Remember

Have you ever had one of those dreams where something marvelous is about to happen, where you can just about touch it and realize it, and then suddenly the alarm goes off? You’ve won the Booker Prize or the piano concerto competition. You’re walking towards the awards platform with a huge smile on your face, and then, the alarm goes off. It's a bit like driving hours and hours in your car to Toronto for a much-needed vacation, arriving at Lake Ontario, spying the city skyline, and then realizing that you must drive another two hours around the lake to get to your destination. The goal is so close you can smell it, but you’re not quite there yet.

Can you imagine what it would have been like for Moses on Mount Nebo looking over into the Promised Land? For forty long years, he led an ornery group of people from Egypt through the wilderness to this mountain, only to die there and never enter the land himself. Scripture tells us that somehow Moses didn’t keep faith with God in the wilderness as he shepherded the Israelites into freedom. Was he so frustrated with that recalcitrant band of people that he doubted if God could bring them to the Promised Land? We don’t know, but we do know that Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land.

Now, on the verge of the Promised Land, knowing he won’t enter, Moses gives instructions to the people he’s led all these years in the wilderness. Surely, some of them were only the ancestors of the original lot that crossed the Red Sea into freedom. So many had died on the way. How many, I wonder, died doubting whether God’s people would ever reach their destination? But finally, the remaining lot of travelers are on the verge of seeing the land of which they had long dreamed, and Moses comforts them. Remember, Moses says, if indirectly, all that your God has done for you. Remember all those things. Never forget them. And you will be fine. If you remember these things, you’ll prosper and flourish. Your God is with you.

There’s something about keeping our eyes on the prize that might motivate good behavior. But Moses knows that once the people arrive at their destination, they’ll forget. When things are going well, we usually forget to remember and be thankful. On Mount Nebo, Moses offers a humility check to the people. Remember what God has done for you, even in the best of times. Never take it for granted. Tell it to your children and to their children’s children. Never forget. They can see the Promised Land. They can almost taste its milk and honey. They’re on the border. They aren’t very far from realizing their dream. . .

Jesus and the scribe are also on a border, looking into the future. Jesus is staring his passion and death and resurrection in the face, now that he’s entered Jerusalem for the final time in triumph. The scribe approaches Jesus after he’s weathered a series of intense questionings by the chief priests, scribes, and elders. And when this scribe asks Jesus about the greatest commandment, Jesus has one eye on glory and one eye on the uncertain past, when Moses stood on Mount Nebo.

Remember, Jesus says. Remember that great commandment, which Moses gave to the people so long ago, but which everyone seems to have forgotten again. Love God. Also, love yourself, and love your  neighbor. There’s nothing more important than this. If you remember one thing, remember this. You’re not far from the kingdom of God. Can’t you taste its milk and honey? Can’t you see its glory?

Here we, too, are on a border. At every Mass, it’s as if we’re on Mount Nebo with Moses and the people, looking over into the Promised Land. It’s so close we can almost touch it. Our taste buds water as we think of the milk and honey in our future. They’re so pleasing and delectable and sweet.

But perhaps this day, there’s a bitter taste that has crept into our mouths. It’s as if we’ve awoken from a bad dream. We thought we were on the verge of the Promised Land, but the alarm has gone off and we are face-to-face with reality. And while the reality might seem unprecedented, it’s really a variation on all those obstacles that confronted the people of God in their wilderness journey so many years ago.

An intractable roadblock is in the way of our journey, and we don’t know what to do. For the Israelites, they were hungry and couldn’t find food. They grumbled at Moses and God. They doubted. They gave up hope. And then they were thirsty because they had traveled for so long, and the desert was dry. And they complained again, and they blamed God. They made a golden calf because they became impatient waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain. Every time they turned around, something seemed to be in the way.

We must remember their story in relation to ours. Remember that God provided manna in the desert. Remember that God told Moses to strike the rock with his staff to provide water for the people. Remember that God forgave them and gave them the Ten Commandments again after they’d betrayed him. Remember that God never forsook his people. And he will not forsake us either.

But all around us, there’s a searing collective amnesia. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to work with one another rather than against one another. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to welcome the stranger into our midst. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to care for more than number one. We’re standing on a border, looking into a future that could be wonderful again. We can almost taste the milk and honey, but sin is in the way. We can see that it’s nothing new under the sun. Proud stubbornness. Willful obstinacy. Closed-minded tribalism. Rampant violence. Hateful speech. They’re back, and we seem helpless before them. Has God forsaken us? Will we die in the wilderness without ever seeing the Promised Land again?

So, like the scribe coming to Jesus amid conflict and argumentative rancor, we come to Jesus this day and ask, we plead before God’s altar, which commandment is the first of all? And the risen Christ says, don’t you remember? Remember now with me. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. Nothing is more important than this. And if we realize that, we won’t be far from the kingdom of God.

And what a gift this is, because remembering is something we can do. It’s an act of the will, and it should arouse our hope. So, we remember. We remember that our ancestors in faith saw themselves as part of the human family. They provided hospitality for the stranger. They didn’t reap the harvest of their lands to the edges; they left what was on the border for the needy. We remember that when our ancestors in faith were slaves in Egypt, Pharaoh’s cruel oppression couldn’t withstand God’s compassionate liberation. We remember that when our forebears in faith were weeping in Babylon with no song to sing, God brought them back to their native land to sing once again. We remember that when humanity had forgotten to remember once again, God sent his only Son to embody in human flesh the meaning of the great commandment that we should never forget. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. It’s one commandment. Remember it, and you won’t be far from the kingdom of God.

At this moment in time, it’s almost painful to remember. The kingdom of God seems at once so near and yet so far away that we’re prone to lose hope. The solution seems so simple. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. And yet, we know it’s so very difficult.

It's so hard to maintain our faith during times like these. But the only way to conquer despair is to regain hope by remembering. Remember that great commandment that the Lord God gave us so long ago. Here, on the border, as we can smell the milk and honey of that Promised Land, remember what God has told us in Jesus. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. Teach this to your children. Talk about it always in your house and outside your house. Remember it before bed and when you rise in the morning. Bind these beautiful words on your person by living them out. Write them on the walls of your homes and on your doorposts. Write them on your lives. Never forget them. And then remember, that although the kingdom of God at times seems so very far away, if we hope and pray and, above all, love as Jesus tells us, we’re not so very far from the kingdom of God. It’s just on the other side.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 3, 2024

Come and See

Grief is an elusive emotion. When we grieve, we never know when the tears might come. We can never really predict what might open the floodgates of our eyes. I recall attending the Requiem Mass of a friend some years ago. He was a wonderful singer in my spouse’s church choir, and he died of cancer when he was far too young. He was always the life of the party, always smiling, always eliciting laughs with his buoyant humor. He was a gem of a person.

At his Requiem, the tears came at an unexpected moment. The choir was singing Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the Requiem Mass, which we’ll hear tomorrow. And my spouse, eyes full of tears, leaned over to me and explained that our friend had auditioned for his choir with that very piece. And the floodgates of my eyes opened.

The unspoken thought was this isn’t the way it was supposed be. A man who was only in his fifties, gifted in so many ways and loved by so many, shouldn’t be dead. We shouldn’t have been there at his funeral so soon, listening to a piece of music that he’d once sung so beautifully. A portion of the Requiem Mass in live time brought back a poignant memory of that same Mass sung in an audition years ago. And the tears came.

There’s a moment like this in John’s Gospel when the tears come for Jesus. It’s a striking moment because nowhere else in the Gospels do we read that Jesus weeps. It’s a profound reminder of our Lord sharing a human emotion that we all know so well. But what is it that elicits Jesus’s tears? Why does he cry at this moment rather than before? Remember that he had known for several days that Lazarus was ill, and he delayed his departure for Bethany. So, why does he cry when he finally arrives? What opens the floodgates of Jesus’s eyes?

Three words do: come and see. Have you heard these words before? They’re the words Jesus himself says to those first disciples who decide to follow him. Rabbi, where are you staying? Come and see, Jesus says. And when Philip finds Nathanael and tells him that he has found the Messiah, and when Nathanael crudely asks whether anything good can come out of Nazareth, Philip says, Come and see. And when the Samaritan woman at the well has encountered the compassionate love of Jesus and runs into the city to tell others about him, she says, Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Come and see.

Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus weeps at these words? It’s not the way things are supposed to be. When Jesus asks where they have laid Lazarus’s dead body, they invite him to come and see. No, this isn’t the way things are supposed to be. Jesus’s beautiful words have been stolen by death. Come and see is supposed to be the invitation to life. Come and see the one who is life. Come and see the one who is the light of the world. Come and see the one who knows all his sheep by name and whose voice the sheep will follow away from death. Come and see the one who knows everything about us and gives his life to draw the whole world to the Father. Come and see the one who is the way, the truth, and the life. Come and see the one who is the bread of life and who feeds us with life. Come and see.

But in Bethany, Jesus is invited to come and see death. It’s not the way things are supposed to be. In this cruel distortion of circumstances and dastardly coopting of words, the One who has come to bring life to the world must go and stare death in the face. Death has stolen his words. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.

We know this perverse invitation, too. We’re not supposed to have to watch our loved ones suffer or die. We’re not supposed to watch the violence of death take them away from us. We’re not supposed to be taunted with a mocking invitation, come and see, come and see the violence, the mass shootings, the hateful political rhetoric, the loss of innocence in our children, the betrayals of the Church, the never-ending war in the Middle East, the starving faces of the poor. But this, alas, is the perpetual summons as we live here and now in this broken, sinful world.

It’s not the way things are supposed to be. So, on All Saints’ Day, for a time, the veil between this world and the next parts briefly, especially in this Eucharistic feast, and another invitation is issued from beyond the veil by the beloved saints in Christ, who are in the nearer presence of God. Come and see, that there’s something else. Come and see that the heart of God, seen vividly in Jesus’s presence before Lazarus’s tomb, breaks at the reality of death. Death and all its enslaving powers are impostors. Even though we will die one day, we’re, nevertheless, made for life. And on this day, the saints call us to life. Come and see.

In the sign performed by Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb, Lazarus is raised, not resurrected. He will one day die again, but for a moment, Jesus parts the veil between earth and heaven and shows how things should be. Lazarus, come out! Walk out of your tomb. Be set free from the grip of death, which is not how things are supposed to be. And to his friends, Jesus says, Unbind him and let him go. Let him cross the Red Sea. Let him walk from death to life. Let him come and see life itself. Let him walk towards the resurrection and the life.

Tonight, we don’t run from death. Despite the world’s attempts to the contrary, we can’t escape it. Tonight, we acknowledge that another invitation greets us with a truth that death can’t take away. The saints are witnesses to this. They have journeyed through the gates of death. They have experienced its ugliness. And yet, they are still alive—truly alive—at this very moment, rejoicing and singing and worshiping with us.

They beckon to us from the nearer presence of God. Come and see that all pain and suffering are gone. Come and see that true life is nothing but ceaseless worship. Come and see that what seems like death in the present–all the world’s troubles, the searing divisions among us, the hatred, the egregious individualism–all those are put to rest in heaven, where it’s unceasing, united praise. Come and see. Unbind yourself and be set free.

So, beloved in Christ, come and see. Come with me to the altar. Come with me and raise your voices in song with the great cloud of witnesses who sing forever. Unbind yourself and let go of all that is holding you back from life. And should your eyes shed a tear, know that something far greater awaits us, and that in our true home, God will wipe every tear from our eyes.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
All Saints’ Day
November 1, 2024

Cross-Tinted Glasses

Recently, I was thinking of my late PawPaw. Maybe it’s because All Souls’ Day is approaching, but I also thought of him when reading about Bartimaeus. PawPaw had a way of seeing life that I always admired. My maternal grandfather grew up dirt poor in south central Louisiana. Cajun French was his first language, and he was no stranger to tragedy and life’s difficulties. At the height of the Great Depression, his father took his own life when PawPaw was just fourteen years old, and from then on, he had to pull himself up by his bootstraps and carry on. When you’ve reached rock bottom, there’s only one place to go other than death, and that’s up.

PawPaw worked hard on a farm even while attending school. Even as a teenager, he had a role to play in the survival of his family, and there was no question that they were going to survive. Eventually, PawPaw moved to southeast Texas, where I grew up, to start a new life and find a career as a carpenter in the oil refinery business. He was a brilliant carpenter. He could make beautiful things out of any scrap of wood.

I didn’t know much about my PawPaw’s sad childhood until later in life, which said a lot about him. He never complained about his life. He never wallowed in self-pity. He just got on with things, because I think he loved life. Watching him cook and build everything from cabinets to houses, I would never have known how much despair my grandpa must have had to rise above to survive. PawPaw didn’t just have a natural inclination to work hard; I think he had a profound sense of faith in God. He saw possibility where others would have seen only impossibility.

I’m convinced that PawPaw’s belief in what was possible was both the direct result of his faith in God and his experience with poverty. The two go together. He had a favorite saying to redirect discouragement or despair. If someone started to fret or worry (as my grandmother was wont to do), or if something wasn’t going your way, he’d say, “don’t fuss; call Gus.” Gus was his father’s name. I’m not really sure what that saying meant, but I understood the “don’t fuss” part.

PawPaw was generous. He would fix things for widows who had no one to help them. He built the house I grew up in. And since he lived next door to us, he was constantly cooking up Cajun dishes and bringing them next door for us to enjoy: crab stew, etouffee, and beignets. But given his background, he would also make dishes out of things we wouldn’t normally want to touch. He would bring over gamey venison sausage and one time, a turkey stew, with a note left on it that said, “Don’t knock it until you try it.” He knew that my family and I would wrinkle our noses and try to dump the food down the drain. I’m sure he knew that was just our privileged perspective, not having lived through a depression or through the challenges he had, where you simply didn’t throw out food.

I thought of my PawPaw when reading about blind Bartimaeus because my PawPaw had a way of seeing things. I don’t think my PawPaw saw the world from a perspective of scarcity. I think he saw abundance where most of us would have been afraid of scarcity. I don’t think PawPaw really complained all that much because growing up on the poverty line in south central Louisiana, he didn’t have time to complain. His own personal story and his own faith in God, allowed him to see as others couldn’t see. And in hindsight, that’s a gift to me.

Of course, the story of blind Bartimaeus is all about seeing. But Mark the evangelist, for all his terse and breathless style of storytelling, isn’t content simply to present Bartimaeus as a raw example of Jesus’s power to heal. Jesus does heal Bartimaeus, but in typical Markan fashion, there’s irony at work, too. Bartimaeus is healed on the verge of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, the final stretch of his earthly life. Bartimaeus is healed as one on the margins. Bartimaeus not only regains his physical sight; he sees spiritually in a way that most people in the Gospel have been incapable of until this point.

Bartimaeus pleads for Jesus’s mercy after James and John have arrogantly asked for seats of glory in the kingdom. It’s precisely because Bartimaeus is poor and blind and on the margins—literally sitting by the roadside—that he can see in a way no one else can see, just like my PawPaw could see possibilities in a life that would seem limited and impoverished to others.

Bartimaeus is the one that no one else could see or would want to see. His is the voice that is silenced by the crowd because he’s a mere distraction to Jesus’s journey forward. His is the voice of so many in our own day who cry out, although most people don’t hear them. His is the voice of those we speak over because they challenge our comfort or distract us from pursuing greatness. His is the voice of the refugee who sees the potential for freedom in this nation—in a way that we might not—but who faces potential deportation. His is the voice of the store clerk who barely receives minimum wage and works three jobs but always has a smile for you because she doesn’t just look at you; she sees you. Bartimaeus sees in a way that many in his own world can’t see.

And it’s for him that Jesus stops dead in his tracks. It’s this blind beggar who’s literally on the margins who finally sees in the way that Jesus has been inviting everyone to see. Bartimaeus sees not with rose-tinted glasses of pollyannish optimism but with cross-tinted glasses of hope. A beggar by the roadside has no choice but to see everything through the lens of the cross, even if the cross is still in the future.

Finally, it all makes sense! All Jesus’s talk about dying to self and about suffering and self-denial and about the first being last and the last being first finally makes sense, and we learn it from the faith of a blind beggar sitting by the roadside. Following Jesus isn’t about a willing acquisition of suffering. It’s about looking up at the world from the lowest vantage point imaginable. It’s about kneeling at the foot of the cross and looking up at our Savior there, suffering so that we might live. It’s about seeing him look at you and really seeing you and also reaching his arms out wide to embrace the entire world and not just you. It’s about seeing all of creation through cross-tinted glasses.

It's no wonder that when we go to the poor, we find Christ. And when each of us recognizes our own poverty, we can’t help but see differently. Because each of us is poor, no matter how much we wish to stifle that thought. We’re all poor in different ways, but being poor, whether materially or spiritually, is one way in which we find our shared humanity.

The more we run away from the poor, the more we run away from our truest selves, and the more we’ll try to look at the world with rose-tinted glasses rather than with cross-tinted glasses. But everything changes when we see through the lens of the cross. We see gratitude rather than disappointment. We see failures as opportunities for spiritual maturity. We see scraggly scraps of wood as a beautiful house for someone. We see money not as something to hoard but as something to give. We see our own parish’s struggles as yet another opportunity to notice where God is redirecting our gaze to do the work he’s called us to do.

When we see with cross-tinted glasses, we learn that loss and poverty aren’t so much misfortune to be avoided but the very heart of the Gospel’s good news. It’s out of death that life comes. It’s on the cross that we find glory. It’s on the margins that we find our Lord, redirecting our gaze to the manifold possibilities for resurrection life in our midst.

I can’t imagine my PawPaw without his sad and difficult past, even while I wouldn’t wish that past on anyone. But because of that past, he could see with cross-tinted glasses in a way that I couldn’t as a child who had everything I needed and was privileged in so many ways.

And then there’s Bartimaeus, a visible sign—a sacramental one, if you will—that believing is seeing. Bartimaeus shows us how to see the world through cross-tinted glasses. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is seeing through the eyes of faith that even when our voice is silenced, God always hears us and sees us. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is trusting that when everything seems to have fallen apart, God can and will build something new.

In every moment of our lives, in our prayer and in our work and in our play, the risen Christ asks us, What do you want me to do for you? And of all the things we can ask of him, there’s yet one thing that we all need. And so, with Bartimaeus, we ask him, “Master, let me receive my sight.” And we jump up from our place of despair, we leave everything we have behind, and we follow him, all the way to the cross, and then all the way to glory.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
October 27, 2024

On the Way to the Kingdom

Over the summer, I was visiting my twin nephews, and they asked me to play the card game “Go Fish” with them, which I hadn’t played in decades. My nephews are five years old, so they were learning the game in stages. And they were in the intermediate stage, which meant that they were playing with modified rules.

We each had our distribution of cards, but instead of concealing them from the other players, we put them down so we could see each other’s cards. As I said, my nephews were gradually learning to play the game as adults would. If you recall, in “Go Fish,” you ask someone whether they have a certain type of card in their pile so that you can collect all the cards of that type, something known as a “book.” If the other players don’t have the type of card you want, you must “go fish” from the center pile, drawing a card and hoping it might be what you need. Once all the cards in the center pile are gone, the player with the most “books” wins. In my nephews’ version of the game, the books were all animals of various sorts: lions, elephants, monkeys, octopuses.

Now, my nephews are incredibly sweet and kind, and they have big hearts. They’re unusually effusive in how they show that love to others. Watching them play and interact with the world around them, your heart aches for the days of such innocence. But as they are getting older, they’re also beginning to learn what the world outside their loving home is like. And it’s, sadly, not the game they’re used to.

Much to my fascination, our seemingly low-risk game of “Go Fish” was a visible marker of my nephews’ transition from loving innocence to survival in a high-stakes world. At some point in the game, I looked at my nephew Mack’s cards and realized that I wanted to acquire another octopus. This would have put me closer to earning the book I needed to win. You see, I was definitely playing to win, but I don’t think that Mack fully understood that. I’m not entirely sure that he was playing to win, or at least not in the way that I was.

“Mack, I said, do you have an octopus?” I looked at him with an impish grin. And his face fell, and then he began to cry. “But I want the purple octopus.” There was a dilemma. I only see my nephews about twice a year. I don’t have quite enough uncle collateral to compete with tears. So, I caved. I gave in and let him keep the purple octopus, and I asked for another animal.

A bit later, in the kitchen with my sister-in-law, I explained what had happened. “Well,” she said, “at some point, he needs to learn that he can’t always win.” She was right. But I still wasn’t willing to risk all my uncle collateral on that game of “Go Fish.” In his beautiful childish innocence, my nephew didn’t yet understand how adults play games. For him, the game was more about having the kinds of cards he wanted, especially the ones with purple octopuses on them. For me, with several decades of trying to survive in a jaded world of competition, I was playing the game to win.

The disciples James and John are used to that same world of competition. They’re in a place of spiritual transition when they come to Jesus and ask him to grant them whatever they want. It’s a bold request, and it’s also full of spiritual naivete at best and spiritual ignorance at worst. Remember that they’re on a journey, and this is significant. For some time now, they’ve been walking along the way with Jesus, both literally on the way to Jerusalem and metaphorically towards the cross. And for the third time, Jesus announces his future passion and suffering, and yet one more time, the disciples opt for selective hearing and change the subject. The truth is that they don’t want to recognize that they must suffer, too, and give things up to follow Jesus, because doing those things is the only way to follow him in an unjust world where you can’t play the game and always retain your purple octopuses. Jesus says he must suffer and die and be raised on the third day, and the disciples respond with the equivalent of “isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning?”

James and John, and all the other disciples, are spiritually in transition. They’ve made a discernible commitment to follow Jesus by leaving their former lives and even their families, but they still don’t want to own up to what the ultimate cost of discipleship will be. They think they’ve paid the cost already, but it’s only just begun.

Jesus, they say, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Their habitual language is that of the world, of competition and of quests for success, status, and rank. They’re beginning to learn that it’s no small feat to live as Jesus’s disciples in a world oriented around domination, power, and wealth.

And so, Jesus can only speak to them in the language of the world in which they live. The disciples are struggling with how to hold onto the bliss of being close to Jesus in discipleship while living in a hard, cruel world that will eventually kill him and some of them. Jesus must translate the way of discipleship through the terms of this world, the world in which the disciples and we must inevitably live.

It's a world in which everyone is assigned a number, and following Jesus in a world of inequity and injustice will mean going to the back of the line. Following Jesus in a cut-throat world will mean sacrificing greatness and success for faithfulness and humble service. Following Jesus in an unmerciful world will mean giving up our individualism for the sake of the benefit of all.

This is our dilemma, too. We, like those early disciples, want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want glory without the cross. We want baptism without the commitment. We want union with Jesus without unity with others. We want salvation without too much change in our lives. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? We are! is our hasty reply, but we struggle to live with one foot in the kingdom of God, where a game is just a game, and the other foot in this world, where games are about fighting your way to the top.

In this earthly life, we’re always in via, on the way, with Jesus. We must go back and forth between speaking that primal language of love where we catch glimpses of the unity that God desires for us and the harsh language of this world which ranks us from greatest to least. And this is partly why Jesus’s words sound so harsh. It sounds as if Jesus is speaking the language of the world when he says, “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” It sounds as if he’s ranking everyone. But it only sounds that way to those of us who live in this world because that’s the way our world speaks.

In a world of competition, to give up success sounds like failure. In a world oriented around money, to give sacrificially seems like financial foolishness. In a world full of violence, to give one’s life for another seems like nothing but stark, cold death. But our true native language is the language of the kingdom of God, which we can only glimpses in fits and starts in this life. And in that language, a game doesn’t need to be played to win. A game can be played simply to delight in purple octopuses, which God will freely give. In that kingdom, there’s no competition. There’s simply wonder and love.

Jesus came to part the veil and show us what lies on the other side, where there’s no sorrow or sighing. There’s only life and joy and delight. It’s a perpetual feast. It’s the hope of glory. For now, though, we’re left with our earthly games and the language of this world. And we must live in this world as faithfully as we can while hanging onto the beauty of that glorious kingdom of which Jesus has given us a foretaste. We savor purple octopuses when we find them. And we also know that we must give them up sometimes because in this life, things are imperfect and unfair.

We also know that when Jesus gives us words that seem harsh and difficult, we must translate them from this world’s language into the language of the kingdom of God. And in that kingdom, our earthly gain is heavenly loss. But our earthly loss is our heavenly gain. In God’s kingdom, sharing in the cup of Christ’s Blood is a death to our sinful ways, but it’s also a feasting on the joy of forgiveness and love that reign eternally in heaven. In that kingdom, our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection is a painful relinquishment of our self-centeredness, but it's also a rising to a new shared life of glory. In this life’s journey, we might be last in line and slave of all, but in the kingdom of God, there are no lines and no slaves but only fellowship and rejoicing. We can simply delight in purple octopuses. And in that life, we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
October 20, 2024

The Language of Love

During the pandemic, we became more adept at communicating with our eyes. At first, with masks covering part of our faces, it was difficult to tell whether the cashier at the grocery store was angry or delighted that you just smacked eighty-five food items down on the conveyor belt—unless you paid attention to the cashier’s eyes. If the eyebrows were slightly raised, she might be smiling. If they were furrowed and scrunched up, he might have been annoyed. Those masks, annoying as they may have been, pressed us to look beyond mouths and noses for emotional clues.

Married couples understand eye communication, don’t they? If you’ve been together long enough, you don’t need words to communicate; you can use your eyes. You can read the worry in your spouse’s eyes when no one else is likely to notice. You’ll observe the twinkle of amusement at a dinner party, although it’s disguised to everyone else at the table. You’ll see your beloved’s sadness and joy there, too, based on the circumstances. And even when it’s just the two of you, words are often unnecessary. A look can convey more than a thousand words.

Jesus says everything with just one look at the man with many possessions who kneels before him. It’s a striking and rare example in Scripture in which we’re invited to look into Jesus’s eyes. What was the color of his eyes? What was the shape of his mouth? What intangible, ineffable glint was present in his eyes as he looked upon the man before him? What did Jesus see in that man that Scriptural details don’t tell us? Jesus’s look, we could say, was worth more than a thousand words. His look was worth everything.

In Jesus’s long, loving look there must have been such delight in the man as a child of God. Jesus could see past his obsequiousness in kneeling before him and calling him “good teacher.” Jesus would have seen the man’s earnest desire to find salvation. Jesus would have noticed the man’s wealth on display in his clothing, for he had many possessions. Jesus would have observed the man’s diligence in keeping the commandments and in trying to be good. Surely, this faithfulness would have evinced a sparkle of joy in Jesus’s eyes.

But complicating that hint of pleasure, there would also have been some sorrow and sadness in Jesus’s long, loving look. He must have known that something was lacking in that man, and I suppose his heart broke for him. Jesus would have understood how difficult it would be for this man to give up the one thing that had shaped his identity until this point: his possessions. Jesus would have looked upon the man lovingly and yet with pity, realizing that it would be nearly impossible for him to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.

That’s the world in which the man lives. It’s the world in which we live, too. We live in the world of transaction, and we have become so fluent in its language for so long that to speak another language is like a middle-ager trying to learn a foreign language. It’s almost impossible on our own terms. Oh, that we could go back in time and be like a little child, the one whom Jesus embraces just before encountering the man with many things. Oh, that we could learn the language of love again.

The man sees Jesus’s long, loving look at him, but perhaps he only sees it as judgment. He certainly sees it as loss, because Jesus’s long, loving look is immediately followed by a crushing blow to the man’s eager hope for salvation. It makes little difference that he’s kept all the commandments since his youth and that he’s been diligent and faithful and pious. He still lacks one thing. He has too many possessions, and to follow Jesus, he must sell them, give the money to the poor, and then follow Jesus. The man must give up the very thing around which his life and identity have been constructed. And this is when his own countenance falls. This must be the moment when he looks away from Jesus’s long, loving look and stares at the ground before he walks away.

But if he’d only lifted his eyes instead of walking away, he would have seen the same long, loving look from the face of our Lord. It’s the look that never turns away from us. While there may have been judgment in confronting that look of love, Jesus wasn’t looking upon him with judgment, only with love. But when your only language is the language of transaction, the look of love might seem like cruel condemnation.

It's too easy to explain away the man’s problem as a universal problem with wealth. Undoubtedly, for this particular man—as for many people—his possessions are his peculiar problem. He’s lived so long in a world of transaction that he believes everything can be bought or earned. Everything can be measured or bartered in a tit-for-tat system. And strings could be attached to his wealth, too. Maybe he could use his wealth for charitable purposes, serving as a benefactor to those in need. And wouldn’t that gain him salvation points? And by keeping all the commandments, wouldn’t he be assured of eternal life? Surely, he must be justified in expecting to inherit eternal life.

And it’s in this posture that he kneels before Jesus, possibly expecting to be justified in what he’s already done. This man is proficient in doing¸for doing is the character system of the language of transaction. And should he have failed to do something, Jesus can definitely tell him what that final thing is that he needs to do to inherit eternal life.

Jesus does tell him to do something, but in a way, it’s not about doing at all. Jesus explains what the man lacks in order to receive the gift of eternal life. Jesus offers not an immediate answer to the man’s quest for the assurance of salvation. He gives him a long, loving look, a look that points to something eternal, worth more than a thousand words. This love isn’t something that can ever be bought, because it preceded our habits of transaction. There’s nothing we can do to win this love. It’s pure gift from our heavenly Father, something that we can only receive. And receiving may be the most difficult thing of all.

For the man with many possessions, his acquisitions are the primary obstacles in his life that prevent him from basking in God’s long, loving look. And this is why it’s so difficult to enter the kingdom of God when we’re attached to wealth and material things. Wealth is inherently structured around a language of transaction. Unless we can gaze back at God’s long, loving look, it will be impossible for us to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.

But it’s not only the wealthy who will struggle to enter the kingdom of God. We all will, and Jesus affirms that. For each of us, there’s something that will stand between us and God’s long, loving look. It may be our pride. It may be our resentment. It may be our covetousness or envy or desire for success. It may even be our own perpetual self-effacement. All these things will make it nearly impossible to enter the kingdom of God. But of course, finding eternal life is not impossible, because with God, all things are possible.

The face of Christ looking with love upon the man with many possessions was the face of God in earthly time inviting the entire world to speak the language of love instead of the language of transaction. God’s long, loving look summons us from transaction to trust, from grasping to receiving, from possessing to giving. And so, while we can never earn that love because it’s always available to us, there’s one thing we can do to receive that love with greater ease. We do it not because it will earn us something. We do it to empty ourselves, as an echo of Christ’s own self-emptying, so that God can fill us with his abiding love.

We give. We give selflessly and generously. We give recklessly. We let go of everything that has taken hold of our lives. In the Mass, we offer our selves, our souls and bodies to God so he can return them to us and eventually to the world, redeemed and made whole. We give sacrificially of our money because that emblem of the transactional world may be the most visible impediment to receiving God’s love. We give not to receive but because only in giving can we receive.

It’s so very difficult to enter the kingdom of God, but it’s not impossible because anything is possible with God. Our countenance may at first fall when we realize what we must relinquish to find eternal life. But if we hold our gaze high and look up, we will find there the gift that’s eternally present for us to receive. It’s the long, loving look that dispels all fear of not having enough or not measuring up or not being enough. In that long, loving look, we recognize what we lack, but we’re also assured that no matter what we must give up, something far greater is ours to receive. And when we are able to receive it, we’ll finally speak the language of love.

Sermon by Father Kyle
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 13, 2024

Exceeding the Exception

The phone call came late in the evening. Was it because the children would be in bed and out of earshot? I was indeed in bed when the phone rang, but this curious child was also still awake and listening. One of my parents was on the phone with someone from the Roman Catholic diocese. A family friend was going through a divorce and was seeking an annulment by the Church. An official was calling to interview my parents about their experience of their friends’ marriage because a reason was needed to justify the divorce. A litany of questions had been prepared, which I couldn’t hear but I can imagine in hindsight. Did the couple behave lovingly toward one another? In your experience, were there ever any moments when the spouse was cruel or mean to the other? Do you think there was ever really love there to begin with?

I was too young to question this whole process or really understand what was happening, but even in my childish innocence, I was unsettled by it all. It seemed as if the annulment process was proceeding from a standpoint of deficiency. Something must have been wrong with one of the partners in the marriage for it to have fallen apart. Surely, he or she must have done something so bad that the marriage could be written off as never having really been valid. The annulment would, of course, free the two partners to marry again.

Now, as an adult, if I want to analyze why that late night phone conversation made me uncomfortable, I could talk about casuistry and legalism. But I’d rather focus on how it started at the wrong end of things. The interrogation seemed to assume that there was a deficiency that needed to be discovered. The process was intended to look for an exception to the rule that divorce should never happen.

If you ask me, this isn’t very different from starting with what’s wrong with humanity rather than the many things that are good about it. Imagine, for instance, the first story in the Bible being the Fall, when Adam and Eve messed up in the garden of Eden. But that’s not what the canon of Scripture gives us, and I think there’s a good reason for that. Scripture begins with the first creation account, when God created everything and called it good. And then when God made humans in his image, he said it was all very good.

The story of humanity’s relationship with God starts with goodness, not deficiency. It doesn’t take long for things to go off the rails, but it still begins with goodness, completion, and paradise, rather than with evil, deficiency, and hell. This beautiful story begins not with an exception to the rule but with the rule itself. Or we might say with an expectation that transcends a rule. The expectation is that humanity is capable of goodness. To speak in anthropomorphic terms, God, in some sense, expects and desires it.

And so, it should be no surprise that when Jesus gets drawn into a discussion about divorce, he starts with God’s expectation, not with the exception to the rule. The Pharisees who question him, attempting to trick him, are simply looking for the exception. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Forget the woman, in this case. She had no rights, which is also part of the problem. The Pharisees assume that divorce will happen. They don’t ask if it’s a tragedy. They just ask if it’s allowed.

But Jesus isn’t so much interested in what’s allowed as in what God dreams for humanity. And this is why Jesus references the second creation story. God desires a one-flesh union of two people. Jesus doesn’t want to start with humanity’s exception clause, which simply allows people to separate what God has joined together. Jesus takes the whole conversation back to the story of creation because it’s the only true starting place. It starts with goodness. And because it starts with goodness, we are dealing with God’s expectation rather than humanity’s exception.

Jesus seems to know that people will always try to take the easy way out. They’ll operate according to the lowest common denominator if they can get away with it. Does my term paper have to be ten pages double-spaced with 12-point font or 14-point font? Am I still an active baptized member if I only receive Communion twice a year instead of three times? Do I have to forgive her every time she offends me or just the first two times? Do I need to need to tithe on my whole net income or only on my net income after I pay the bills?

Looking for the easy way out assumes that there’s a deficiency within us. It assumes that our spiritual lives are beholden to the governing forces of industry in which we’re always striving for economy of motion or doing the least amount of work possible to earn the most amount of money. It assumes that we’re always searching for an exception to the rule.

But Jesus isn’t interested in exceptions to rules. He’s not even very interested in rules. Jesus is interested in God’s high expectations of his creation and in God’s vision for humanity. Jesus highlights what God intends and desires rather than what’s merely allowed. He sets the bar high because he knows there’s a still more excellent way than our tendency to settle for less.

It's not simply that Jesus always demands more and more in the sense that modern progress is no longer satisfied with working forty hours a week and must push for fifty. As Jesus draws his followers into deeper and deeper relationship, he also draws them more and more out of their own selfishness and isolation. He invites them into community. He does so by setting their sights on the immeasurable love between God and his people, a love that never settles for less and that can never be put asunder.

And this is why the world needs the sacrament of marriage. We need this sacrament to set our sights high instead of settling for less. The sacrament of marriage calls us to live into God’s expectations rather than humanity’s exceptions to the rules. In a good marriage, we see a glimpse of the love between Christ and his Church, a love that is indissoluble, even when we reject it.

In pointing to a more excellent way, Jesus navigates a different path from our two modern ways of dealing with difficulties in marriages. Marriage is either treated without reverence, tolerating divorce when a marriage simply becomes inconvenient. Or marriage is treated as something that can never be dissolved and requires a legal process to prove that it was never valid from the start. The problem with these two approaches it that they let Christian community off the hook.

When Jesus points to one-flesh marriages as embodiments of God’s high expectations of humanity, the implication is that more than the married partners are involved in a marriage. The whole Christian community is affected when a marriage is in distress. The community can’t easily write off a marriage because it has some troubles. They can’t write off a marriage as invalid because one of the partners didn’t behave well. The community is called to do everything in their power to support the couple when times are tough. The community is supposed to live into God’s expectations rather than settle for the exceptions to the rule.

Christ points us to a still more excellent way in which eschatological hope exceeds human deficiency, where with God, anything is possible. It’s possible that in a troubled marriage, God’s grace can help a couple emerge stronger on the other side. It’s possible that with the help of the Christian community, a couple can learn to delight in one another again after years of dissension. But it’s also possible that God can create a new future for those who’ve had to face the tragedy of divorce. God can heal and mend wounds. And it’s possible that God can still enable forgiveness to happen for those who’ve been wrongly hurt and judged by the Church after a painful divorce.

As Christian disciples, we’re called to live into God’s expectation, not into humanity’s exception. This doesn’t mean that the exceptions won’t occur or even be the best possible solutions in intractable situations. But there’s no good reason to make the exception the rule. Nor is God’s expectation itself a rule. It’s a vision of hope, a call into walking the way of the cross. And when we walk this way in community and fellowship with one another, we settle not for exceptions for rules or even for rules themselves. We learn to glory in God’s hope for all humankind. We refuse to settle for what’s allowed. More than anything else, we dare to hope for what is possible only with God, because with God, anything is possible.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 6, 2024

All the Time in the World

This past summer, while at a conference, I was attending an organ recital in a church when I looked up to see the most surprising thing on the wall—a clock! I was shocked. I can’t remember the last time I saw a clock on the interior wall of a church. It’s true that we have clocks all over this campus—in the sacristy, Choir Room, and Parish House—but you won’t find one inside the church and thank goodness!

Clocks and worship just don’t go together very well, or at least, they shouldn’t go together, so stop looking at your watches. Now, I admit that I’ve been in church situations where I did look at my watch. I was even in a service once where the preacher crossed the 30-minute mark on the sermon and someone in the congregation took off her watch and waved it in the air, for which I was quite grateful, to be honest. But in all seriousness, although we may start Mass punctually, once it starts, the clock stops. Of course, none of us expects to spend the whole day here at Mass, even though maybe we should. When we come to church, the last thing we should be thinking about is time, or certainly not human time.

Rest assured: you won’t find a clock on the wall inside this church. You won’t even find one above the west doors as you’re leaving. Above the west doors is a far better visual indicator of why we’re even here in the first place. Above the west doors is that magnificent window featuring St. Michael and All Angels.

The most obvious reason that the angels are depicted above those doors is that they’re God’s agents of protection. As we cross the threshold of this building, we’re reminded that God’s holy angels are hovering around to guard and protect us. Perhaps less obvious is that the angels help us lose our sense of time. They remind us that when we enter the doors of this sacred space, earthly time comes to a grinding halt.

For a long time, the Church has focused on the militant prowess of Michael and the host of angels. Just look at the window: they’re armed for battle. As the Revelation to John reminds us, there’s a good reason for this. There is a battle still taking place between good and evil. The heavenly battle may have finished, but woe to the earth and sea because the battle has been brought down to earth. Having been cast out of the heavenly realm, the devil is furious, and he will use every chance he has to rage against those of us who walk towards the light.

But the image of Michael and the angels armed for battle might seem somewhat repugnant in a violent age, where we wish to see fewer weapons and where weapons are bandied about as if they’re articles of clothing. At what point does combating evil become an obsession? Many Christians are, quite frankly, obsessed with evil, and that can be a very dangerous thing. At some point, fighting evil gives it more power than it has or should have.

The truth is, if you like to fight, if it gives you a rush, you’ll always find something to fight about. People in the Church do that all the time. The urge to fight is a vicious cycle that causes us to rehash the same old resentments and litany of grievances. But surely, there must be a way to break the cycle. Surely, there must be a way to recognize the reality of evil, resist it, and move on.

So, let’s return to that great west window here in the church. If those angels standing guard there remind us that earthly time must stand still when we enter the church, then there’s the answer to our question of acknowledging evil and letting it have no power over our lives. The angels assure us that there is no shortage of time. Our time is not real time. God’s time is what matters. The theologian Stanley Hauerwas has wisely said that we, as Christians, must profess that we have all the time in the world. And this is what the angels witness to. They remind us that we have all the time in the world.

The angels are, admittedly, an elusive lot. We can certainly find plenty of references to angels in Scripture. And tradition tells us that they’re spiritual beings, without physical bodies, who exist in the heavens. They’re creatures of God sent as messengers and as protection for us mortals. But because they dwell in the heavens, where evil has already been cast out, they’re always worshipping, singing, praising, and serving God. That’s the essence of their existence.

It should be no wonder, then, at that great moment in the Mass before we sing the Sanctus, we join our song with that of the angels. Heaven is brought down to earth, and we’re raised up to heaven. The angels are the epitome of worship. And in that worship, there are no clocks. The angels’ praise never ends because when God is all that matters to you, all you can do is worship and sing! Such worship reminds us that we have all the time in the world because God certainly does.

But there’s one being who doesn’t have all the time in the world. Did you notice that from the Revelation to John? He’s full of great wrath because he knows that his time is short. Yes, it’s the devil. All his wiles, accusations, and slander are the result of his anger. And he’s angry because he knows his time is short.

It adds up, doesn’t it? We might say that human impatience is the root of much evil. When we’re obsessed with fighting evil, we show our impatience, because we’re looking for the quickest solution to what vexes us. When we’re unforgiving, we reveal our impatience, because we won’t take the time necessary to see God’s image in another person. When we lose our hope, we show our impatience, because we demand an immediate answer to our problems. When we give up on peace or settle for an easy peace, we’re impatient, because we refuse to take the time to engage in difficult conversations and relationship-building. When we don’t get our way, we’re impatient, because our consumer culture tells us to demand results now, not later. And when we become impatient, we usually become angry.

But Michael and the glorious legion of angels guard us precisely by reminding us that we should live as if we’re in the kingdom of God. We need to live as if we have all the time in the world. Our Lord himself lived that way. He made time for the stranger. He stopped his journeys to heal the sick and needy. He took time from his work and ministry to be with God in prayer. He refused to resort to violence to hasten the coming of God’s kingdom. He lived as if he had all the time in the world.

The devil, on the other hand, is impatient. It’s his impatience that led him to tempt Jesus in the desert with quick fixes to spiritual problems. And he tempts us, too, by capitalizing on our impatience. He tempts us through those vile accusing thoughts that tell us our work is in vain. The devil taunts the Church with prospects of her decline, and the Church often believes him because she can’t see the bigger picture, which requires faithfulness and hope. The devil torments us with the ticking clock, convincing us that we don’t have enough time and are constantly in competition with others for our existence. The devil tries to get us to believe that God cares nothing for us because our prayers go unanswered, at least in the way we expect. Above all, the devil knows nothing of hope, because hope takes time and patience. The devil is just angry because he knows that his time is short.

But God has all the time in the world to put things right. And the devil has good reason to be angry, because his time is short. The victory has been won by Christ, and so we have all the time in the world to live in the kingdom of God. And that’s why the angels are constantly worshipping and singing.

And that’s why we’re here. That’s why our worship together is the heartbeat of our lives in Christ. When we’re here, the clock stops, and we’re taken up to heaven in wonder, love, and praise. Our only objective is to give glory to God, and when we do, we join our song with Michael and his angels, who are constantly worshipping and singing.

Michael and the host of angels protect us by pointing in their ceaseless praise to the One who has accomplished the victory in heaven. They guide us to the place prepared for us. They lead us to the place where there are no clocks, just ceaseless praise. And in that place, where there is neither sorrow nor sighing, there’s all the time in the world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels
September 29, 2024

It All Started with John

He started it. John the Baptist, that is. So, blame him if you don’t like what he did. Maybe we could say that he simply continued what began way back with the Old Testament prophets. Their prophecies unsettled and angered people, but oddly enough, they didn’t draw attention to their own eloquence or perceptiveness. They pointed to God’s word. We Christians might say they gestured towards Christ even if they didn’t know it. They pointed to something beyond themselves. They pointed to God.

But it was John, that wild rabble-rouser, who really started it. During the time that he was baptizing, his disciples came to him, a bit disturbed that Jesus was also baptizing and drawing a crowd to himself. Presumably, this would draw people away from John. John, after all, had come first. And that’s when John said it, putting into words what the great line of prophets had done from the moment they were called by God. He must increase, but I must decrease. I’m not the Christ, he said. John added his own finger to that bold line of prophets, pointing not to his own work or to himself, but to Christ.

Yes, John the Baptist started it. And Jesus’s apostles, in the aftermath of his death, eventually learned how to keep John’s spirit alive. When the apostles were spreading the Gospel to the ends of the earth and Paul healed a man who couldn’t walk in the city of Lystra, the crowds were amazed. They claimed that Paul and his companion Barnabas were gods. But they pointed away from themselves. He must increase, and we must decrease. We’re merely human, they said. The miracles are simply signs that point to the work of almighty God, not to us. John the Baptist opened that can of humility. Blame him, if you want to.

But the disciples weren’t always so humble. Look at the twelve on the road with Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, arguing about who’s the greatest. They’re concerned with being great, not with being faithful. And all this just after Jesus’s tells them quite clearly that the way to the cross requires self-denial and suffering. The disciples still don’t even understand what Jesus is saying when he speaks of his future passion and death. They refrain from asking him what this really means because they don’t really want to know. They just want to be great. At this point, they can only point to themselves and not to Jesus. They must increase, and he must decrease.

The disciples, as we so often do, think in terms of lines. Someone, of course, needs to be at the head of the line. Someone needs to be great, indeed, the greatest. And of course, that means that everyone else will fall behind, and someone will be dead last. Some student needs to be at the top of the class or the most popular or the most likely to succeed. Some politician needs to be the winning candidate. Some priest needs to be known for growing their church the fastest or having the most TikTok followers. Someone in the top one percent needs to be the richest person alive. And in a oddity of statistical greats, some big city needs to be the poorest one, like Philadelphia. Life has its pecking order, so get in line.

But Jesus mixes it all up when he says that the first must be last and the servant of all. He takes a line and begins to turn it into a circle. And then he does something even more spectacular. He doesn’t tie it up. He leaves it open, and he does yet one more thing that truly confounds the disciples. He invites a child into their midst and puts it smack-dab in the middle of the circle.

To us, this seems like a cute little exercise, like a children’s sermon where all the kids come forward so the adults can marvel at how child-centered the church is. But this is not what Jesus does. Imagine, instead, that Jesus takes the convicted felon on death row or the migrant who’s escaped from Venezuela or the poorest of the poor and puts that person in the center of the open circle and embraces that person. That’s what Jesus does. The child in his day barely qualified as a person. It was the one with no rights, who was constantly at the mercy of adults who often failed to care properly for the child. This child—this utter outcast in society—is placed at the center of the circle. Then Jesus says that to welcome this one, the one at the end of the line, is to welcome Christ himself.

And this is when Jesus does the most surprising thing of all. He continues what John the Baptist started and points away from himself to God the Father. Even the Son of Man, the Lord and Savior of all, doesn’t put himself at the front of the line. Yes, John the Baptist really started this whole mess. Whoever welcomes the child welcomes Christ. And whoever welcomes Christ welcomes the One who sent him, that is, God the Father. The line has become a circle, and at its center is God.

To be a Church that’s true to the values of the kingdom, we must stand in a circle and not a line. Outside the walls of this church, we can’t avoid standing in lines, whether it’s at CVS or the Phillies game. We can’t avoid getting in line to see whether Harvard will accept us or whether we’re next up for the transplant. Lines are the reality of life, and we must stand in them. And yet, Christ asks us to stand in those lines as if they can be shaped into circles of welcome. They’re circles that always have space for one more person to stand.

But along the waiting line of life, there’s a common emotion, and it’s usually not happiness. It’s stone-cold fear. Fear is the mechanism that ossifies lines and makes some great and others least of all. Fear is what causes us to hunger for tribal greatness at the expense of the greatest well-being of all people. Fear is what propels us to rush to the front of the line no matter how many others we have to trample on. Fear is what causes us to point to ourselves and not to Christ. Fear is what causes us to look some people in the eye when it’s just her and me but ignore them completely when we’re around the more important or popular. Fear is what has turned even the Church’s three orders of ministry into a rat race of ladder climbing. Fear turns open-ended circles into lines.

This fear starts with a nagging sense that we aren’t loved enough by God or that we must appease God to earn his love. And if we’re not loved enough by God, then we need to be loved by someone else. And to earn that love from someone else, we begin pointing to ourselves more and more, and the circle of inclusion becomes a line where some are great and others are not even human.

When we put a child or a despised immigrant or a condemned felon or an unhoused person at the center of our circle, we have nothing to gain. It’s simply a gesture of pure love. Loving the poorest of the poor will get us nothing in the world’s straight line. It won’t get us a promotion or a raise or tenure. Genuinely welcoming the poor and the stranger is the most selfless act of love possible because it has no ulterior motive except putting God at the center of the circle.

If our life in community at Good Shepherd is to be Christlike, then it must be an ever-expanding circle, not a closed one but one in which there’s always room for another to stand. It’s a circle where only God is at the center. All that we do and all that we are points to God, not to ourselves. In this circle, our own personal preferences and opinions can and should be voiced but are never given undue weight to the exclusion of the good of the whole. In this circle, no person is silenced, no matter how little money they make and even if they’re standing at the end of line. In this circle, the newest person to the group is valued in the same way as the person who’s been here for decades. In this circle, the need of the person on the other side of the circle is ours, too, and we’re always willing to take one for the team, despite any inconvenience it might cause us.

We can do all this only if the center of this circle isn’t fear. Fear would only warp it into a line. At the center of this circle is selfless love in the face of Christ, who we see is actually pointing to God the Father. In this life in community, we can only point away from ourselves and to God, who stands at the center of our open-ended circle. Yes, John the Baptist started it all, and we must keep it going. With every fiber of our being we should let the circle remain a circle and not be forced into a line. And in this circle, there’s always room for one more.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 22, 2024

The Costly Way of Life

It’s just after five a.m. on a Sunday, and you’re walking quickly—but not too quickly—through the streets of Center City Philadelphia. You have a purpose to your mission, but you don’t want others to pay you too much attention. Although it’s a Sunday, the city is already coming alive. Sunday is no longer a day set aside for public worship. It’s another busy workday like the rest of the week.

You’re on your way to Mass, but you don’t want anyone to know about it. What you’re doing is illegal, and if you’re caught, you could end up in prison, or worse yet, be killed. In one of your pockets is a small piece of bread that you baked at home. You turn a corner and are on Delancey Place, but you discreetly head to the back alley to enter the house of a wealthy Christian. Someone is keeping the door to ensure that those who enter are familiar and not spies. You nod at the doorkeeper and enter the parlor of the home. A small but faithful congregation has assembled around a table, covered by a white cloth. A man in civilian clothes sits in a chair, and you recognize him as the Bishop of Pennsylvania. Before you take your seat, you place your piece of bread on the plate resting on the altar.

After a few more minutes, the bishop rises, welcomes those gathered, and begins to pray. He’s joined by several other people in civilian clothes. They’re priests. The bread and wine, which have been brought by you and all those assembled, are prayed over, the Bread is broken, and then the Bread and Wine are shared.

When this sharing in the breaking of bread and common cup is ended, everything is put away, and all are dismissed. While you’ve only been there for twenty minutes or so, the city is now bustling outside. Under the current government, production is king. The workday is starting earlier and earlier. Many people are rushing to work, and should one of them see you and a host of other people leaving this prominent house at the same time, you might tip them off to the fact that you’re Christians.

If they noticed several people leaving the house on Delancey Place, it wouldn’t be too long before they whipped out their cell phones and called the police. Shortly thereafter, you, the others, and even the bishop, too, would be handcuffed and hauled off to the police station. You’d be efficiently judged—hastily, because there’s no real just process these days. You’d be asked if you’re indeed a Christian, and of course, how could you deny it? To deny it would be to deny Christ himself.

Now, there might be someone in the group that was hauled off to the station who waffles before that question, “are you a Christian?” He says no, but the judge suspects that he really is. “Bow down before that picture over there of the president and show your allegiance to our real ruler,” the judge says. For a time, the person is tempted to do it, but then he simply can’t. He turns his back to the picture on the wall and proclaims that he’s a Christian. You and your handcuffed companions become the next victims of the state’s violent system of capital punishment. And it’s not even noon yet.

What I’ve just described is very difficult for us to imagine. It’s a modern riff on an imaginative scenario posed by the late Anglican monk and liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix in his famous book The Shape of the Liturgy. Dix, writing in the 1940s, imagined a similar situation in his own day. A London grocer attended a furtive celebration of the Mass in the home of a wealthy woman in the Hyde Park neighborhood, under the constant threat of persecution from an anti-Christian monarchy. Dix was trying to demonstrate how modern Christians have lost a sense of the danger of Christianity.[1]

In the early Church, sharing in the breaking of bread and in the common cup was a life-or-death matter. But the riskiness of going to Mass was softened, even eliminated, once Christianity was legalized and became a source of power rather than a target of persecution. Christians became complacent. Dix’s transposition of the early Church’s Eucharistic practice into twentieth century London reminds us that at the center of every Mass, beneath the ritual actions and layers of tradition, is the seminal question of Christ: Who do you say that I am?

Jesus’s incisive question to his disciples lies exactly halfway through Mark’s Gospel. And Peter’s hasty answer shows that he, like the rest of the disciples, have no clue who Jesus really is. They may grant that he’s the Messiah, but they’re ignorant about just what kind of Messiah he is. And this is why Jesus immediately forbids them to tell others exactly who he is. To speak of Jesus only in terms of his healing work and miracles is to shield Jesus from the cross and to protect his followers from the cost of discipleship.

But while Jesus urges reticence about his messiahship, he speaks openly and plainly about his future passion, death, and resurrection. This is the kind of Messiah he is to be. He won’t be the anticipated Messiah who’ll gather an army and drive out the occupying Roman forces, thereby winning victory for the Jewish people through violence. He’ll be the victim of the state, the one who goes to the depths of hell and refuses to return violence for violence as part of his saving work. And by this action, he’ll destroy the power of human violence once and for all. In this great inversion, death becomes life, and life becomes death.

In an age where we can walk or drive without fear from home to Mass, we have it all backwards. In this nation, at least, we need not worry about being spied out leaving this church and then hauled off to a crooked court of law and executed. We can be Christian without others so much as blinking their eyes. Increasingly, it seems that the world outside the doors of this church is more and more apathetic to what we’re doing inside this church. And paradoxically, this has caused a huge problem for us as Christians.

We’re willing to confidently profess who Christ is for us. We wear crosses around our necks as attractive jewelry. We’re the rightful heirs of that primal Christian charge: go and proclaim the Gospel to all nations. And, of course, this we should do. But there’s also a tragic cost to the ease with which we embody our Christian faith, and the cost is that we forget about the demands of discipleship. We forget that when we answer Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am,” our response is a matter of life and death. And what we think is life is often death, and vice versa.

Whether we’re living in a police state where Christians are persecuted or on the Main Line in the twenty-first century, one thing never changes. Christians in every time and place are always at the risk of choosing death over life, especially when they want to save their lives. To take up our cross to follow Jesus is far more than bearing with the annoyances and frustrations of a relatively uncomplicated life. And it’s most definitely not about voluntarily introducing unnecessary pain and suffering into our lives. Finding life is about putting ourselves behind Christ, to whom our answer is always yes, no matter the cost.

To walk the way of life and to follow our Lord is to find our lives bound up with one another. Another’s death becomes our own death, another’s pain becomes our pain. Another’s loss is our loss, but another’s rejoicing is ours, too. And in a privileged and complacent society like ours, this means that the seemingly small choices in life are really matters of life and death. They’re the choices of how we treat our neighbor, because the dignity of another can never be sacrificed to our own personal, emotional, or financial security. These are the difficult choices that lead us to deny our own comfort for the flourishing of the whole human family.

And while we might not lose our physical lives by choosing life over death, we’ll experience a kind of death. We’ll die to our selfishness and greed. We’ll die to some of our most deeply cherished convictions. We’ll die to our tightest alliances with earthly rulers and instead choose loyalty to our true King, the one who rights the world not by violence but by sacrificial love.

Here in the Mass, we choose life over death. At its heart, it appears to be an action centered around death, but it’s really all about life. Here in the Mass, we celebrate that the worst of human violence doesn’t have the last word but is overturned by a selfless act of love that sets us all free. Here in the Mass, we give it all—our selves, our souls, and our bodies—back to God. We give God all our petty grievances and all our selfish instincts. Here, we refuse to make peace with oppression, but we know that real peace doesn’t come quickly or easily. Here, we can’t choose life by ourselves; we must choose it together, in community. Here, we must make an honest answer to the question that Christ daily poses to us. Who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, we boldly say. And before we go to tell all the world that Christ is our Lord and Messiah, we must speak plainly about the way in which the Gospel will give us life. It will give us life when we’re willing to face death, whether physical death for the sake of the Gospel or death to our unholy allegiances that comfort us while causing death for others. You are the Christ, we say, and we know that if we lose our earthly life for the sake of the Gospel, we’ll gain something far greater.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2024 

[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), 142-145, also referenced in Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 102-106.

More than Meets the Eye

Something changed for me in ninth grade, and it happened in Mrs. Hancock’s English class. She teed up the year by assigning us a ton of reading for the summer, which I was less than pleased about. While others played outside in the southeast Texas heat, I was reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and other classics from a long reading list and draining the ink from highlighters like there was no tomorrow.

We’d been instructed to mark comments and underline in the books themselves, which was new to me. I admit that I didn’t care very much for Hamilton’s Mythology. The world of the gods and goddesses was bizarre to me, and frankly, I didn’t see the point of reading about them. I said as much to an aunt who’d majored in literature in college, and she reminded me that reading about mythology would be helpful in making sense of allusions in other literature. I inwardly thought, okay, whatever. But I dutifully did my reading, and I’m glad I did. It changed me.

It was in Mrs. Hancock’s class that we devoured Shakespeare, parsing it for allusions, foreshadowing, paradox, symbolism, and above all, irony. It was in her class while reading Lord of the Flies that I learned that Piggy’s glasses were not just glasses, and owls in Shakespeare were not just cute animals. Although I was a complete and utter bookworm as a kid, I’d never realized that words weren’t just words. Stories weren’t just stories. The text was more than its literal meaning. There was more than met the eye. Things were not as they seemed.

Those high school literary exercises foreshadowed the way I would come to think about life in general. They might only have been interesting mental exercises for a ninth grader, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that the art of de-literalizing our speech and our thinking is part of what it means to be a mature human being. Finding echoes within a text and savoring the multivalence of words moves us from a simplistic, binary mode of thinking into honoring the complex nuances of our humanity.

I’m not sure why the lessons from Mrs. Hancock’s English class don’t always translate to the reading of Scripture. But since the word of God is a living word of God, then even and especially in Scripture, things are more than they seem to be on the surface.

I wish we’d read Mark’s Gospel in Mrs. Hancock’s class. We could’ve had a field day in discussing irony. Why do we always think of irony as sarcasm or skepticism or equate it with the hermeneutic of suspicion? Irony is also theological. Irony can tell us a great deal about the dissonance between our lives and the vision that God has for us. And if we can understand the irony of our spiritual lives, there will always be an invitation to something greater and deeper than what meets the eye. Irony can even move us into spiritual maturity.

There’s one person in today’s Gospel passage, other than Jesus, who understands that there’s more than meets the eye. I think she understands irony, too. It’s the Syrophoenician woman, whom tradition has called Justa. Let’s use that name, because she deserves a name. Justa is an outsider, a Gentile, and she inserts herself rather boldly into Jesus’s mission to the Jews. And that’s the root of the problem.

But poor Justa has been used by countless commentators to promote their own agendas. For some, she’s the one who “bests” Jesus in an argument. Give it to him, Justa! they say. For others, she’s the victim of Jesus’s rudeness, yet one more reason to try to exhaust the complex intricacies of Jesus’s humanity rather than embrace its mystery. But rather than go down one more rabbit hole with this story, what if we let Justa be the one who sees that there’s more than meets the eye.

Here's where we need Mrs. Hancock’s English class and a generous helping of faith to discern how Justa fits into the larger story of Jesus’s ministry. Context is everything. Justa appears from out of the blue after Jesus has fed the 5,000 and before he feeds another 4,000. Justa appears after Jesus has questioned traditional understandings of what’s clean and unclean. As one of the Gentiles, Justa might be offensively likened to a dog by some, and she emerges on the scene and aces the English test on literary devices.

Meanwhile, Jesus’s disciples are clueless and missing every question on the quiz. Although they’re of the chosen people and are chosen as disciples by Jesus, they’ve still failed to understand the meaning of his feeding of the 5,000. And even after he feeds another 4,000, they still don’t get it. They can’t understand that Jesus’s healing of the sick is more than meets the eye. They don’t understand that bread in the miraculous feedings isn’t just bread. They don’t understand that when there doesn’t appear to be enough, there might be far more than they need lurking below the surface. The disciples are royal failures in humility most of the time. Some want to be first in line and have the best seat at the table, but Jesus reminds them that the first will be last and the last will be first. But what does that mean? they wonder.

And then here comes Justa, with the unshakeable expectation that Jesus is more than meets the eye, that he can, in fact, heal her daughter who’s possessed by a demon, that even though he’s a Jew and she’s a Gentile, perhaps Jesus’s mission doesn’t have to rigidly follow a neat ethnic and geographic map. And when Jesus abruptly remarks that the children—that is, the Jews to whom he has been sent—must be fed first and that the dogs—the Gentiles—should not receive what the Jews deserve, she won’t take no for an answer because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. Justa must comprehend that beneath Jesus’s remark, there’s a spiritual test, or better yet, an invitation to rise above petty emotions and reactivity. Is she offended by Jesus? Who knows? But what she does know is that a crumb is more than a crumb. It’s a gift from God. And no one else in the Gospel, at this point, seems to understand that.

And yet, commentator after commentator will tie themselves into knots trying to figure out how Jesus doesn’t sin here while behaving rudely. Or they use this as an opportunity to direct their latent anger at Jesus by accusing him of deplorable behavior. But Justa, the only one who might have a right to take umbrage at Jesus’s curt reply, rises above it because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. The woman understands that even a few crumbs from the hand of the Lord are enough. She’s utterly persistent in that belief. She won’t take no for an answer because she knows in the depths of her soul that a little bit can go a long way. It doesn’t matter if the crumb is small. It doesn’t matter that one must eat it from below the table. It doesn’t matter if the acquisition of a crumb seems like an afterthought. This woman is most interested in the fact that the crumb is food indeed but also that eating the crumb is more than sating hunger. It’s about being spiritually fed, and it’s about being healed and made whole. And Jesus’s response to her gumption proves her right.

The irony in Mark’s Gospel is that we, the readers, know exactly who Jesus is and how the story will end. The disciples don’t, but oddly, Justa the Gentile outsider knows something that the insider disciples don’t. And yet, this irony is more than just an interesting literary device. It also points to the dissonance between our lives and the lives that God desires for us. Too often, we’re like the disciples and others who can’t see that there’s more than meets the eye. We see the unanswered prayer as the absence of God. We see our meager situation in life as a reason to be angry that we’ve only been given the crumbs beneath the table. We see someone else’s success as our failure. We imagine that we’re simply one more participant in the great game of competition, where those who are fed first are favored and those who eat last get the short end of the stick. And if we’re the ones being fed first, we imagine that we’ve done something right and that those eating the crumbs are inferior. The irony is that no matter how many literary devices we can pick out of a Shakespeare play, we often read the story of our lives on a literal level. But faith and charity demand that we rise above the literal level, because there’s much more than meets the eye.

In the kingdom of God, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear like Justa, those who have perfectly good hearing fail to hear, but those who physically can’t hear are healed and understand who Jesus is and what he’s done. In the kingdom of God, a crumb is far more than a crumb. It’s a sign that when we think there isn’t enough, we’ve failed to see that there’s more than meets the eye. In the kingdom of God, every tongue that is fettered must be unloosed to tell the world that death on a cross is more than death; it’s life. In the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t remain hid. He must be recognized and loved, and his marvelous works must be told out among the nations. In the kingdom of God, things aren’t what they seem to be, and we should never take no for an answer. Because in the kingdom of heaven, what’s impossible is always possible with God.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2024

Straight to the Heart

Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec isn’t your ordinary detective. He’s, of course, not a real person but the protagonist of Louise Penny’s murder mystery series set in the fictional town of Three Pines, just over the U.S.-Canadian border in the Eastern Townships region of Québec. Inspector Gamache is a French Canadian who graduated from Cambridge University. He has a fierce intelligence and a big heart. He’s brave, courageous, and thoughtful, with a penchant for reciting poetry in conversations with other members of the police force. Gamache tries to see the best in people and is known for giving opportunities to the most ostracized members of the Sûreté du Québec. He believes in the goodness of people; everyone deserves a second chance.

But Gamache is a particularly unusual detective in that he hates guns. He usually doesn’t carry one, and although he certainly uses guns in the line of duty, he detests them. More than one person accuses him of being a coward for not carrying a gun, but they simply fail to understand Gamache’s bravery. He dislikes guns not only because they harm and kill but because he’s acutely aware of the dangerous alliance of a weapon and human emotions. In the heat of the moment, with passions flaring, it’s easy to pull the trigger when a gun is readily available. Gamache knows that the most difficult course of action is to manage one’s own emotional volatility and see potential victims as real human beings, capable of conversation and dialogue, of conversion and redemption. Gamache is extraordinarily self-aware and psychologically mature, which is part of what makes his character so engaging. He doesn’t simply solve crimes through facts. He uses his heart, too.

Gamache is deeply in tune with the inner recesses of his own heart. When he sits across from a serial killer, he sees not only a murderer but the presence of murderous inclinations within himself. When he’s trying to figure out who committed a crime, he’s acutely aware of his own biases and unchecked suspicions. And that’s why he loathes carrying a gun. He can see what lies within his own heart. He knows that when dealing with the worst of human behavior and the presence of evil, he can’t fully trust his motivations for relying on a gun. Will he fire out of self-defense or because he despises the evil in someone? Will he use physical violence to keep the peace instead of taking on the more difficult task of risky dialogue in a hostage situation? Gamache is humbly aware of his own frailty as a human being because he’s befriended the scariest of human passions lurking within his soul.

There’s a spiritual analogy to the self-awareness seen in a character like Armand Gamache. Gamache himself is religiously inclined, although not a faithful practitioner of religion. But he nevertheless understands a spiritual insight that is quite ancient. It’s what the monastic desert fathers and mothers came to understand all too well when they fled the cities to be silent with God. They discovered that although they thought they had left the world, the world had followed them. They learned that each of them was a “little world,” to use the words of the early Christian theologian Origen.[1] Inside of them were all the evils imaginable in the wider world: murder, envy, rage, adultery, licentiousness, theft, deceit, pride.

And it was in the desert that those fathers and mothers learned to befriend the little worlds within themselves. They weren’t supposed to like the inclinations they saw inside, but they at least needed to recognize their presence. They couldn’t run from those real human emotions, and they couldn’t fight them. But they could acknowledge their existence and then ask for the grace of God to relinquish their power. Paradoxically, by embracing the darkness in their hearts, the desert fathers and mothers found that the darkness had less control over them.

It should be no surprise that the desert fathers and mothers came to see that they were “little worlds.” It should be no surprise that the demons of the world found them in the desert because those demons had made a home within their own hearts. None of this should surprise us because it’s precisely what Jesus taught.

His encounter with the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading seems, at first, to be a simplistic overturning of legalistic ritualism. But such a shallow reading conveniently excuses us from being honest with the state of our own souls. Armed with Jesus’s words to the Pharisees and scribes, it’s tempting—indeed dangerous—to lambaste those who are rigidly obedient to the Law or to Church teaching. And in doing so, we get no further than a vague preference for the spirit rather than the letter of the law. But Jesus is not eschewing the Law or religious duty in his exchange with the scribes and Pharisees. His teaching might as well be directed at us, too, and at every Christian who enjoys pointing fingers at those they deem immoral or law-forsaking. Christ’s wisdom is for any of us who secretly judge others while ignoring the spiritual turmoil within our own souls.

Jesus’s teaching goes straight to the heart because he’s showing us that each of us is a “little world.” Our souls are so often like closets under the staircases of our homes and of our retreat house next door: they’re the convenient places to store all our junk while making the visible parts of the house look presentable. Only by doing some spring cleaning within the closets of our hearts can we grow into spiritual maturity. If we recognize the murderous impulses within, we’re less quick to judge the convicted murderer. If we own the fact that we give our loyalty and love to gods and idols of our own making instead of to God, then we’re perhaps less willing to point fingers at a sexually promiscuous person. If we face the overwhelming covetousness within our own souls, we might be reluctant to judge the person locked up for embezzlement. Each of us is a “little world,” which means that none of us is far removed from those whom society considers to be the dregs of the earth.

But this sobering knowledge of our own little worlds would be nothing more than a source of shame unless we could see that there’s a profound grace in it. In this realization of our own little worlds, we’re brought to our knees in humility and utter dependence on God. We stand, of course, before God “to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid.” It's futile to hide our hearts from God, as much as we might try to hide them from others, and this rather terrifying reality is also a gift. There’s a profound moment of grace in recognizing that the confusing mess of our hearts is the source of our shared humanity.

Our own fallibility, our human tendency toward sin, however awful that may be, is what unites us but not in a morbid acceptance of human depravity. It’s a humble recognition that each of us, from the weekly churchgoer to the felon on death row, is made in the image of God and is therefore nakedly reliant on the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God to be healed and saved. That is indeed the only thing that will make us whole.

Our unkind words and judgmental actions, our exclusion of others, our moral superiority, are all weapons that we wield to defend ourselves from befriending the terrifying emotions that nest within our souls. And like Inspector Gamache, that brave detective, we, too, would do well to cast away our spiritual guns and courageously honor our shared frailty with those whom we long to attack. Often the ones we try to attack are mirror images of ourselves.

Christ gently directs our spiritual eyes into the terrifying depths of our hearts. Those hearts are open to him even when we try to hide them from the rest of the world. Despite what lurks there and is disquieting, our hearts are made for goodness, not for evil. And although demons may find a home there, because Christ has the final word, those demons have no power over us. Christ is the light in our darkness. Christ is the one who forgives all that seems unforgivable. Christ is why we have no reason to be afraid of our hearts, because Christ himself dwells in our hearts. And when we befriend the turmoil of our hearts, we will find that Christ has been there all along. He’s always there, unafraid of what terrifies us, because he has unlocked the prison doors and set us free.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 1, 2024

[1] Martin Smith, A Season for the Spirit: Readings for the Days of Lent (New York: Seabury, 2004), 29-30.

The Unceasing Invitation

One of the most memorable travel experiences I’ve had was a train ride from Blackburn, England, to Durham Cathedral. The journey took about three hours and was relatively nondescript. After miles and miles—or kilometers and kilometers, if you wish—of rather uninteresting scenery, the train rounded a bend and suddenly, hovering over the flat landscape was the mammoth hulking mass of the cathedral. Its Norman tower was like a fortress, rising hundreds of feet—or meters, take your pick—above the surrounding town.

When I first saw it, goosebumps pricked my spine and neck. It was as if by looking at the cathedral, I could feel the weight of its thousand-year history. The tower leans slightly, further emphasizing how old it is. Durham Cathedral dominates everything around it. It makes a clear statement of what, indeed who was at the center of life in the 11th century.

I know we should be wary of idealizing the medieval era, but it’s also difficult to get away from the fact that it was a time when God was at the visible center of village and cultural life. Small towns in Europe that would be mere dots on a map of the United States have their own gargantuan cathedrals. In some sense, villages existed because the cathedrals did. To understand medieval music, you must inevitably understand sacred music.

Make no bones about it. Medieval times were pretty raunchy. Corruption was rampant. It’s not that the medieval Church was better than today’s Church, but it did put God more visibly at its center, at least aesthetically if not always in practice. The towering cathedrals with their peals of bells were constant discernible and audible invitations. Come to the Mass. Come and meet God.

Our modern religious landscape might seem flat by comparison. Many eschew the Church for a variety of reasons. On Sundays, the siren calls are often to places that promise fulfillment beyond the Church. There are few cathedrals that dominate the skylines of our towns, and when they do exist, some people don’t even know they are there. I was vividly reminded of this in my first trip to Washington, DC, when I exited a metro station and asked an employee of a CVS store where the National Cathedral was. She had no idea what I was talking about. And the Cathedral was just a stone’s throw down the street.

My train ride to Durham Cathedral over a decade ago was both a stunning sight and a salient reminder of how far removed we are from the days when churches dominated and infused the culture and lives of those around them. Long gone are the days, to quote a friend, when we could ring the Mass bell and the people would come pouring in through the doors.

But in this humbling realization, I think there’s a profound gift. We’re not worse off than a medieval yeoman, and in fact, religiously speaking, maybe we’re better off. And I’m not interested in continuing to spin the nauseating woes of Church decline. I’m interested in the opportunities for grace latent in an age when the Church has been brought to her knees and is still grasping for a vision of her future. If the medieval cathedral was a visible call to God and to hope, then what is it in our own day?

What about Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs? Wisdom, who is associated with femininity in Scripture, has built her sturdy house of seven pillars, most likely symbolizing completion and expansiveness. She has prepared a rich feast with sumptuous wine. She has even set the table. All is ready. All is prepared. Lady Wisdom has done everything possible to establish a setting for nourishment and fellowship.

But she doesn’t stop there, because more is needed. No one will know the feast is ready or how lavish it is. No one will even know that they are welcome at this feast. So, Lady Wisdom goes the extra mile. She sends out her maids to the highest places in the town, towering over the landscape a bit like Durham Cathedral. But Lady Wisdom doesn’t seek to attract by her dominating power. She calls by virtue of her generosity and hospitality. Her maids call out the invitation, “Turn in here!” This isn’t an invitation intended only for the brainy and sophisticated people of the day. It’s for everyone, especially for the simple and naïve. The invitation isn’t to a theological symposium or scholarly debate. It’s to a feast. It’s to something practical, even necessary for human existence. Come, eat some bread and drink some wine. Choose this feast, this relationship with Wisdom, and you will find life.

What we don’t hear in today’s reading is Lady Wisdom’s foil, and we can’t really know Lady Wisdom without understanding her opposite, who is Lady Folly. She appears just a few verses later, and she’s described as noisy, without knowledge. She has no shame and is perhaps even promiscuous. She’s prepared nothing for others, no feast, no set table. She’s far from generous. She simply lounges at the door of her house or at the high places of the town, and she calls to those who pass by, inviting them to partake of stolen water and bread eaten in secret. Her ways are furtive. In short, Lady Folly is lazy and offers nothing of real substance. Her inertia is the exact opposite of Lady Wisdom’s preparedness and proactivity.

What we also might not know from reading Proverbs is the long tradition within the Church of associating Lady Wisdom with Christ. It echoes within the New Testament. Christ is the one who offers us a choice: follow him and find life, or refuse him and encounter death. But it’s even more complicated than this. Some imagine the Christian life as a dichotomous choice between life and death at a single point in time, for good or for ill. Once you’ve decided which way to go, you’re destined either for heaven or for hell.

But the choice Christ offers us is more nuanced, I think. He’s the one who’s built a stable house for us on strong foundations, not on sand. He’s prepared a rich feast for us, of bread and wine. He’s set the table. He’s, indeed, done everything possible to feed and nourish us with his very life at his banquet. He’s even experienced death itself so that we might choose to follow his way and live. He seeks to call not through domination but through the quiet power of his generosity. And no matter how many times we choose the way of death, Christ gives us infinite opportunities to turn aside in our simple-mindedness, to grow into spiritual maturity, and to feast at the banquet of life that he offers us.

In the days of medieval cathedrals towering over their towns and ringing their bells, the buildings and the bells seemed to be enough. They called others to the feast. But there’s something inspiring in the days before those cathedrals asserted their visible claim on the world’s landscape. Before that religiously-privileged time, Christ, our Incarnate Wisdom, pitched his tent among us and prepared the feast, but there were no visible towers and clanging bells to call others to the feast. Christ, our Wisdom, first called people into relationship with him. He changed their lives, and this catalyzed a mission to the ends of the earth. And then, as the incarnation of Lady Wisdom, he sent out his maids—his disciples—into the highest places of towns to issue his constant invitation: “whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” And this is why we’re here today.

There’s an astounding moment of grace in our own lackadaisical day. Our glorious buildings and beautiful bells are gifts to be used and to call out from the highest places that God is among us. But something more is needed to call others to the feast. Those who’ve not yet found their way to the table need us. They need our stories, our retelling of the transformative encounters we’ve had at the table with Jesus, our Lord, our Wisdom. They need us to tell of our own relationship with the one who has done everything—even given of his own life—so that we might turn aside to celebrate at his life-giving banquet. Jesus, our Wisdom, calls not only to the geniuses and brilliant or to the cultured and well-known but particularly to the simple and innocent, to the hurting who have been worn down by the brutality of our own age. He calls to all, not once and forever, but daily, and he invites us to come and sup with him.

The foil of Christ, our true Wisdom, is a lazy, complacent, inert Church, who rests on her laurels and offers nothing but hollow speech, hypocrisy, and cheap tricks, who goes not into the streets to issue an invitation but proudly expects that grand towers, loud bells, and social media are enough to draw others to the feast.

Now is a beautiful moment for the Church. Christ’s command is still valid and true. Go and preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Go and make disciples. See, our loving Wisdom has done it all. He has given his life for us, and he has prepared his feast and set the table. He has promised to be with us always, even unto the end of the age. We are the maids of Lady Wisdom. We are Christ’s messengers. Let us go to the highest places of our town and neighborhoods. Let us issue the invitation, the timeless and eternal one: Come and eat the bread and the wine that give true life. Turn aside and see what Christ is offering you. Come this way, and you will find life.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 18, 2024

Too Close for Comfort

There’s been some about the TV show The Chosen, which depicts the life of Jesus starting with his Galilean ministry. Much of this contention is located within Protestant evangelical circles, which are suspicious of creating visible images of Jesus. If you can’t make a statue of him, then it’s likewise problematic to have a sinful human portray him in a television show. Some Christians are also uncomfortable with a TV show that imaginatively expands on the sometimes-sparse stories found in the Gospels.

The director of The Chosen has responded to these criticisms in a YouTube video, where he explains that the producers of the show have made their best efforts to stick close to the Gospels, while also taking judicious liberties in fleshing out certain characters and stories from Scripture. This means that there are scenes in which characters within the Bible are shown doing things that never appear in the Gospels but could very well be things they actually did in real life. Nicodemus, for instance, gets a lot of screen time, rather than a brief mention. Simon Peter has a wife named Eden. And Jesus is seen camping out in the woods outside Capernaum, making fires to keep warm at night, and even brushing his teeth.

If you ask me, based on the few episodes I have watched until this point, the somewhat imaginative portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen is consonant with a long line of Christian tradition. For centuries, until rationalism flattened any kind of personal, prayerful encounter with Christ in Scripture, Christians read the Bible through several different senses, rather than literally. There’s a venerable practice of reading between the lines in Scripture and of prayerfully placing oneself within the text. This means letting Jesus speak to you and me, right here, right now. This means hearing the sounds of a Galilean street, smelling those who crowded around Jesus as he taught, and looking into the eyes of the beggar pleading for healing.

But I do wonder if the controversy surrounding The Chosen is more than a simple fear of idolatry. It’s not surprising that some Christians are deeply wary of straying too far from the Biblical text in portraying the life of Jesus. There is a discernible risk involved in allowing a fallible human to portray the Son of God. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more at work to the objections to The Chosen. And I think it has to do with Jesus becoming too close for comfort.

We’re used to what the Gospels show us about Jesus. We hear his words and glimpse some of his actions. But we don’t see him brushing his teeth or uttering a prayer to his Father before falling asleep at night, alone in a tent. We don’t see him playfully telling stories to local children who find him in the woods or creating funny sounds with his mouth to make them laugh. And when we do see Jesus doing these things, it probably disturbs us a bit, because Jesus begins to seem a bit too close for comfort. He’s like us in his full humanity, but unlike us in his divinity. He reminds us of who we’re called to be, and also of who we’re not.

It’s the same with those who mutter and complain about Jesus in John’s Gospel. Just as our bodies manifest hidden illnesses through visible signs, audible complaining is often a signal that there’s unrest and turmoil within the heart. And we would do well to probe such visible signs to befriend our uncomfortable emotions.

I would guess that those who murmur against Jesus when he says that he’s the bread come down from heaven are put off for the same reasons that some in our own day are put off by seeing Jesus portrayed in a television show. He’s too close for comfort. In John’s Gospel, those who murmur against Jesus know his mother and father. How can a divine claim be made by someone with flesh and blood parents? How can the bread of life be one of us? How can humanity be so tied up with divinity? And if he is, how does that convict our unholy alliances with power and privilege? We’re disconcerted by the human side of Jesus because his perfect humanity reminds us of who we’re called to be and of how much we’ve fallen short. And no one likes to be reminded of that.

This is the judgment in John’s Gospel. God himself has come terrifyingly close to us in the incarnate Word, Jesus, and yet we have pushed him away. We have refused to allow ourselves to be taught by God. God has made everything personal for us, and yet we long to go back to an impersonal relationship with God. Those who grumble against Jesus in John’s Gospel don’t seem to want a person; they’d prefer a thing. And maybe it’s also true with us. We like the idea of Jesus, not the person of Jesus. We prefer Jesus as a moral exemplar and not as one who lives within us, convicting us and challenging us. We like sanitized Gospel stories that point to God’s justice and yet leave our daily encounters with injustice untouched. We simply don’t want a Jesus who is too close for comfort. And this is how many Christians see salvation. They want a salvation that’s accomplished by Jesus but that requires no transformation or effort on their own part to realize it.

Perhaps more than anyone else, the Church’s martyrs give witness to a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. I was vividly reminded of this a few days ago when we commemorated Edith Stein, who converted from Judaism to Christianity when she was thirty years old. A gifted philosopher, she was forced out of a teaching position in Nazi Germany because of the pervasive anti-Semitism in the 1930s. She eventually entered a Carmelite community as a nun, and later moved to the Netherlands. After the Dutch Bishops Conference condemned Nazi racism, the Nazis retaliated and arrested 243 Dutch Christians of Jewish origin. Edith and her sister Rosa were in this group and eventually died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Before her death, Stein had already challenged the Roman Catholic Church, speaking out about its failure to stand against the Nazi regime. Her words judged a Church that ultimately couldn’t grapple with a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. She challenged a Church that was centered around the Eucharist, around Jesus as the living bread come down from heaven, where God brings himself closer to us than we could ever imagine. And yet that Church ignored Jesus in the gas chambers. Hear Stein’s words from a 1933 letter to the pope, which received no reply. “Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles?”[1]

Here's the rub of a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. In Christ, we see who we’re called to be and how we’ve fallen short. But we also see how the risen Christ is all around us, everywhere we turn. And we see that it’s impossible to be an honest Christian while putting Jesus into a hermetically-sealed box that we open on Sundays and close at the end of Mass. Christianity is currently in a state of crisis because some have pushed Jesus away to regain their comfort, because a Jesus that’s too close for comfort challenges our unholy alliances, whether with government or any sinful human system that, to use Edith Stein’s words, denies the holiness of humanity.

When we get close to Jesus, we must be changed. We can no longer plead innocence in knowing what Jesus wants us to do, because in him, we’re taught by God. We can no longer behave as if our neighbor’s need isn’t our own. We can no longer hide our spiritual gifts rather than use them. We can no longer take shelter from the world instead of living well in it. We can no longer say one thing and do another. Coming close to Jesus demands that we be integrated human beings, people who live in the world and yet are not of it, people who show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith.[2]

And this involves a death to many things, to our pride, to our safety, to our power, to our comfort, to our protective isolation. But in this death, we find eternal life. The Jesus who’s too close for comfort is also the true living bread come down from heaven, whom we take into our own bodies and digest and feed on. And the one who’s too close for comfort has promised us this good news: that if we let him into our lives and allow him to get close, we will never be hungry. And we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 11, 2024

[1] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/11/Lesser-Feasts-and-Fasts-2022_final.pdf

[2] From the Collect for the Second Sunday of Easter, The Book of Common Prayer (1979)

Set Free by Love

It’s said that with age, people mellow. Youthful arrogance is transformed into more flexible humility. Rashness is tempered by thoughtfulness, impatience by patience. Those who were firebrands for a particular cause in their 20s choose their words and battles more judiciously in their 70s.

In my early twenties, I moved from Texas, where I’d lived my entire life, to Connecticut. In my youthful arrogance, I considered it a liberation and an escape from insularity. I then spent four years in New York City, soaking up its culture, riding high on its electric busyness, and quietly feeling sorry for those who had to live in other less sophisticated places. I relished being around people who, on the whole, thought as I thought and voted like I voted. I was a member of a parish that echoed my social values as well. It was very comfortable and very affirming, and it felt good.

But then at age twenty-eight, I moved to Washington, DC, and immediately realized that I was in a different milieu. I quickly learned that the people in my circles at church and work didn’t necessarily vote the way I voted. They didn’t always agree with my opinions. I had to check my tongue and speak with greater discretion. Life had gotten much more complicated, and I became frustrated, even angry, with that messiness. I even thought that I had made a mistake by moving away from New York City. I worried that I was regressing and undoing the progress I had made since moving to the northeast.

Just a few years after relocating to Washington, DC, I found myself sitting at a table with the vestry of my parish. The vestry was there to sign off on my candidacy for ordination. One by one the vestry voted, and each person said yes until one person said no. I sat there as he explained why he had voted in that way. He didn’t believe that openly gay persons should be ordained. But he also told me that he respected my education and my qualifications. He had no qualms about my academic suitability, just with who I was. And I took great offense.

I later discussed my impressions of the vestry meeting with the interim rector of the parish, a retired bishop. I expressed to him how angry I was that the vestry member had voted no in that meeting. And I’ll never forget how the kind, wise bishop responded. He looked at me, smiled, acknowledged my feelings, and then said, “But he said it in the most loving way, didn’t he?”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. In my spiritual immaturity, I wanted him to side with me, to say that it was unjust of that vestry member to vote no and tell me in front of the whole vestry that I wasn’t suitable for ordination. But over a decade later, I’ve realized how wrong I was in that moment. When I could have welcomed with genuine love, if quiet disagreement, the challenging opinion of a brother in Christ, I reacted resentfully, at least inwardly. But why? That vestry member didn’t yell at me. He didn’t tell me I was going to hell. He wasn’t mean or rude. He wasn’t trying to sabotage my ordination process. His one vote didn’t even change the outcome. That man was simply being honest about his own beliefs, and he was trying to speak the truth in love.

It's probably only the gift of time that enables us to hear the truth spoken in love and to speak the truth in love. We could argue about what is truth, but let’s say for just a minute that truth, as it’s referenced in the Letter to the Ephesians, might refer to what a person in good faith perceives to be the truth. There is, of course, an eternal truth that is objectively so and independent of our fallible understandings of truth, but we often can’t fully comprehend that truth. It eludes human wisdom because it lies only in the mind of God. There are, in fact, times when we believe ourselves to be speaking that truth, but on this side of the eschaton, we will never be speaking it perfectly. How can we?

And yet, neither is the Letter to the Ephesians arguing for a relative truth, where you speak your truth, and I speak mine. As we follow Jesus, we strive for the truth, and at the same time, if our perception of how that truth is manifested in our lives is always imperfect, then it’s possible for each of us to aim for the truth in good conscience and still miss the mark somewhat. And this takes us to a very gray place, where the demands of Christian community require us to exist together in love as we struggle to grasp the truth, even while each of us presumes to know it or tell it. In that ambiguous, uncomfortable place, we must exist with those who are trying to speak the truth that can sound very different from the truth we are trying to speak, even as each of us does so in good conscience.

The Letter to the Ephesians seems less concerned about defining truth, apart from the revelation of God in Christ, and more concerned about human relationships in the body of Christ. Whoever wrote this letter, whether Paul or someone writing as him, must have been around the block more than a few times. The author must have understood that it’s hard to grow up into spiritual maturity until we’ve experienced the frustrations and disappointments of life and been significantly humbled, like Paul was. He was, after all, a firebrand in persecuting Christians and later found himself preaching the Gospel to Gentiles while also trying to stay in conversation with the Jews. He never gave up on that conversation. It’s hard to grow into a mature Christian until you’ve been in dialogue with those who question your most deeply held convictions and possibly question your very identity.

To grow up as people of faith, we need the Church. The Letter to the Ephesians may, in fact, provide a very good answer to the question we’ve been exploring on Sunday mornings in our book study. Why go to church? Why? Because the Church is the place in which we learn to live together in unity, peace, and love. The Church demands that to be the Church we strive for a higher calling even while our roots grow deeper into the earth.  The Church is the place where our diversity of perspectives and variety of gifts demand that we rely closely on one another to discover unity. The Church is the place where peace exists because tensions and conflicts have been wrestled with, not avoided, and where love abides because the health of the body is more important than personal comfort. The Gospel tells us that strength is found in lowliness, meekness, and patience with those who push all our buttons. We have grown up when we can sacrifice our own certainty and sense of superiority for the sake of the unity of the body of Christ.

We need the Church because she calls us to a constant truth that surpasses the instability of the world in which we live. It’s a world that’s capable of so much good but is often governed by wily voices that dupe us into self-righteousness and binary certitude. In such a world, we’re told that we should silence the voices who disagree with us or at least ignore them. We’re told that progress is far better than patience. We’re told that those who think differently from us simply need to be converted to our way, and for those of us in the know, it’s our job to help them see the error of their ways. Is it any wonder that there’s so much division among us?

And so, we need the Church more than ever. We need the Church as she implores us, just as the author of Ephesians implored the residents of Ephesus, to strive for a better way as revealed in Christ, to grow up into spiritually mature adults. We need the Church to teach us the gift of time and patience. We need an open space for tense words that are still spoken in love. We need room to lovingly agree to disagree.

The place where the mettle of the Church is tried and tested is in the Mass. Our actions in the Mass are the litmus test of whether we’re really Christians or simply self-righteous hypocrites. At the Communion rail, if we’re truly seeking a better way and if we long to speak the truth in love, we let Christ speak his truth into our lives. We kneel beside others who color different bubbles on the election ballot, and together we stretch out our hands and receive into our very bodies Truth himself. At that moment at the rail, Christ is the only thing that matters. We serve together in ministry with others not because we necessarily like or agree with them, but because in love, we agree to act out of our shared belief that Christ himself is the source of our actions, not our own personal convictions. We share Christ’s peace every week, even with and especially with those that challenge every ounce of our patience, because that peace is not ours to control but Jesus’s gift to receive.

And the greatest paradox of all, is that when we become prisoners of the Lord, just like the author of Ephesians, we become truly free. We’re free because we’re released from the slavery to self and human ideology into the glorious freedom of abundant life in Christ. And what a marvelous gift that is.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 4, 2024

Right Before Our Eyes

In my first two years as a priest, I served both in a parish and as a choir director in an Episcopal school, which was situated in an under-resourced neighborhood of Philadelphia. For students who were well acquainted with trauma and poverty, the school was a haven of security. It was a place that would always be heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, where students could enjoy well-prepared and nutritious meals. The teachers would love the students and do their best to give them a quality education. The students would be taught about Jesus, even while their own religious traditions were respected.

At each chapel service in the school, the prayers of the people ended with please and thank you prayers. Students and staff would raise their hands and ask or thank God for something. When I first encountered these prayers, I was surprised and moved by how abundant they were. The average person walking into that chapel off the surrounding streets might have imagined there would be a plethora of please prayers and only a smattering, if any, of thank you prayers.

On the streets, it was obvious what wasn’t there. What wasn’t there were adequate public schools. What wasn’t there were enough garbage cans to hold the trash that littered the streets because the city traditionally ignored this part of the city and didn’t provide enough trash cans. What wasn’t there was the certainty of walking to a neighbor’s house without being caught in the crossfire of gun violence. What wasn’t there was sufficient heating in homes and money to pay the rent.

And yet, while the please prayers were in abundance, sometimes it was the thank you prayers that were even more prolific. The school chaplain didn’t have enough time to call on all the students who wanted to voice their gratitude. I learned very quickly that some of the most grateful people are those who don’t seem to have enough by the standards of the more privileged. They’re adept at discerning the blessings of their lives and giving thanks for those things that evade the awareness of those who are more sated in life. They’re skilled at seeing abundance where others only see scarcity.

The school itself was a shining example of finding abundance where most people would only see scarcity. It was housed in an abandoned Episcopal church, with buildings that were unused and deteriorating. To most people’s eyes, the property was one more example of the disastrous effects of church factionalism. But to the eyes of one Episcopal priest and a pediatric oncologist, the school’s founders, it was a gold mine of an opportunity.

The beautiful historic church would become a chapel. The church’s parish house would become the school itself. The former rectory would be turned into a community house for teachers. The neighborhood, long overlooked by many, would help provide the vision for this new school and its students. And now, little more than a decade later, the school is thriving.

But in those initial days of visioning for the school, the narrative could have been otherwise if only skeptical questions were asked. Perhaps those questions wouldn’t even have seemed skeptical but merely practical. How could that one piece of property, which was in shambles, nurture so many people? How could those aging and neglected buildings, cramped as they were, be sufficient for a school? What are they among so many problems? The need and the numbers to address the need didn’t add up. But thankfully for that school, the neighborhood, and the Church, the vision of a few, hearty, imaginative people prevailed. They shifted the narrative from scarcity to abundance, from rationalized impossibility to miraculous possibility. Through prayer, the school’s leaders began to see that everything they needed was right before their eyes.

Such a shift in vision is what Jesus reveals in the feeding of the 5,000 in John’s Gospel. When Jesus confronts a hungry crowd that has followed him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, his disciples ask all the usual questions engineered by a scarcity mentality. They’re the same questions that were undoubtedly voiced by those who were skeptical that a flourishing inner-city school could emerge from decaying, abandoned church property. They’re the same questions that most of us have surely asked at some point in our lives. But Jesus’s initial question to Philip is meant to test him. It’s also intended to teach him and the other disciples that everything they need is right before their eyes.

Philip’s first reaction is to put dollar signs on the need. Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. Andrew is no more hopeful. There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many? Philip and Andrew simply ask the typical questions of our own age. What can we do with so little money? How can we afford to maintain all these aging buildings for such a small congregation? How can we give sacrificially and also plan for our retirement? How can we be practical and hope for a miracle, too?

It’s impossible to exist in our society without constantly being told that there’s not enough. Either you’re told that you don’t have enough or that you aren’t enough. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money. There aren’t enough homes or jobs. There’s not enough peace. There’s not enough security. And it’s all because we live in a zero-sum game of competition with finite resources that must be distributed among a crowd of billions. And this inevitably means that many will lose out.

How could five barley loaves and two fish feed all those people? And Jesus shows them how by performing a miracle, but his miracle is much more than mere magic. It’s miraculous, because in it, he reveals to the crowd that everything they need is right before their eyes. It’s miraculous because Jesus teaches the crowd and the disciples that five loaves and two fish is enough because God makes it enough.

It’s not simply that people within the crowd were inspired to bring out their own hidden stores of food to share with others, as some overly rational interpreters have claimed. Such a view only reinforces the sense that we live in a zero-sum universe where there really is only a finite amount of food. But Jesus undoes this kind of thinking by manifesting a miracle wrought by the hand of God, in which infinite abundance emerges from seeming scarcity. And it all happens from the ordinary stuff that has been right before the people’s eyes the entire time.

This is what happened in north Philadelphia. A handful of decrepit, abandoned buildings turned out to be more than enough for an under-resourced neighborhood in north Philadelphia. It was enough because God showed it to be enough. It was enough because a few visionaries who believed and trusted in God’s abundance knew that with God’s help something good could come out of a rotten past on that property. They had a strong sense that everything they needed was right before their eyes, even if unseen. The money needed to resurrect that abandoned property came pouring in, as if five dollars and two cents had been multiplied infinitely. The volunteers emerged as hundreds aligned themselves with the mission of the school. The teachers and the students and the visionary neighbors all came because more than human altruism was at work. God was at work, creating a miracle with all the stuff that had been beneath their eyes the entire time. And nothing was lost or wasted.

Right now, as we are continually fed with emergency messages of scarcity, the Mass teaches us—as Jesus taught that crowd of people on the mountain—that there is enough, that a little bit of Bread and a tiny sip of Wine will give us eternal life. The world will always try to teach us that there’s never enough. The world, indeed, feeds us with fear because the sustenance of its competitive spirit is based on fear. But it’s God who teaches us to shift our vision from scarcity to abundance, from seeing impossibilities to seeing possibilities. And while some try to force-feed us fear, God feeds us with the gift of Christ his Son, the true bread from heaven. And in that gift, God shows us that everything we need is right before our eyes.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
July 28, 2024

Finding Our True Home

In his rule for monks living in community, St. Benedict of Nursia, the classic founder of conventional monasticism, describes four kinds of monks. The first group includes the cenobites, who are monks attached to a particular monastery where they live in obedience to a rule and the abbot. In the second group are the anchorites and hermits who have weathered time in monasteries but have moved on to the challenges of living in the desert wilderness.

But St. Benedict’s strong opinions rise to the surface in describing the third and fourth types of monks. He describes the sarabaites as “detestable,” lacking in experience, not living by a rule, and with “character as soft as lead.” “Still loyal to the world by their actions,” he says, “they clearly lie to God by their tonsure.” The fourth group, the gyrovagues, seem to be the most objectionable to Benedict, and he describes them as even worse than the sarabaites. The great fault of the gyrovagues is that “they never settle down,” as Benedict puts it. They are peripatetic and “are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.”[1]

After all, the whole point of Benedict’s rule is to shape a stable community of monks, sharing in life’s joys and sorrows together, through obedience to God, to the abbot or head monk, and to one another. In such a grounded community, monks don’t leave because they’re having a bad day. They don’t leave if the food isn’t to their liking. And they certainly don’t leave if they get bored. Life in religious community is all about stability despite the sway of fickle human emotions or personal preferences.

Such stability is often found in a physical place, such as a religious community or parish church. But underlying this stability is a deeper spiritual grounding, that can be found no matter how peripatetic one might be. It's no coincidence that St. Mark includes the story of Herod and John the Baptist within the larger story of Jesus sending his disciples out two by two into the mission field and their return to Jesus to report on what they’ve done. Mark’s message is clear if you look at the narrative as a whole. To be a true disciple, you can’t be a spiritual gyrovague. You need roots. It’s no use being a spiritual listener and not a spiritual doer. True disciples don’t wander around pleasing whomever they’re with at the moment. True disciples know how to settle down and find their anchor in something beyond political power, cultural fads, and shallow spiritual gurus.

And Herod is the prototypical foil to spiritual stability in St. Mark’s Gospel. Herod comes across as a mixed character. On the one hand, he has certain qualities that could very well have pulled him in the direction of goodness, that part of humanity that’s still in touch with the image of God. We’re told that he delights in listening to John the Baptist. He even knows that John is holy and righteous and therefore keeps him safe, at least for a time. And in that tragic moment when he promises more to Herodias’s daughter than he should have, we’re told that he’s “exceedingly sorry.” He really doesn’t want to put John to death. But he does it anyway.

Herod’s spiritual and emotional instability sounds a lot like the gyrovagues, whom St. Benedict accuses of never settling down. Herod can’t settle down. Herod is not his own man. He fears John the Baptist because he senses something holy about him but probably even more because he’s concerned about how John’s followers will react if John is harmed. Herod doesn’t know to whom or what he should be loyal, and that’s a very dangerous thing.

And because Herod has no spiritual grounding, he loses control at his birthday banquet, where he makes a hasty and irresponsible promise. When he promises to give Herodias’s daughter whatever she asks, he’s captive to his emotional fervor and spiritual weakness (and most likely at least a little inebriation). So, when Herodias asks for the head of John the Baptist, he can’t refuse. Here, Herod is more concerned about honoring a hasty promise than he is about preserving life. Sure, he may have once listened gladly to John the Baptist, but now, he’s willing to hand over his head on a platter. Herod doesn’t know where his heart is.

Although Herod discerns that there’s something profound about John and although he even delights in listening to him, it goes no further than that. Listening to John isn’t enough. Being moved by John isn’t enough. For Herod, the titillation of his senses and the pricking of his heart have no ultimate effect on his actions.

If Herod’s crude instability is a foil to true discipleship, such instability may also epitomize the groundlessness of our own day. It seems that we live in an age of gyrovagues, where people increasingly struggle to settle down. And this makes it incredibly difficult to settle down as disciples of Jesus. In her weakest moments, the Church is willing to promise whatever people want because she merely wants to please, and before long, religious principles have been handed over on a platter and souls have been sold to a political party or to an agenda. Give to the world anything it wants, and give to God what’s left.

But perhaps even more chilling is a propensity to be listeners of Christ and not followers. On some level, it’s rather easy to relish the stock phrases of Jesus that challenge oppressive systems and promise liberty to the captives and to delight in the inclusive love of a God who constantly forgives and to feel righteous anger at a Jesus who overturns the tables of moneychangers in the temple and stands up for the underdog and to feel a rush of adrenaline when singing the Magnificat and hearing of injustices being righted. Simply put, it's rather easy to be intrigued with Jesus—even perplexed by his teaching—and to gladly hear what he has to say to us. And yet, when it becomes inconvenient to follow him or his words challenge a way of being and living, his teaching is handed over on a silver platter, however reluctantly.

It’s increasingly less obvious that the Church is where we really learn to be spiritually grounded. It’s here, in a parish community, that we’re stabilized amid the fickle winds of a world that’s lost its moorings. It’s here in worship that we find the stability needed to ensure that we’re not spiritual gyrovagues but committed disciples of Jesus. The Mass teaches us that it’s not enough to be intrigued by the words of Jesus or by a sermon that agrees with our point of view. The Mass compels us to go forth from being fed to feed others, to be transformed from simply being delighted by Christ’s gift to being a part of the delight of all God’s beloved children.

There’s no better place to find our spiritual grounding than before the altar of God. Here, we’re invited to submit our own emotional and spiritual vagrancy to loving obedience to Christ. Here, we’re put next to people who think and vote differently from us, who chisel down our rough edges and conceit, and with whom we can receive the Eucharist with gladness and thanksgiving, even if we don’t always see eye to eye. Here, God’s eternal, abiding promise perfects our own fledgling promises, as we strive to be more than those who are simply interested in Christ and his message. Here, we learn to be transformed by that message so that we can be hearers and doers of the word. Here, God shows us that it’s not enough merely to be intrigued by Jesus. We must decide to follow him or not.

And although the cost to follow him is great, the reward is infinitely greater. The reward is that when we allow God to order our lives, we become truly free. We’re no longer pawns in sinful systems of human power. We’re no longer captive to our unstable emotions. We’re free: free to live and love and delight in God and one another. And in that love and delight, we find our true home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 14, 2024

[1] The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry (New York: Vintage, 1998), 7-8.

The Final Laugh

Laughter, like tears, is full of mystery. We don’t always know if someone is crying because they’re sad or hurt or overjoyed or think something is hilarious. Tears emerge from a variety of emotional states. Similarly, laughter could be the mockery of another person’s mistake or laughter at something truly funny or giddy laughter of goofiness or an utterly joyful happiness or the complex laughter at the tragically comedic.

A few years ago, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I was meeting with a group on Zoom. It was the earliest days of the intensified use of virtual meetings, and everyone seemed to be fascinated with other people’s Zoom locations. Conversation partners would ask each other about a picture hanging in the background, because virtual meetings only afforded a narrow view of one’s setting. In this particular meeting, one of the participants had what appeared to be an Episcopal Church welcome sign leaning against a wall in the background. I’m sure you’ve seen the signs all over the country. There’s one hanging right outside this church on Lancaster Avenue. “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,” these signs say, and each sign lists the name of a specific parish.

But the sign leaning against the wall in the background of this Zoom meeting was difficult to decipher. From my vantage point, the sign looked a bit old, rusted even, and the fact that this person had possession of the sign intimated that there must be a story behind it. At some point, another person in the meeting inquired about the sign, and so, the owner of the sign got up and grabbed the sign to bring it closer to the computer screen. And the name of the parish on the sign was. . . wait for it. . . Good Shepherd, Rosemont. And everybody laughed.

Everybody that is except me. At that point, and to no one’s knowledge in that Zoom meeting, I had been called to come to Good Shepherd as the next rector. Although my first reaction was to be offended in a protective way, upon further reflection, I realized that those who laughed weren’t really laughing at this parish. They certainly weren’t laughing at me, because no one knew I would be the next rector here. They were laughing, if implicitly and unconsciously, at what seemed to be the preposterous prospect that Good Shepherd, Rosemont, could survive. Someone, in fact, made a comment to that effect. And the rusted welcome sign, that had either fallen down or been absconded and then ended up in a yard sale was a visible symbol of a parish that was hanging on by a thread.

Laughter isn’t always the best medicine, as some like to say. Laughter is complex. It can wound. And of course, it can cheer people up. But in its most chilling form it can reveal a profound lack of hope. And this is the form of laughter that escapes from the crowds in the house of Jairus’s daughter when Jesus arrives to attend to his dying daughter. The crowds laugh because Jesus has said something that’s rather ridiculous on the surface. He’s been told that Jairus’s daughter is dead, but when he gets to the house and encounters the group of mourners, weeping and wailing, he asks them why they’re upset. The girl is not dead but sleeping, he says. And of course, they laugh. Wouldn’t you?

They laugh because Jesus seems like a silly, naïve person. They laugh because for all intents and purposes the girl has really died, and indeed, we have no reason to doubt that. They laugh because they have no clue about just who this man Jesus is, despite his previous miracles. But we, of course, know that Jesus can raise the dead and give life to what seems to have died. We know that he will be the one to defeat death by his own death. But the crowd in Jairus’s house laughs because, above all, they’ve given up on divine possibilities. They’ve lost hope, if they ever had it to begin with.

If you ask me, this is the most disquieting form of laughter imaginable. Laughter that arises from a loss of hope has a duplicitous air to it, for it outwardly purports to be funny but is twisted on the inside with cynicism, apathy, and an utter unwillingness to embrace mystery and the unknown. The crowds laugh because they’re accustomed to seeking human solutions to human problems. The problem with Jairus’s daughter is that she’s sick—deathly sick—and no one can do anything for her. There’s no human solution to the problem. It’s rather like the case of the hemorrhaging woman who interrupts Jesus’s journey to Jairus’s house. She approaches him in the crowd with the laughable prospect of touching his garments so that she may be healed.

No one laughs at her, but the disciples all but laugh at Jesus. They’re rather cynical with him when he stops and asks who touched him. Can’t you see that there’s a large crowd around you? Why in the world would you ask such a foolish question? They simply don’t get it, just as the crowds in Jairus’s house don’t get it. And because they don’t get it, they laugh.

All the scoffers in these Gospel stories are used to seeking human solutions to human problems. Even the hemorrhaging woman tried it for a while. For twelve years, she sought the wisdom of human doctors, and in her case, it seemed like she went to a fair number of charlatans who took her money but couldn’t deliver and then laughed all the way to the bank. And finally, she decides to go a different route. In Jesus, fully human but also fully divine, she seeks a divine solution to her human problems. In this God-man, who is the perfect image of God, she will find the divine solution to her problem.

And despite thousands of years of Christian witness to the one who brings us divine solutions to human problems, we still live in an age when we’re constantly looking for human solutions to human problems. Searching for divine solutions doesn’t deny our human agency, but it should prompt us to acknowledge that we too frequently lose hope in the One who can do what seems utterly laughable.

In some ways, the Church has forgotten the laughable good news of the Gospel. After all, we supposedly worship a God who gave Sarah and Abraham the gift of children in their old age, who parted the Red Sea to deliver the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, who fed them in the wilderness as they journeyed to the Promised Land, and who sent his beloved Son into the world not to condemn it—despite its profound stubbornness—but to save it and make it whole. We worship this God who did the most laughable thing of all when he raised Jesus from the dead, offering the eternal laugh to the wily lies of the evil one, who had made a living out of giving sin and death more power than they really had.

It should be no surprise that we will be, and probably are, laughed at by others. They laugh that we would take time out of our busy schedules to be here in the middle of summer to worship God. They laugh that we believe that forgiveness should be routinely offered to the worst offenders because sin doesn’t have the power it wants us to think it has. They laugh because we sacrificially give our money and time to ministry that we believe is life-changing, while those who laugh think we’re throwing money at a sinking ship. In short, they’re laughing because we’re putting our faith, trust, and hope in a God who offers divine solutions to human problems.

Those who laughed at the rusted Good Shepherd, Rosemont, welcome sign a few years back were unconsciously subscribing to the popular despair of our age. They couldn’t imagine that a parish that was then close to death could be brought back to life. It’s the same with all in the Church who can only put their hope in the largest churches with the biggest endowments. It's the same in our society, where the decline in churchgoing is automatically equated with the Church’s demise. It’s the same in an overly rational culture that equates lack of physical healing with the absence of God. It’s the same whenever we assume that the impossible is always the impossible. When we’re looking for human solutions to divine problems, a parish like Good Shepherd, Rosemont, seems laughable. But we who are here know better. We know that our story is a vivid example of a divine solution to a human problem from a God who can raise the dead and give the laugh to sin and death.

For those of us who choose not to fear but to believe and to hope, we have the last laugh. But this laugh is not at anyone’s expense. It’s not cynical or nervous. It’s not an expression of despair. It’s a laugh of profound joy that’s rooted in the hope that, no matter the odds, God will turn all our human expectations upside down.

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
June 30, 2024

Towards the Other Shore

It must have happened in the evening, a couple of days after we installed the Memorial to the Lost on our lawn in memory of victims of gun violence in this county. I noticed it the next day. First, I saw that some of the T-shirts in the memorial were askew and uprooted. Graffitied on a flyer kiosk installed as part of the monument were these words: “This religion is responsible for the destruction of people and the world.” I was taken aback.

And then as I walked my dog Beau further down Lancaster Avenue, my heart sank even further as I saw the shattered glass on our shadow box sign. That sign is intended to be a gesture of welcome to our neighbors, to those walking by for a stroll or on the way to work, and to those waiting patiently for a bus at the bus stop. The sign, with its multi-colored banner, clearly announces that this parish is a place where all are welcome and can find belonging. Above all, it’s a place where all are intended to feel safe and to know that they are loved by God, without question.

My first reaction to the act of vandalism on our property was to assume that it must have been an angry response to the installation of the Memorial to the Lost. I reported the vandalism to the police, thinking that would probably be the end of it. But a few days later, I was once again walking Beau when I saw a police officer knocking on the church’s office door, even though it was after 6:30 p.m. When I asked the officer if I could help her, she explained that a person had been apprehended in response to the vandalism on our property. Did we want to press charges? It turned out that the person in question had been triggered not by the Memorial to the Lost but by the multi-colored banner of welcome on our church sign. In a confusing but understandable mixture of emotions, a person who had once felt excluded by the Church then enacted their resulting anger on the sign of a church that announces itself as a place of inclusion. Violence begets violence, doesn’t it?

I told the police officer that I’d have to speak with our vestry about whether we would press charges. We wouldn’t gain anything from it, and I wasn’t sure how it would be helpful. Our collective response crystallized in a vestry exchange over email, when one member had a compassionate suggestion. Instead of pressing charges, what if we sent a message to the person who committed the crime? What if we explained that, in a gesture of forgiveness, we were sorry for the hurt this person had experienced by the Church in the past? What if we offered a different witness to the transactional retribution of our society? What if we offered a healing message of peace?

Peace is indeed what has been breathed upon the Church by our Lord, and it isn’t ours to control or possess. It’s Christ’s hallowed gift to us and the world. This is the peace we exchange week after week halfway through Mass, which is far more profound than a handshake or smile. It’s something to be handled delicately and with reverence, because Christ’s gift carries great power. It heals, but it also dispels our fear. It calms the storms of our lives, but it causes violence to dissipate before it.

This is the peace that Jesus speaks to the wind and the sea when he’s in the boat with the disciples during a terrifying storm. Our English translation uses exclamation marks to give emphasis to Jesus’s words, but in the Greek, there are no such tonal cues. The exclamation marks make Jesus’s words sound as if Jesus is fighting the wind and the sea or yelling at them to cease. But I wonder if his speech was firm and yet gentle. He was speaking words of peace, and I suspect his manner of speaking was peaceful, too. His peace is reverential. Just a few words, Peace, be still, and the deadly natural forces of the chaotic universe are put in their place. Or better yet, they find order and calm under the sovereignty of the one who is Lord of all creation.

And curiously, the disciples’ response to Jesus’s action is awe and reverence, but depending on how the Greek is translated, it may be that they simply ended up more afraid. As one translation has it, they were “enormously afraid.”[1] But of what were they afraid? They were, of course, in awe of one who could calm the threatening seas, but they must also have been afraid, with some measure of anxiety, of this mysterious person, whom they thought they knew but really didn’t. Were they afraid of his ability to be so supernaturally calm amid a storm while dispelling any looming devastation with just a few direct words? But even more troubling, were they afraid of what their Lord was demanding of them in discipleship?

Jesus’s calming of the storm is both a demonstration of his miraculous power and a visible sign of an invisible power far more awe-inspiring than even the subversion of natural forces. Faith in the peace of the Lord of all creation is a daring, even crazy, willingness to believe that however real the storms of life are, they have no power to destroy our lives. Our true lives and identities are found in Christ, who gives us life even beyond the grave.[2]

The disciples took Jesus with them in the boat, just as he was. And who he was is who he still is. He is the one who commands us to push away from the shore and venture to the other side. For those earliest disciples, it was a risky and frightening move from Jewish to Gentile territory. For us, going to the other shore means pushing away from our comfort zones. Crossing the sea is getting into the boat with Jesus, just as he is, and setting off into the unknown.

And we don’t know what is waiting for us on the other side. It may be hostility because we carry the Gospel on behalf of a Church that has wounded too many in the past and still wounds people, just as she wounded the person who shattered the glass on our sign. On the other shore, we’ll undoubtedly encounter a culture that might not always intend to be hostile but that constantly demands more time and energy and money from us, while pulling us away from mission. On the other shore, we find even fellow Christians who think about God differently from us, or who think we’ve lost our way, or who might not even think we’re Christians at all. On the other shore, we find the uncharted frontier of the Church’s future in an uncertain world.

To take Jesus in the boat with us, just as he is, is to push away from the shore with Jesus on his own terms, not on ours. It’s refusing to make him into an on-demand magician but to accept his answer to our prayers as his own will. It’s to embrace a Lord who doesn’t return violence for violence but offers forgiveness and unending peace. It’s to accept the presence of a Lord who doesn’t affirm our complacency and comfort but coaxes us into risky discipleship. It’s to accept the mission of a Lord who tells us that we need to cross to the other side and that we can’t stay just where we are because discipleship is about growth and sacrifice. It’s no wonder, then, that the disciples are “enormously afraid” at the end! They’re beginning to understand that to follow Jesus is to push off from the shore in faith with only his peace as protection in a hostile world.

We, too, like those early disciples are probably more than a little afraid. We’re probably afraid of the unknown, of how to be a part of the Church’s growth in an age of malaise, of how to build vibrant ministry amid financial challenges and aging buildings, of how to be a safe and viable place of welcome in a culture that is increasingly reactionary and in a Church that’s often confused. The corresponding temptation is to stay in our shells, retreat behind our stone walls, and refrain from crossing to the other shore. But to do so, is to leave Jesus outside the boat and to ignore his summons to push away into the unknown. The smashed glass of our shadow box sign is only one visible sign of the storms we might encounter as we push off from the shore to engage in ministry on the other side. It’s not without risks, hurt, pain, or some cost.

Sadly, even though we reached out to the police, we were never able to convey our message of forgiveness to the person who vandalized our sign. But I hope our implicit message to that wounded soul is one small step towards claiming the peace that Christ has breathed upon us. I pray that our refusal to inflict retribution as a means of perpetuating the cycle of violence is a visible, if human, manifestation of the peace that always calms and still the storms of our lives. Being a disciple of Jesus is more than saying we’ll follow him. It means being in the boat with Jesus, on his terms, just as he was and is and always will be. And no matter the storms we’ll face in that boat, Christ’s peace is always with us. It’s his eternal gift. And nothing can take that gift away from us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2024

[1] David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2023)

[2] See Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 146.

Waiting, Watching, and Reaping

Of all the things my Cajun grandfather cooked, it was his roux that held the greatest mystery. It was a frequent familial topic of discussion. Other family members would try to get their roux dark enough to lend the right amount of richness to the etouffee, and frequently, it would be either too light or it would burn.

Roux in Cajun dishes is the secret ingredient, and it’s the foundation of dishes like etouffee and gumbo. A little vegetable oil or butter and some flour, that’s all. But like making a risotto, you have to stir and monitor roux constantly. Walking away from it for even a minute can mean you’ve lost everything. Stir and stir and stir. Watch and watch and watch. And at some point—and this is where the mystery lies—the roux will be ready. If your roux cooks just a second too long, it will burn. It's a bit like performing a chemical titration. One drop too many can kill the experiment.

Most recipes about making a dark roux will give you descriptions of the color of the roux. It should be the color of peanut butter, some say. But there’s something more to judging the status of a roux simmering on the stovetop. The ultimate judge of its readiness can’t be a visual description in a recipe, nor can it be a defined amount of time. So many factors are involved: the type of cooktop, levels of heat, kinds of oil, types of flour. The ultimate judge is a kind of sixth sense in the cook, who can tell when the point of perfection has been reached by smell and sight. I wish I’d asked my PawPaw how he could tell when a roux was done, but I bet he wouldn’t have given a specific cooking time or a particular shade of brown. I think he would have said something like, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

There’s a mystery to making a good roux that alludes even the best of cooks. It’s annoying in its lack of specificity and so is unlike the chemistry of baking. It’s not a science; it’s an art. And this indefinable art and its accompanying air of mystery are frustrating to those of us who are generally impatient and like clearcut answers. Cooking up a delicious dark roux will vary based on your environment and ingredients and pace of stirring. It requires settling into the moment with patience and attentiveness. It necessitates giving up control to all those unpredictable factors that are operating behind the scenes. But despite these uncontrollable factors, the art of discerning when the roux is ready can be acquired only with time.

And time is the key that unlocks some of the mystery to Jesus’s parables. You must spend time with them, and even that’s not enough because parables speak of something that is timeless. I don’t know how a Biblical literalist reckons with parables because they’re meant to frustrate and challenge, not to give answers. To literalize them is to destroy them. There’s no secret code to unlocking a parable. A parable invites us into a world of mystery, a world in which we must live and breathe and spend some time. And when speaking about the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t limit himself to one shining parable. He must tell several, each of which can’t fully encapsulate the meaning of that mysterious and glorious kingdom.

Being a good agrarian man, our Lord naturally gravitated to images of planting. He compares the kingdom of God to the scattering of seed upon the ground, which would, of course, make complete sense to a farmer, whose life depends on the weather and infinite patience. It would probably even make some sense to an avid gardener who gardens as an avocation. But it may be bewildering to those of us without a green thumb and especially to those of us who live in a culture that operates at ninety miles an hour with no time to breathe and wait and watch. If you ask me, the most surprising thing of all in this image of scattered, growing seed is its uncontrollability.

This parable must frustrate the living daylights out of anyone who adores planning and wants to be in control. The man in the parable does practically nothing. He scatters the seed and then waits. And waits and waits. And watches and watches and watches. Meanwhile, the earth has a mind and agency of its own, producing first the blade, the ear, and then the full grain in the ear. Who knows how long this would take. And while there are signs that the harvest is nearing ripeness, Jesus gives no discernable length. There’s no recipe for the readiness of this roux. The laborer waits and waits and waits until the harvest is ripe.

The problem is that this may seem like a recipe for laziness or inactivity. Perhaps an irresponsible reading of this parable gives license to those in the modern Church who say they’re managing decline or who are inclined to give up on the Church’s future altogether. But nowhere does Jesus’s parable equate waiting with lack of agency. In fact, this parable demands the most vigilant form of agency. It demands that the laborer know when the harvest is ripe, at once, for the sickle. The cook can’t leave the roux for even a second on the stovetop lest it burn.

There are all kinds of reasons why this parable frustrates. There’s, above all, the mystery of time. There’s the surrendering of control to the timeline of the environment. But there’s also the knowledge that to know when the harvest is ripe we must have lived. We must have lived through some crops that we failed to harvest in time. We must have lived through disappointments of too much rain or not enough. We must have been forced to wait with excruciating patience until the time was right. We must have gone through some trial and error to hone our skills of discernment, to know just when the harvest was ready for the sickle. We must have cooked gallons of roux and seen and smelled them before we could say like my PawPaw, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

But despite some of the frustrating aspects of this parable, I find it to be one of the most encouraging for the modern Church. It’s unbelievably good news. It doesn’t give us easy answers or a definitive key to discerning the ripeness of a particular harvest. It simply assures of us something that many Christians have too easily forgotten or ignored. It comforts us with the good news that the harvest will come one day. It assures us that in God’s kingdom, there will always be growth, and the Gospel will live on and never disappear.

Sure, experiencing the fruit of God’s kingdom may take far longer than we imagined or would like. It will undoubtedly require infinite patience. Chiefly, it challenges those of us who like control to cede that control to God, who alone gives growth to the seed in God’s good time. In this, there’s hope for us when the pews seem far too empty. There’s hope when we’re confronted with the pessimism of statistics trying to predict the future of the church. The problem with all those supposedly clear signs is that they wrest control of the kingdom from God and give it to humans. And this is a grave error.

So, instead of predictions and statistics, we can opt for something less definable and more mysterious, however frustrating it may be. It’s rather like making a roux. Jesus’s parable suggests that our role in God’s kingdom is not to claim total responsibility for the growth of the Gospel or even to control it. Our job is to scatter the seeds and wait. And wait. And wait. But while we’re waiting, and through troublesome seasons and destructive weather, we learn to pray. We learn that if the bedrock of our lives is prayer, and if we are patient, we’ll learn the art of discernment. We’ll learn how to keep stirring the roux while attentively but non-anxiously watching its color and smelling its aroma. And we wait some more. And we continue to pray. And we watch, and we wait yet some more. And then in God’s good time, with plenty of living and lots of time, we’ll eventually know when the harvest is ripe. The roux will be ready. We’ll know it because we can see it. And we’ll be able to see it because we have been trusting in God and saying our prayers. And so, we’ll put in the sickle, and we’ll give thanks because, as promised, the harvest has come.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 16, 2023

What's Good for You

Because there are no Publix, Harris Teeter, or Kroger grocery stories within several hundred miles of here, I do most of my shopping at Trader Joe’s. It may be the only store where I’m routinely asked, “did you find everything you wanted in your visit today?” I almost invariably answer, “yes.” And, truth be told, the local Trader Joe’s store usually has everything I want to buy.

But there are times when I want to respond with something other than yes. “Actually, I was really looking for the pumpkin rolls that you only seem to carry in the fall. I would really love it if you carried those all-year round. Oh, and sometimes you have lasagna noodles, but sometimes you don’t. Could you look into that? And the spicy trail mix that makes such a great snack, well, I haven’t seen that in a while.”

I’m just as much a product of our consumer culture as the next person, and this consumerism has only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic. “Could you alter the camera angle on the livestream just a bit,” someone types in the Facebook comments section. “And while you’re at it, the volume is kind of low.” “I’m never going to that restaurant again because they downsized their portions during the pandemic.” “I simply can’t go to church there because they moved the service thirty minutes later, and the sound system is horrible.” Perhaps I exaggerate, but you get the picture, I’m sure.

And maybe as a reaction to our consumer culture, I’ve found myself with a greater appreciation for farm-to-table restaurants, where the menu changes according to the season, rather like Trader Joe’s. You get what’s fresh and available. Seldom will you be bored, and almost always you will be surprised. You might have really wanted the meatloaf, but it’s summer, so you’re more likely to find a lighter dish on the menu.

I enjoy being surprised at Trader Joe’s or a farm-to-table restaurant, even if I’m also disappointed when I can’t get what I want. There’s something beneficial to me in such disappointment and in the accompanying surprise of available options. I don’t really need the pumpkin rolls. I can survive quite well without them, and something else can adequately serve as a substitute. The grocery store—and more importantly, the world—doesn’t revolve around my wants, needs, and desires. Complaining does no good. It’s better for my soul to accept gratefully what is available to me. It’s good for me.

But complaining, mumbling, and grumbling is the usual response in John’s Gospel when Jesus announces what’s good for those he came to love and save. They’re unable to recognize what’s good for them, and what’s good for them is Jesus, the bread of life. Just who does he think he is by suggesting that he is God? And how grotesque it is to speak of eating his flesh! To contemplate drinking his blood would have been utterly offensive to Jews for whom blood was the locus of life in a living animal and therefore forbidden to be consumed.

We need to go back all the way to the Books of Exodus and Numbers, to discover the roots of St. John’s Bread of Life discourse, which we’ve heard today. Do you remember what happened? As soon as God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and brought them out into freedom, they began to complain and grumble. “Why have you brought us out of slavery to allow us to starve in the desert? And there’s no water to drink.” The Israelites whined about the garlic, cucumbers, leeks, melons, and onions to eat back in Egypt. “It would have been so much better if they were back there!” God’s provision in the land of freedom wasn’t good enough for them, because it wasn’t what they wanted. To them, it wasn’t enough.

When the Lord sent manna to sate the people’s hunger, we’re told that he did so because he heard their grumblings. But when the people saw the manna, they said, “What is it?” You could almost see their upper lips curl in distaste at this strange, fine, flaky substance on the ground. The amazing thing is that when they ate it, nobody had too much or too little. Everyone had just what they needed, no more, no less. They had what was good for them.

And still, God’s people couldn’t follow his instructions. “Waste nothing,” he said. But they did waste the gift, and the manna left over stank to high heaven and became riddled with maggots. God told them to store up everything they needed for the sabbath, and still some disobeyed him by searching for food on the sabbath. The people just couldn’t do things on God’s terms. They had to do things as they wanted.

It turns out that our modern consumer culture isn’t so modern. There’s something in our DNA as humans—pride, sin, selfishness—that makes it very difficult for us to do what we don’t want to do or feel like doing. And oddly enough, sometimes what we don’t want to do is precisely what’s good for us. So, when God provided manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, he quite deliberately didn’t give them what they wanted or asked for. He gave them what they needed, no more, no less. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. God gave them what was ultimately good for them.

The feast of Corpus Christi is a celebration of the supreme gift that God has given us, the gift of the Body and Blood of his Son Jesus Christ in the sacrament of the Mass. God has given us precisely what’s good for us. And as St. John reminds us, in consuming the Body and Blood of our Lord, we find eternal life, right here, right now. In doing so, we shall live forever.

In the Eucharist, God has given us not necessarily what we asked for or what we expected or even what we wanted, but it certainly is what we need. It’s what’s good for us. We should eat this gift of Jesus’s very flesh and blood always and frequently. The Eucharistic gift is no spiritual menu catered to our whims and desires. It’s a menu that is everlasting, constant, and always intended for our good. No matter what we’ve done and no matter how recalcitrant and ungrateful we may be, God’s gift of himself in the sacramental feast is always extended to us out of his infinite mercy and compassion.

But we are a complaining people, aren’t we? We live in an age where there’s never enough. Why, then, would we expect a bit of bread and wine to give us eternal life? How could that ever be enough? It’s far easier to complain and fail to be grateful. It’s far easier to see scarcity where there’s hidden abundance. It’s far easier to control a gift on demand rather than receive it according to the giver’s time. It’s far easier to grumble and favor certainty over mystery.

The Eucharist is God’s loving answer to our ingratitude. It’s God’s assurance that there’s always enough in a world that thinks there’s never enough. In the Eucharist, God gives us what we can’t control and what we can only receive. The Eucharist is exactly what’s good for us in God’s inverted world, where faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains and where every hair on our head is counted and where even the one lost sheep out of the hundred is searched for and found.

To have eternal life is to live as if what we have and who we are is enough in the eyes of God. Eternal life means living as if the impossible is possible and as if five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish can feed 5,000 people. Eternal life means that in coming here week after week and feasting on Christ we will never be hungry again.

So, eat the bread and drink the cup in good times and bad. Partake of the feast when you feel like it and especially when you don’t. Feast on it when you’re struggling with your faith and also when you’re certain about it. Share this sacred meal when you’re happy and particularly when you’re sad. Receive the gift, even if you didn’t ask for it, even if the wafer is small and tastes like cardboard. Drink the cup, even if it seems like it’s unsanitary and the wine is cheap. “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus said. Receive this gift, it's good for you. And when you do, you shall live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of Corpus Christi
June 2, 2024