For You, Me, and the Whole World

There’s a funny thing that parents will often do when they’re irritated with one of their children. They might say to one of them, “go and tell your sister to come here!” Which of us hasn’t heard this before? Perhaps parents even use this circuitous way of speaking with each other. “Go and tell your dad that it’s time to mow the lawn!” It’s a funny thing we do, isn’t it? When we find ourselves angry or irritable, we distance ourselves from the sources of our irritation by failing to use their names. It's as if we’re saying, for the length of our annoyance, that the relative isn’t ours. It’s everyone else’s: it’s the son’s or the daughter’s or the wife’s or the husband’s.

Such verbal distancing is usually a rather harmless thing, a momentary response from out of human impatience. But broadly speaking, we could read it theologically, too. Our world is full of such distancing. Thank God I’m not like those people. You go tell him that he’s out of line. We can’t let them into our close circle.

The pronouns that families use to momentarily create estrangement amid conflict should be personal. Your father and your mother and your brother and your sister tell us that we belong to each other, even though that’s the opposite of how we use them in familial tiffs. But when Mary Magdalene encounters her risen Lord at the empty tomb on this day, the first day of the week, pronouns are full of theological meaning. And they’re very personal.

The scene is intensely personal, too. It’s poignant and heartbreaking and sweet, all at the same time. When Mary arrives at the tomb, she doesn’t yet understand what has happened. In her confusion and in the twilight of this hour, she reports back to Peter and the Beloved Disciple that they have taken away the Lord. Neither we nor she know who they are. And it’s the Lord, as if in her grief, her Lord is one step removed from her.

But after Peter and the Beloved Disciple have come and gone, noting the fact of the empty tomb but going no further in emotional or theological reflection, Mary stays at the tomb, weeping. And in the pain and emptiness of her grief, in her lingering consternation, she decides to look inside the tomb. She sees two angels, who ask her what she is looking for, as if she were searching for an object, maybe just a cold, dead body. And from out of her sorrow, Mary shifts her language. They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. We still don’t know who they are, but as Mary goes deeper into her heart, Jesus is no longer the Lord but my Lord. It’s personal now because it's always been personal.[1]

Then, Jesus himself appears, although Mary mistakes him for the gardener. Whom do you seek? he asks, suggesting that Mary isn’t looking for a dead body but a living man. And finally, in the most touching of moments, Jesus calls Mary by name. She’s not merely Woman, but Mary. The Good Shepherd has called the sheep by name. Mary knows his voice. She’s always known his voice, and now, she knows just who he is. He’s not it, some impersonal dead body. He’s her Lord and Savior. In turn, she calls him Rabboni, Teacher, because he’s not just any man to her. He’s her Lord and the Lord of all. He’s also the one who taught her in the past and will continue to teach her by the power of his Spirit. And he’s the one who will continue to teach the whole Church.

But Jesus responds by saying something strange. He tells Mary not to cling to him. Perhaps she was reaching forward to embrace him. It seems cold, as if Jesus is distancing himself from her. But he’s not. He’s drawing her closer, and not just Mary, but others as well. This personal exchange has broadened beyond the garden to encompass the entire world.

And as Jesus looks at Mary, it’s the look that we remember from Maundy Thursday as Jesus washed our feet. It’s the look from the cross on Good Friday. It’s the look of love that entrusts us with a mission that we can’t reject. Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. This charge is both personal and universal. Mary can’t hold on to the risen Christ, because to do so would be to make this moment of resurrection glory about only her and Jesus. But this moment, this Gospel mission, is about Mary and the whole world. It has always been about the entire world, the world Jesus came to save. It will always be about the whole world that Jesus continues to save and heal.

It should all make sense now. As Jesus formed community in the upper room, commanding his disciples to wash the feet of one another, and as he formed community at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, entrusting his mother to the Beloved Disciple, so on the first day of the week, Jesus entrusted the members of the young Church to one another. He gave them the Gospel message, the Easter proclamation.

And here we are, too, on this first day of the week. We’ve followed Jesus from the cross to the empty tomb. We’ve stuck with him. But in an individualistic age, we must beware that this Easter Gospel doesn’t get warped into an individualistic faith or an individualistic sense of salvation. This Gospel is personal, but it’s also about the entire world, not just you, me, and God.

The powers of death and the systems of oppression that crucified Jesus didn’t win. It was believed that, by eliminating this perceived troublemaker, earthly power would win the day. But in crucifying this man, the powers of darkness failed to understand that something far stronger and lovelier and more beautiful would triumph in the end. And it all came about at the foot of that cross on Good Friday, when the Church was formed. And it persists this day, before an empty tomb, where the absence of a body is not the conclusion of a story but only the beginning. Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene are words to us as well.

We aren’t here to fulfill an obligation or to soak up our Easter joy and then leave as if we aren’t changed. Jesus says to us, Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. In these words, Jesus has drawn us into the very life of God. We’re no longer servants but children, children of God, who is Jesus’ Father and our Father, too. Go and tell the good news, Jesus says. Go and tell all whom you meet that the Good Shepherd has found you and given you life. This message is not for you alone. This saving message is for the whole world.

On this day of a new creation, we undo our betrayal on Palm Sunday. That betrayal is like Peter’s, where we sit by countless fires as people judge our Lord, denying our relationship with him. I do not know him, we say. Today, our Lord bids us tell the whole world that we do know him, who is not only for me but also for all of us.

The One who calls our name in a nameless world, asks us to call others to him. The One who gives his life for ours commands us to bring others who are lost to him. The One who feeds us with his very Body asks us to feed others and bring them to the Bread of Life. The One who gives us life commands us to go and tell about this life to others so that they can have life. The victory of life over death is this: even after the world has crucified its Savior, his power to heal and give life persists. It lies in the Church, inspired by his Spirit, which will continue its community until the end.

The empty tomb on the first day of the week is a celebration that life’s worst cruelties can’t defeat the Easter Gospel. No anonymous abuse of the least of these, no divisions within the human family, no distortions of Christianity, no exclusive connection between Jesus and a particular group of people, no brokenness within the Church herself can undo the Easter Gospel. The truth that Christ rose from the dead and still lives is not my truth or your truth or any sole individual’s truth. It’s our truth. It’s the truth that Jesus came to bring for the entire world.

So now, go. Go and tell your friends and my friends that on the other side of the empty tomb, our world is not the same. Go and tell the whole human family—show them with your lives—that there’s a truth that will always outlast betrayal and deception. Go and tell the entire world that your Lord and my Lord, our Lord, has risen indeed. Alleluia!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Resurrection: Easter Day
April 20, 2025

[1] This observation is from John, Gail R. O’Day and Susan E. Hylen (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006, 193.

Remembering from the Other Side

With all the light drained from the world, we gathered at the foot of the cross, just a day ago on Good Friday, looking up at our Savior gazing down lovingly at us. And in the terrible darkness and emptiness of the aftermath of that moment, when our Lord’s body was resting in a tomb, we came to the church this night, to keep vigil. Since we lingered in this silent emptiness a year ago, so much has changed. There are some, dear to us, who aren’t here with us. We came here to the tomb tonight to keep vigil, sad and bereft at their absence, and we remember.

Over the past year, others have joined us in the uncomfortable silence of waiting at the empty tomb. Some of them have been through the valley of the shadow of death more than any of us could imagine. Many of us have grieved painful losses in our own lives. Perhaps we’ve left a past sense of security for a present feeling of deep uncertainty. But all of us, no matter what our life story is, have lost something. We’ve lost minutes of our lives, hairs on our heads, friends, and perhaps our hope. We’ve all done things we wished we hadn’t done and left others undone. We’ve lost more of our innocence. In some sense, we were all grieving as we entered the church doors this evening and sat in the darkness, although some of us may have been more willing to admit it. We were all in Egypt, slaves to sin, anxiety, and fear. We were all victims of a cruel world giving us more work to do each day but also telling us to gather more bricks to do the work while we were at it. We were all on one side of a vast expanse of water looking across, wondering how we’d ever get to the other side.

But then, something happened in the dark emptiness before the tomb, both expected and unexpected. With one flick of flint against stone, light was kindled. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. And we began to see each other’s faces, dimly at first. We saw the face of a fellow parishioner across the church who had had a particularly horrible year. We saw the face of a newcomer to the church, seeking community in a life of loneliness. We saw another who knows deeply the cost of speaking the truth and yearning for freedom. We saw the faces of the sick, the youthful, and the aged all searching for something deep in a shallow world. And we realized that we were hardly alone. This spark of light, lighting our world and the faces of our friends in Christ, was really kindled at the foot of the cross yesterday as our Lord looked down on us in love. We forgot about it as the emptiness of loss overwhelmed us.

And then, that tiny pinprick of light moved slowly through our midst, our pillar of fire by night, leading us through the darkness and wilderness of our lives. And the Red Sea parted, and we left death and sin behind, and we crossed over into the Promised Land. By that same tiny dot of light, we remembered. We remembered that from empty nothingness, God created all that is good. From slavery, God brought us to freedom. From sinful anarchy, God renewed the face of the earth and called us again to goodness. From dry bones of apathy and malaise, God gave energy and a Spirit of newness to humanity. From the despair of exile, God gave us the hope of bringing us home once again.

Hearing all this, we remembered on the other shore, by the light kindled by a God of love. Our hope was also rekindled, because it was shaky when we entered the church tonight. Of course, we remembered that our Lord had once said that “he must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified.” Because we remembered that, we had fallen into despair. That’s all we remembered in our despondency and sorrow and hopelessness. But when the light was kindled, on the other side of the water, standing at an empty tomb, we remembered that other part, which had been drowned out by living in a world oriented towards death. Our Lord also said, on the third day, I will rise.

And now, it all makes sense. Why are we looking for the living among the dead? Why are we moping in the graveyard? Why are we hanging onto that anger and those resentments? Why do we refuse forgiveness? Why are we giving up on our future? Why are we looking backwards instead of forwards?

When the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee to the cross returned to the tomb on this day, the eighth day of a new creation, they were living in a world of death. They brought spices to anoint a dead body. They were fully prepared for the stench of a decaying corpse and the sadness of looking at the inert face of the one they had known and loved.

But upon arriving, they were reminded of our Lord’s complete teaching, the full proclamation of the Easter Gospel. Why do you seek the living among the dead? And then they, like us this evening, remembered. They remembered the brutal execution of their friend on the cross, which they witnessed with their own eyes. They remembered how his cold body was laid in a tomb and sealed with a stone. But they also remembered that he said he would rise, and now, looking at the absence of a body in an empty tomb, it all made sense. And they ran and told the good news.

But they ran and told it to a world like ours, a world that resembles creation in reverse. It’s a world in which fear is choking the life out of all its inhabitants. It’s a world without hope, without a recognizable future. And so, the words of those first women apostles, whose voices were routinely ignored and stifled, seemed like an idle tale.

To powerful government officials whose power was and is built on the trampled souls of the poor, those words were and are an idle tale. To a nascent group of disciples thinking it had put its trust in the wrong person, those words were an idle tale. To a cowardly group of men who presumably hadn’t followed Jesus to the foot of the cross like the women, the brave women’s words seemed like an idle tale.

To everyone this night who will not have the courage to recall their own losses, their own sin, their own daily deaths, their own suffering, the Easter Gospel will seem like an idle tale. To the complacent and the powerful and the privileged who fail to recognize their own poverty, the words could seem like an idle tale. At least, until we look back across the empty tomb and Red Sea and see by a newly kindled light, a past that isn’t forgotten but is now redeemed.

The Easter Gospel was first preached by those women disciples not by an accident of history but because they had been with Jesus all the way to the cross. They had seen his torture, suffered it inside their souls. They had achingly watched his helpless body removed from the cross and sealed in a tomb, presumably forever. But they also went back, to remember what had happened. And when they returned to the tomb, they remembered what they’d forgotten. He would rise again, and he had. This story was only just beginning.

This is the night to remember. We remember not with maudlin sadness but with the desire for our memory to be reformed and redeemed by God. We remember because in remembering, the good news of Easter can never be just an idle tale. It’s those of us who have been face to face with death, those of us who have been persecuted or tortured, those of us who have held the hands of loved ones who are dying, those of us who have seen what’s dearest to us, even our very own parish, stand at the brink of the grave, who can be the most effective conveyors of the Easter proclamation. Like the women at the tomb, those of us who have known death run, unbidden, to tell the good news. On the other side of the Red Sea and the Jordan River and the waters of baptism, there is another story to tell.

So, we run. We hurry from the empty tomb and tell all those who need to remember, too. We proclaim that our haunted past is not eradicated but transfigured by the rising from the dead of Jesus, who gives us life. We announce to a world turned towards death that it, too, should look for hope among the living not among the dead, that a tomb of death is not permanently sealed by a stone. It’s indeed open to a new future. We announce to an enervated Church that every moment in Christ is a new creation. We tell each other, through the sharing of our own stories of loss and pain, that at the door to the empty tomb, we’re not looking for the dead but for the living, and all because Jesus, the one who died for the life of the world has risen as he said.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter
April 19, 2025

Where It All Begins

Here at the foot of the cross, one image is seared into our memories. It’s an image that is gentle yet powerful enough to outlast betrayal and a change from light into darkness. It’s the look of our Lord, kneeling at our feet and washing them, as he did for us last night. As he washes away their dirt, as we let him serve us and as he calls us to serve others, we remember that loving look, which is not from above but from below. Jesus looks up at us as he washes our feet. And that look is worth a thousand words.

We, who know how this story ends, who’ve heard it countless times, can’t forget that look. We humans know how to communicate all kinds of things with just a look, especially when we can’t say anything. In the most furtive of circumstances, sometimes, a look is all we can give or receive. In this cruel world of ours, we must keep that look alive. With that look, we announce to those who have eyes to see that there is a truer story than the one that purports to be true.

         Throughout the entire drama of this holiest of weeks, there are two narratives happening. There’s the plain, obvious narrative of the drama, of a man unjustly brought to a fake trial, sentenced to death, and crucified on a cross. But there’s another narrative, the narrative we know that threads its way through the brutal events of this week, and this narrative is guided by that loving look from Christ, as he gazes upon us while washing our feet.

These two narratives are in deep juxtaposition and tension on this day. It’s as if John’s Gospel is written in code. On the level of the world—the cosmos—everything is fighting against the truth of God.  This is the world without eyes to see or ears to hear. To encounter the precious story this way is to experience it from creation to the cross, as a treacherous undoing of God’s work. But with eyes re-formed by that loving look from below, we can experience the story from the cross back to creation. Two narrative strands are twisting together on this day, vying for our attention and a place in our hearts. Which one will win?

With Jesus’s loving look from below in our minds, we enter the story. Judas with his band of soldiers seek Jesus out, a chilling foil to the disciples who would honorably seek and follow Jesus. Judas and his cronies pursue Jesus in the garden with lanterns and torches and weapons. The garden is just a garden, but we know it’s more. We know that creation and light and goodness start in the garden, and so we have a hint that flowers are ready to bud. We know that if those dishonorably seeking Jesus had believed that he was the light of the world, they wouldn’t have needed torches and lanterns.

We know that when Jesus is dressed up like an earthly king and Pilate introduces him to those calling for his death, he says, “Behold the man!” We know that he is true man, but we also know that he is true God. We know that those calling for his death look upon him as an impostor, a human criminal. But we know that what the world considers criminal in this case is indeed truth itself.

We know, too, that when Pilate says again to the people, “Behold your King!” that Jesus is indeed a king, but not the kind of king the people were anticipating. Recalling that loving look of Jesus from below as he washed our feet last night, we know that this king will not save by brute strength or revenge or violence. This king will die on the cross as the Passover lambs are sacrificed in the Temple. Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is what John the Baptist said earlier about him. John knew something early on that no one else could understand.

And here we are, standing at the foot of the cross, as our sacrificial Lamb gives of his life willingly so that the entire world can be saved, so that we can be reconciled with God and one another. In the narrative of the world that encounters this story and has encountered this story from time immemorial, there’s only a wayward man hanging on a cross with a band of bereft former disciples wondering why they ever followed him.

But in the narrative propelled forward by that loving look from below in the washing of feet, there’s so much more to the story. Behold, the man hanging on the wood that will enable flowers to spring up from the dead earth! Behold, the Good Shepherd who has called his sheep by name, who know his voice, which is why they’ve followed him all the way to the foot of the cross! Behold, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep! Behold, the door, the gate of heaven! Behold, the bread of life whose broken body will be our eternal food for life’s journey! Behold, the light of the world that shines in the darkness of human cruelty! Behold, the vine whose blood becomes our spiritual drink! Behold, the way and the truth and the life, the one who gives us life in the face of death!

This entire week we have moved from fickle, faithless betrayal on Palm Sunday to allowing our feet to be washed by our Lord last night, to experiencing that loving look from below as Jesus reminds us of the truth of this story, our story. And today, we’ve made it all the way to the foot of the cross, closing that horrid distance between Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

And something remarkable happens out of the deep darkness. After the last act of betrayal, after Jesus has been nailed to the cross and his earthly garments divided as a visible sign of an undoing of creation, our perspective shifts. For those of us who know the true narrative of this story, who know the secret code of this Gospel, who remember the loving look of Jesus from below, darkness turns to light. The undoing that has happened since Judas’s betrayal last night is suddenly transfigured into a glorious remaking.

Until this point, everyone has been pointing fingers at Jesus. Behold, the Lamb of God! Behold, the man! Behold, your King! But now, in his final words, Jesus speaks. Reigning from the tree, he says the words that spark this new creation that his life, death, and resurrection will bring. Looking, now from above, at the Blessed Mother, he says, “Woman, behold, your son!” And looking, now from above, at John, he says, “Behold, your mother!”

At the foot of the cross, in the face of betrayal and violence and cruelty, Jesus forms the Church, his risen body that will continue his work in the world. And now, instead of looking at Jesus from the narrative of the world, we look at the world from the perspective of Jesus on the cross. We are there with him. All has changed. A new creation is born.

And having completed this final action, Jesus utters his last words, “It is finished.” As he looks down again, we look up into our new future, into heaven, which is our destiny. Now, we are living from the perspective of the cross looking at the world in love. It is finished. It is complete. To that angry, factious world of ours, those words are a death sentence, an end to the antics of this perceived troublemaker. But to us, who know the real story, who know Truth incarnate, who believe in him, who have followed the voice of the Good Shepherd all the way to his death, we know that in this end, the story is only just beginning.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 18, 2025

The Command that Remakes the World

Something has been edited out of tonight’s story. It’s as if it’s too horrible to be confronted. It’s like a name that shall not be named. The brief scene is too dark for the camera of this movie to register anything worth keeping for the final product. If we were to look at tonight’s Gospel story in its full version on the panel of video editing software, we would see variations of light except for this brief succession of frames where there is nothing but darkness. There’s no light at all.

Or at least, that’s the way it looks to our human eyes. It looks as if the act of creation has been put in reverse, an awful undoing of all that God did in the beginning when he said, “Let there be light.” And there was perfect light. And sheer magnificence burst into being.

But tonight’s hideous unmaking of creation, its antithesis and reverse, is a glaring lacuna in our story. It sits between a tender scene of fellowship between our Lord and his disciples in an upper room. They feast together. It’s their last meal together. And following upon this beautiful feast, our Lord divests himself of his garments, as if he’s giving up all claims to earthly power, and stoops to the dirt floor to wash the feet of his disciples. The Lord of the universe kneels and looks up at his followers. The master becomes the servant. And the ones who are served are no longer slaves bound to some fickle god of desperate imaginations. They’re now children of the everlasting God who is the source of their being and life.

But directly after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, and after he has commanded that they kneel before the feet of one another to wash them, to go forth and serve one another in selflessness and humility, the awful scene transpires. It’s almost too painful to recount. It’s like the unspeakable deed that ruins a party. It’s an act so blasphemous that we dare not name it.

Judas, whose feet have just been washed by his Lord, receives a morsel from Jesus and leaves the room. And the screen goes dark. It is night. It’s as if all the creative power unleashed by God in the beginning of creation is sucked into the vortex of a black hole. And all is darkness. This we edit out of tonight’s story, a painful ache in our memory too terrible to behold year after year.

The one who has received the gift of footwashing from his Lord and also a morsel of food, has turned gift into betrayal. He has participated in an unmaking of creation, a horrible reversal of all that is light and good and creative.

But interestingly, this is where tonight’s story picks up. After skipping over this devastating chasm of light’s negation, Jesus continues in our story. “Now has the Son of Man been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” From our human perspective, knowing all too well our own many betrayals and the world’s many betrayals, it seems unthinkable that the story can go on. It’s night after all, and overtaken by the great Accuser himself, Judas seems to have eliminated all the light. He has gone into the darkness of despair, to a tragic ending of hopelessness, which has no vision for a future, no hope for redemption or good to arise out of evil. Judas sees no light ahead.

And yet, eleven disciples, fallible and sinful, who will yet keep their distance and deny Jesus in the hours ahead, those eleven stay in the room. They must remember the loving look from below as Jesus washed their feet. And now, when all seems to be darkness, when it appears that creation has been twisted into reverse, the light shines in the darkness yet again, as it always does, and as it always will. And a new creation is born from out of the deepest pit of darkness and despair. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And the creative impulse initiated by God in the beginning of time churns on indefinitely, fueled by this incredible new spirit of love, manifested in humility and service and charity towards all.

The truth is that the grotesque betrayal in tonight’s story, the silent void in the Gospel narrative that goes unnamed, is the progenitor of countless dark betrayals and evils that echo throughout our lives. It’s the precursor of those who abuse and hurt us. It’s the foreshadowing of a prevailing culture of despair in which we live, where life is an incessant spiral into nothingness and death. It’s the sign of all future unmakings of creation, that turn gifts into weapons of control and unending cycles of retribution and violence.

But after yet another year of navigating our world’s hopelessness we return to the upper room again this night. It’s not merely a story of the past. It’s our story. And in it is the story of the remaking of creation, the story that is the constant light that the darkness can’t extinguish, that, indeed, darkness can’t even comprehend.

And while backward narratives of despair and of a reversed creation swirl outside the walls of this upper room, we gather at the behest of our Lord, the world’s true Light. He bids us sit at table with him, even though we betray him often enough. He washes our feet, although those same feet tread on the dignity of our neighbors. He looks up into our eyes, which too often look down on others. And to the Lord’s table, we bring all our brokenness so that he might refashion it into something whole.

Perhaps that’s why the unspoken deed of darkness into tonight’s story is only present by implication. This is the night to remember something other than the constant unmaking of creation that persists around us. And so, we remember that loving look from below, as Jesus washes our feet and gives us a new commandment. This is the commandment that will lead us to the light. This is the commandment that is at the heart of the world’s re-creation. And it all starts with one look from below, a look and a command that will remake the world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Maundy Thursday
April 17, 2025        

The Love that Can't Be Undone

In my office, there’s a small cross made of palms. It’s been with me for several years. I can’t bear to burn it with the other palms when I make ashes for Ash Wednesday because there’s a story behind it.

Some years ago, on Palm Sunday, a young child approached me after the service and, without so much as a word, handed me the palm cross he had woven from the palms distributed that day. The palms that he had used to create the cross over the course of the Mass had, just an hour before, been raised in triumph as the congregation sang “All glory laud and honor.” We were participating in Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem that had happened thousands of years before, when crowds of zealous people waved palms and welcomed him into the holy city. He rode in rather awkwardly on a donkey, not in typical kingly style. If the people had been perceptive enough, they would have realized that this king was not the king they had been expecting.

In the gift of the small palm cross created by that child, strands of affirmation had been twisted into the sign of our betrayal of Christ. Fronds of ostensible love had been woven into a clear sign of rejection by his little hands. As the Palm Sunday liturgy shows, our quick shouts of approval can so quickly turn into bitter cries of denunciation. This complex mingling of fickle emotions that we relive on Palm Sunday was all represented in the tiny cross that I held in my hands.

But there was something else in that cross, something that the maker and giver of it didn’t know and would probably never know. Just minutes before that child handed me the cross, a close relative of the child had lashed out at me in response to that day’s sermon. The words stung. They hurt because I was in a vulnerable place as we began that Holy Week, and the bitter words caught me off guard. And so, when the child handed me his little gift, I was deeply moved. It was as if God had quietly and powerfully turned sorrow into joy, or perhaps more accurately, woven them together. The palm cross, a tiny sign of the execution of the world’s Savior, became a sign of hope that in the kingdom of God, pain doesn’t have the final word. From God’s end of things, the unwoven palm leaves were the sign of betrayal. They had been disingenuously waved in the air to welcome Christ shortly before his betrayal. But the woven leaves were a sign of God’s eternal love for the whole world. On the cross, pain is mixed with joy, betrayal is forgiven, and division is healed by reconciliation.

There’s a striking reversal of motion in Luke’s account of the Passion of our Lord. Jesus’s disciples have followed him to the Mount of Olives, just as they’ve followed him since Jesus first called them as his own. But as things get darker in this story, the distance between those disciples and Jesus expands. It’s as if the closer we get to the cross, the farther we seem from Jesus. This is the day on which we can’t help but remember our own sinfulness and weakness and our fallible attempts to be faithful disciples. Peter’s hasty acclamation of Jesus as the Messiah disintegrates into three hasty denials of Jesus. We, too, must surely be reminded of our own facile betrayals of Christ.

We must recall the times in which we, like Peter, sat outside in the courtyard before a fire and were identified with Jesus but quickly betrayed our relationship with him. “I do not know him.” Was it embarrassment over being a Christian? Was it something else that caused us to momentarily renounce our adoption as children of God? And when we look at Jesus hanging on the cross in misery, can we see his look of love despite our betrayal, just as he looked on Peter with love as the cock crowed?

Or when we look at Judas, before we judge him too quickly, do we remember our own kisses of peace that morphed into kisses of betrayal? How easily this gesture of affection can be distorted into evil! Or are we with those who followed Jesus from Galilee to the cross, who at the very end, stood at a distance, watching these things, perhaps anonymously, perhaps unwilling to get too close to him for fear of their own lives? We stand willingly here in this church, in this safe place, at the foot of the cross with Jesus. But it’s much harder when we leave this place, in a world where Christianity is judged harshly by its own worst behavior. Maybe there, we’d prefer to stand at a distance, ashamed to be seen too close to the cross, ashamed to acknowledge our fealty to Christ.

All these memories of betrayal must come flooding back on Palm Sunday, where our shouts of “Hosanna” become shouts of “Crucify him!” We can’t run from this bitter reality of our mortal nature. But despite this, there are yet signs of hope. If we keep our eyes on Jesus, hanging on the cross, we see no cold anger at our betrayal. Instead, we behold him hanging between two criminals, both undeniably guilty as charged, unlike the Christ. We see one offender who seems unrepentant, but there’s that other criminal, who shows us something else. With all his guilt and sinfulness, he points to the meaning of the cross. When we’re at our greatest distance from Christ in those moments of sinful betrayal, our Lord is still closer than we can imagine.

There, as the criminal openly acknowledges his sin, he asks for mercy. Nothing more, nothing less. And Jesus forgives. At the apex of human cruelty and evil, Jesus returns not evil for evil but offers forgiveness, love, and mercy. The treacherous palms that were waved to welcome him as king have been woven, by God’s infinite love, into a cross that transforms our spirit of vindictiveness into a response of unbounded love. An instrument of torture becomes the means to eternal life.

Each Palm Sunday, we must also know that no sooner than we leave this building and move on with our lives, our old behavior will return. We’ll unravel the palm cross again. We’ll divide and scatter what God has united. We’ll separate the fronds of love into insidious strands that we’ll wave hypocritically in the air to greet Christ in one breath and deny him in the next.

And yet, God continues to draw us closer. When we’ve taken a cue from that criminal on the cross, when we acknowledge our sin and refuse to cancel the memories of wrong done, then we find ourselves nearer than ever before, at the foot of the cross, where Christ looks down on us in love. In the depths of our sin, we’re no longer at a distance. We’re closer than we’ve ever been, drawn into the arms of the One who came not to call the righteous and healthy, but the broken and sinful. He has turned the strands of our betrayal into the sign of perfect love that can never be undone.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025

A Love without Price

It was just another ordinary Monday morning for me, a time for running errands. I had checked everything off my shopping list as quickly as I could. I found a checkout line that wasn’t too long, and I was rapidly plopping item after item on the conveyor belt. I put the cold items together, and then I threw all the others down, scooted to the end of the counter, and attempted to bag everything as quickly as I could. I wanted to get home and move on to the next thing.

But she took her time, not in a careless, lazy way, but in a deliberate, careful, almost touching way. First, she reorganized all the yogurts, counting and neatly stacking them. She carefully sorted the other items, too. She had a system and wanted to navigate it with thoughtfulness. But more than that, I noticed that she really cared about her job. It seemed to be more than a job for her, although it could easily have been just a mind-numbing task. She took her time because the job was worth doing well.

As I whipped out my credit card to pay for the items and to complete the transaction, I noticed that she was spraying the surface of the item scanner, wiping it clean. She was preparing for the next customer, but she wasn’t in a rush. And this little gesture moved me in an indefinable way. There, at a numbered checkout counter in a factory of transactions, a few pointless, unnecessary actions mattered a great deal.

The job of scanning and ringing up the items could have been done more quickly, perhaps even more efficiently, without the pre-organizing, and the scanner would have worked perfectly well for the next customer without being cleaned. Those small acts of attention were above and beyond the requirement, superfluous even, but they couldn’t be assigned an economic value. At that checkout counter, for a few minutes on a Monday morning, perfunctory consumerism rubbed edges with timeless, gratuitous, extravagant care.

At this point in the season of Lent, we’ve made a hard turn towards our landing on Easter Day. We’ve been heading tenaciously towards the cross, and soon, we’ll be at the empty tomb, staring into its mysterious silence. So, too, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus returns to Bethany—where he had raised Lazarus from the dead not too long ago—we’re on the cusp of the Passion. Tension is building as more and more people refuse to accept the gift of Jesus’s life. A bounty has been placed on his head because his signs are disturbing the peace, and the raising of Lazarus was the final straw. We know how this story is going to end, and we’re eager to move to the good ending on the other side of the suffering.

But John slows us down in this tender scene in the house of Mary and Martha. We’re only six days from the Passover and the clock is running out. By the world’s standards, we should be anxious, tense, and fearful, racing ahead in the drama. Nevertheless, here we stumble upon a leisurely entr’acte between two sections of this grand play, between Jesus’s working of signs and miracles and his steady progress to the cross in his Passion.

It’s as if John is deliberately trying to suspend time before we attempt to interpret the meaning of the cross. The little vignette of the supper in Bethany is redolent with meaning, and we can only find that meaning by savoring this moment. Mary takes a prodigious amount of expensive scented oil and lavishly anoints Jesus’s feet. It’s a profoundly wasteful act, if we measure it by consumer standards. It will serve no practical purpose, for Jesus will soon die. Those precious feet, once anointed luxuriously with oil, will be ravaged by nails and smeared with blood. Jesus is already the Messiah. He has no need for traditional anointing as King, but Mary does it anyway.

Jesus and his friends partake of a supper, reveling in each other’s company, reclining at table, foreshadowing that fated meal a few days later in the Upper Room. Mary massages his feet with oil and wipes them with her hair, just as Jesus will soon wash his disciples’ feet at his last supper with them. These gestures have no utilitarian purpose. They’re extravagant, poetic, and astoundingly beautiful.

And then, Judas speaks. If we weren’t already biased against him, his words might not seem so inappropriate. He has assigned a value to the oil, weighing its quantity against the standards of a commercial economy. Surely, if this oil had been sold, the money received could have been used to aid the poor. We know this feeling of weighing competing goods, of assigning market value to all our actions. Surely, those moments at Mass or that luxurious time in prayer could have been better spent on a work assignment or in precious sleep. Surely, the time polishing the brass candlesticks or straightening the pews or rehearsing the organ voluntary could have been used in personal fulfillment. Surely, the time spent at the bedside of an unconscious loved one who will never feel the warmth of our hand in hers was just a futile effort. Surely, all those actions were prodigiously wasteful, if quantified in transactional terms, just as Judas greedily eyed the quantity of costly oil that Mary slathered on Jesus’s tired feet.

But Jesus hushes Judas’s mercantile rationalizing. Enjoy my presence while I’m here, he seems to say. In a similar way, he will soon command Peter to put his sword back into its sheath after cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave. That moment, as Jesus’s will is perfectly synced with his Father’s, is not a moment for revenge and retribution. A life will be taken on the cross, but it’s by no means a life wasted.

And maybe this is exactly the reminder we need as we approach the cross. We’ve heard it said that Jesus must die for our sins to be forgiven, that in some kind of vicious bloodlust God the Father required the death of his Son so we could have salvation. But Jesus says to us that all his life—all the healings and miracles and feedings and time spent with his friends—could never be reduced to a mere transaction. Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. We can’t run Jesus’s life over a checkout line scanner and put a price on it. We can’t quantify salvation in the way we’ve been trained to do.

The most telling way in which Jesus can express the beautiful mystery of the cross is in a touching domestic scene, giving off a fragrance of profound theological meaning. In that house in Bethany, the abundant meal hearkens back to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and looks ahead to the Last Supper. Martha’s quiet acts of service foreshadow the acts of selfless service to which Jesus will call each of us. Judas’s greedy appraisal of the value of a pound of nard anticipates his own betrayal of Jesus, when a price is assigned to the world’s salvation. In that house at Bethany, ruthless calculation is paired with liberal spontaneity. Fear of scarcity rubs uncomfortably against a reckless sense of abundance.

And it will be so on the cross, too. The world that couldn’t contain the excessiveness of perfect Truth itself will demand its retribution on a weighted scale. For offenses perceived, a penalty will be exacted, at least if we look at it through the eyes of Judas and the world in which we live. But as we see in the profligate anointing of Jesus’s feet by Mary and as we understand those seemingly wasted hours of fellowship on the threshold of death’s door, Jesus’s life has always been about abundance and life and timeless companionship.

On the cross, where an eye is demanded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, love spills out, pounds and pounds of it, immeasurable quantities, and the glorious fragrance of new life fills the air. A life was taken but in the selfless, willing, wasteful giving of that life, new life was received by those who had stuck through it all with their friend and Lord. And despite their own betrayals and faithlessness, the One hanging on the cross refused to counter betrayal with its own deficit in the accounting charts. Instead, he gave a surplus in return, forgiving and healing and loving to the end.

To many outside the walls of this church on this morning, our time of praying and singing, of offering up incense and marvelous music, and of receiving Bread and Wine that will hardly fill our stomachs seems extravagantly wasteful. We could be on the tennis court or reading the paper or catching up on sleep, or better yet, earning more money. But this time spent in the presence of our Lord and one another is the truest way of reveling in the meaning of the cross. In our extravagant worship, we have no agenda except to worship the living God. Here we learn to be less like Judas, always assigning a price to every minute of our time and grinding through the cogs and gears of consumerism, and we learn to be more like Martha and Mary, serving selflessly and spending our precious time in the company of the risen Lord. Here, we receive a foretaste of that heavenly banquet to come, where there’s no clock, no schedule, and no lack of anything. But for now, it’s enough just to be here and to know, that in the kingdom of God, no price tag can be put on love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
April 6, 2025

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.