As I walked out of the sacristy, I was surprised to see them. They were two young adults, standing right in front of the Communion rail pointing at the stained-glass window and talking about it. “Hi,” I said. “Hi!” the woman returned. “You have a nice smile!” She was bright and cheerful. Her companion was a bit more morose, however. They continued to wander around the church, admiring the furnishings as I proceeded to set up for the concert that evening.
Soon, the couple approached me. They had some questions. The man started off with a zinger. “Do you think there’s evil around here, in this church?” I wasn’t quite sure what to say, except to acknowledge that I’m convinced evil exists. And, yes, I do think it infiltrates churches from time to time. But I shared my sincere belief that, as a Christian, I also believe that evil does not have the last word. We disavow it at our peril, and at the same time, it’s possible to be so preoccupied with resisting evil that it, paradoxically, begins to have more power over us than it should. I told the young man that I thought that prayer has healing power, and it’s something with which evil does not easily contend.
The man’s companion, the woman, in keeping with her radiant personality, was much more ebullient. She smiled and told me how she thought that love was the essence of everything. She said, “I just think that we’re all supposed to love each other, and that’s what everything is really about,” or at least it was something to that effect. The man and woman were like two extremes: one joyfully optimistic with a tendency towards a pan-religious understanding of moral values, the other a bit obsessed with the world’s darkness and evil.
The man said, “I look around at the world, and I just think we must be living in the end times. There’s just so much awful stuff out there.” I half agreed with him. No, I don’t think we’re living in the end times, but yes, I do think the world’s often a mess. I told the couple that I thought we weren’t supposed to know when the end of the age would be, and I believed the best way to deal with evil was to recognize its presence and then gently avoid letting it into our minds and souls. Let it go. Don’t fight it.
This man and this woman who stumbled into the church emblemized two ways of thinking in our increasingly polarized world. One attempts to reduce all religions to a happy-go-lucky, abstruse concept of love in which we all just need to get along. It’s perhaps naïve about the intractable tensions and persistent anguish of earthly life. But the other perspective is pessimistic, even reactive. The world is evil, and that will never change. The best we can hope for is the end of time as we know it, when we’ll be delivered from this sorry state. The world is something to be escaped.
This is the view of the Left Behind novels and other apocalyptic literature where the bad people are left behind to deal with the hell that is earth, and the righteous are raptured out of this world. This is also the view, if more subtle, of many Christians these days. In a world that seems increasingly more secularized and even hostile to religion, it’s easy to cast ourselves in the victim role, where it’s us versus them. Everyone is against us. Society is against us. No one cares about moral values anymore. Traditions are being lost. So, we must fight against it. Fight, fight, fight. And if you don’t fight, you lose.
Look around, and you will see Christian reactivity everywhere. The Great Litany compels us to “beat down Satan under our feet.” A painted shield in our cloister by the office door shows St. Dunstan stomping on the devil. The caption is “St. Dunstan gives the devil his due.” Evil is a scary thing, and it’s most certainly real. But sometimes we are unnecessarily violently and reactive against it. Wouldn’t it be better simply to acknowledge it, firmly renounce it, and then refuse to let it have any power over us? Doesn’t reactivity at some point end up giving evil more power than it really has or deserves?
If we want to find the perfect example of confident peace and stability in a reactive world, we need look no further than Jesus Christ. He’s the one who calms the storms while everyone else in the boat is losing their minds. He refuses to return violence with violence. He tells the disciples that when they are in the mission field and people refuse to listen to them, they should simply shake the dust off their shoes and move on. He doesn’t take the bait of petty arguments in which his opponents try to engage him. He resists Satan in the wilderness without fighting him. And in his high priestly prayer in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is the epitome of prayerful calm as he both recognizes the presence of evil in the world and also entrusts the world to his disciples.
Yes, the world hates them because the world will always hate anyone who is committed to the upside-down values of the gospel. Yes, the evil one is out there, always waiting to ensnare the lover of Christ. Yes, Jesus is not of the world, nor are the disciples of the world. And yet—and yet—God the Father has sent Jesus into the world. Indeed, he was sent into the world not to condemn it, but to save it, to love it, to redeem it. And so, the disciples are being sent by Christ not away from the world as if they could be raptured from its perils but into the world. They are sent into the world because it’s worth saving.
To forsake the world, escape it, or fight it is to give up on it. But how can we give up on a world made by the hand of God and deemed very good? How can we give up on a world in which Jesus himself lived, and for which he died and rose again? How can we give up on a world to which heaven deigns to come down in every Eucharist? Isn’t there some middle ground between naïve overlooking of the world’s systemic sin and an obsession with it? Isn’t there some place between the extreme cheerfulness of the young woman I met and her somber companion?
It's not difficult for me to point out the darkness to you or the ways in which every one of us is and will be hated by the world. Just look outside the church doors at the eighty T-shirts on our lawn, memorializing the victims of gun violence in this county. The youngest victim was only twelve years old. As we speak, civil discourse appears to be breaking down, and lawmakers reject any consensus out of spite. Hateful speech and rhetoric are signs of power in a hard-hearted world, and compassion is seen as weakness. To retaliate means you’re strong, to forgive means you’re a sucker. Is there anything more difficult to live in the world but not be of the world? How can we be of the world without forsaking it? How can we live in it without selling our souls to the devil?
But the answer is not in fighting the world, nor does the answer lie in throwing up our hands in defeat. The answer seems to be in planting our feet more firmly on the soil of this earth, the soil that God made and called good, anchored in the hope that holy living can re-sanctify the world. We can do this with integrity because Jesus himself planted his own feet on the soil of this lovely world that God made. This is why our Anglo-Catholic forebears planted their churches in the darkest, grimmest parts of cities. They refused to run from the world’s problems but chose to go into the very midst of them.
At the end of his earthly life, Jesus prayed that the disciples and all who would follow them, including us, might be consecrated in the truth. And the truth is this: our home is in two places, heaven and on earth. The truth is that God created this world for goodness and still sees it as good. The truth is that God will never give up on this world. The truth is that God is calling us to be holy so that this world can also be holy.
What would happen if we started living in this world as if we were not of the world? What if we refused to be party to the open hostility and mean-spiritedness of our broken political system? What if we said no to the incessant demands of our culture that asks us to do more and more and more, and be more and more and more while giving less and less and less to the Church? What if we refused to feed the beast that demands more of our time and money? What if we faithfully worked our jobs and went dutifully to our schools but also chose to give more time and more money to our churches so they could help call the world to holiness? What if we brought our faith into our lives outside the Church? What if we trusted God’s view of us—that we are loved and beautiful in his sight—rather than the world’s, which tells us that we need its products and affirmations to be worthy? What if we started living this way, and teaching our children to live this way, still in the world but not of it?
Not long from now, at the end of this Mass, you and I will be sent by God into the world. It would be irresponsible to hole up inside this place as a refuge from the world. But we are asked to come here weekly, so that we can be made holy. We’re asked to take something of this place into the world, to pray for it, to call the world to the holiness of which it’s capable, to live as if the world can be better than it is while refusing to succumb to its darkest behavior. Because no matter how much we want to shun this world, God has never given up on it. And God never will.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day