. It’s as if it doesn’t matter at all what the Church does. They stay away from the pews not because they’re angry but because they don’t care enough to be there. Some are in the pews or even in the pulpit, but they’re apathetic and content with the status quo. There could never be a fire of which to warn people. These night watchmen have neglected their duties. They’ve fallen asleep at the switch.

Rarely do we hear voices from within the Church threading the needle. What has happened to the night watchmen of the Church? What has happened to that predictable faithfulness of showing up both in feast and famine to watch with reliable confidence and hope, expecting redemption to draw nigh?

And yet, this is precisely what our Lord consistently calls us to do. Throughout the Gospels, he entreats us not to be anxious. He urges us not to worry about tomorrow or be consumed with fear over the drama or exact time of the end of all things. And in his final words before his passion—words that anchor this season of Advent—Jesus offers his disciples words of comfort: watch at all times. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. These are words of reassurance that are too often lost in hypervigilance. Watch at all times, Jesus says, and above all, pray. This is how we thread the needle. We remain alert. We stay vigilant. And more than anything else, we pray, and we pray, and we pray.

The most obvious solution to the Church’s current situation is the one that we’ve consistently neglected. When many of the Church’s watchmen are crying out in alarm and predicting fires that have never happened, taking time to pray seems like a waste of time. Anxiety has a strange ability to convince us that we should always respond with everything but prayer, regardless of whether it’s meaningful or not. But Jesus tells us that watching, waiting, and praying are the bedrock of how we live faithfully in the world as we await the Second Coming of our Lord.

Over four years ago when I came to this parish as your priest, many were crying out in alarm. I was told that it was a mistake to come here. I was told that if things didn’t change, the church would run out of money. I was told by others that in light of the parish’s drastic decline in recent years, I had more than my work cut out for me. And I admit that it was difficult for me to ignore those cries of alarm. I wrestled with demons as I tried to discern what God was calling me to do.

But I came here anyway, and I’m so glad that I did. Even after I arrived, the voices of alarm continued to sound. And frankly, there will always be voices of alarm in our midst, whether we’re trying to make decisions for this parish or for our family or for how to live faithfully in this world. But there’s one thing that we did in this parish despite the cries of fire! fire! We prayed. We tried as hard as we could to listen to God’s voice and to respond faithfully. We woke from a long sleep. But above all, we prayed. And your presence here is a testament to that prayer.

There’s a lesson in our parish’s own story for the wider Church. Watch and pray. Watch and pray because the strength we need to endure the difficulties of this life will only come from prayer. The Church needs her own watchmen to show up, constantly and faithfully, to announce, It’s the Church! Our redemption is drawing nigh! Our redemption is drawing nigh! Pray, listen, watch, and pray!

We’ll seem to some like an anachronism, rather like the watchman on the bell tower of the cathedral of Lausanne. What’s the point in announcing our presence? Who needs the Church when we have social service agencies and medical care and technology? But we show up anyway, despite any accusations of futility, and we watch and we pray. We’re needed less to predict the future or cry out in alarm than to give the Church and the world the comfort of Christ’s good news.

We’re the watchmen of the Church. Our Lord invites us to not to be anxious and not to worry about the future of our existence as his beloved Church. He encourages us to lift our heads when the cares of the world threaten to weigh us down. He tells us to be alert, to watch, and to wait, because our redemption is always drawing near. We’re to cry out when the Church and the world need to be redirected to good news. But our most important task is to show up and pray. Watch and pray. Watch and pray, always in hope and joyful expectation and with confidence. Look up. Raise your heads, because our redemption is drawing near.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
December 1, 2024

[1] “The Watchman of Lausanne” by Michael Cervin (https://craftsmanship.net/the-watchman-of-lausanne/)