The Curtain Goes Up

One of the cultural casualties of this pandemic is the inability to attend live performances. Whether it’s a symphony concert or a play or a musical, it’s been a number of months since any of us could sit in a darkened theatre and watch the curtain go up on a living work of art.

Do you enjoy the drama of the curtain rising? I certainly do. I recall sitting on a high school stage in a concert band, waiting for that thrilling moment when the curtain would rise, the audience would clap, and the music would begin.

If there’s not a curtain on stage, I miss it, quite frankly. I don’t like seeing all the performers assemble before hearing what they have to offer. I like the surprise of the artists being revealed at once, as a collective group, ready to entertain and interpret a musical work or a literary drama.

We might not be able to safely visit a theatre these days, but today, in this holy place, the curtain is about to go up on a fantastic scene. This scene is not a work of fiction. It’s not a show that lasts only for the hour plus that we are here today. It’s a dramatic scene, and yet it’s a reality that is completely true.

The author of the Revelation to John has set the stage for this scene. And he offers us a window into a vision that confounds our minds and which I imagine is quite difficult for us to comprehend.

The incomprehensibility of much of this revelation to John, might suggest that we need to solve a puzzle. We want to know exactly who the people in the heavenly vision are. We hope to decipher who God’s elect are. And, we wonder, are we part of this company? Who’s in, who’s out? What’s the great ordeal? And on and on. . .

But John is not presenting us with a puzzle to solve. A great work of art is not some mystery to be decoded, and the Revelation to John is not a text for us to predict the future, or to judge who’s in and who’s out of God’s favor, or to prophesy the end of the world. John’s vision is simple that: it’s a vision, a showing forth of God’s saving acts that break into our present time.

John’s vision is where the curtain goes up on a drama that we are participating in today. It’s a startling glimpse, if for a time, into a dramatic reality that is true, just as it was for John and just as it is for us.

Imagine with me, for a moment, this astounding vision. The curtain rises on a great heavenly throne room, where in the center, is a great Lamb, the great Shepherd of the flock, the Good Shepherd. And around him are people, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, speaking in a great variety of tongues, shouting, and singing, not in conflict or accusation but in unbounded joy. They form a circle, and the Lamb in their midst is the sole focus of their attention.

They are seemingly unconcerned with themselves. True, they have known pain and suffering. Their journey has not always been easy. But in the throne room, they are somehow at peace with this past memory. Their tears have been wiped away by the Good Shepherd himself. They don’t judge one another or hurl accusations against their companions. They are simply dancing, an eternal dance to the most exquisite music you have ever heard. And the focus of all they say and do and see and hear is the Lamb at the center.

This is nothing any of us has ever encountered. Our earthly experiences are wholly different. In the theatre of life, we often feel helpless in our seats, watching the curtain rise on a drama that is horrific and that we are helpless to change. Frequently, we are surprised by these visions. We settle into our seats for a comforting play, and we witness the horrors of human rage and deceit played out before us, and we can’t understand how the drama went wrong. And we are stuck in the middle of the row of seats, unable to escape the mayhem.

In our earthly visions, people from various tribes and people and nations rarely circle up to focus on something greater than themselves. More typically, they face off in opposing lines, hurling insults or destructive objects against one another. There is no Lamb obviously in the midst of these scenes.

But today, we have been presented with another vision. So settle in. This is a drama unlike any you have ever experienced. I hope the suspense is getting to you. Today the curtain will go up here in this nave, towards the back, in a small room off to the side.

In the center of this room, the curtain will go up on a portal into heaven itself. Here heaven comes down, but as we participate in this very real vision, we are also taken up into heaven, too. At the center of this room, is a spring of living water, present in the baptismal font. This is the water of creation, over which God’s Spirit moved in the beginning. This is the water of the Red Sea, through which the Israelites were led to freedom by God’s gracious hand. This is the water of the Jordan in which Jesus himself was baptized.

Jesus, of course, needed no purification himself, but as St. Gregory of Nazianzus has told us, the purpose of his baptism by John was “to hallow water,”[1] so that we will no longer be thirsty. We are offered sacred water so that we can be cleansed and have our robes made white in his very blood. Out of that font in the back of this church is a spring of the water of life, and it never runs dry.

To that spring of living water, we will carry Iris Carter Austen. Iris will be a participant in this great drama we experience today, although she is not the protagonist or primary actor; that is God himself.

When the curtain goes up on this drama, for a time, we will be in heaven itself. The veil between this world and the next will be pierced, and we will see a great company around God’s heavenly throne. There are the saints who have gone before us, known and unknown. There is St. Mary, and St. John, and St. Francis, and also those beloved of us who have entered into the nearer presence of God. There are the angels, whom we’ll later hear singing with us, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts” before Christ comes to meet us in bread and wine.

Those we once knew in this life, will seem familiar, and yet different. Their idiosyncrasies and rough edges will be somewhat smoothed away. Their tendencies to be critical or judgmental or aggressive will not be there, because they will be holding hands with everyone in that great circle. Their eyes will be fixed on one thing only, the center of the circle where the Lamb, the Good Shepherd reigns.

The tears they once shed over this broken world and one another’s pain have been wiped away, or are being wiped away, by that gentle and powerful Lamb at the center.

And to this central throne, the source of the spring of living water, we will bring little Iris. Christ himself will hallow the water at the font for us, and into this living water, Iris will die to sin, through Christ’s own death, and rise to new life cleansed from sin through Christ’s own resurrection.

In heaven the glorious company of the saints will sing and sing and sing. With them, we will lift our voices, and Iris will become a part of this great company of people from all tribes and peoples and nations, the Body of Christ.

And Iris, like those around the throne, will be sealed on her forehead and marked as Christ’s own forever. This indelible seal will be with her forever, a mark of whose she is, a mark of her destiny to be with God.

And then, at some point, reluctantly, the curtain will go down on this drama. Life will again seem normal to us, and we will perhaps wonder if it was just a dream. Was it simply a figment of our imaginations? Was it wishful thinking? We will then sit helpless as the curtain goes up on a raging drama around us, where no one circles up because they have forgotten how, and God is far from the center, and where the springs of water are all dried up. Here people are hungry and crying ceaselessly, and the singing has devolved into rancor.

But the challenge for us today is this: will we forget the vision we are about to glimpse in just a few minutes? Will the present dramas of violence and hate and division conquer our memory? Will they tempt us to escape this world instead of remembering the seal on our own foreheads, which compels us to transform darkness and evil into truth and light, with God’s help? Will we constantly come back time and again to this glorious vision that we are so privileged to witness today?  

The presentation of Iris at the font is a gift to us all. It is a gift and a charge to remember our own baptisms. For some, it may be an inspiration to be baptized. It is a charge to constantly recall, even if it requires our full mental stamina, the vision we will soon behold. It is a charge to hold this vision with us in thick and thin.

See this vision with me again as the curtain rises. At its center is a wellspring of living water. It is the water of deliverance. It is the living water that alone quenches our thirst. Reigning over it is the Good Shepherd, who alone is our Truth, who alone is our Peace. And we hear his gentle words to us, “Come to me.” I, alone, will suffice. I, alone, will shelter you forever.

Now, prepare yourselves. The actors are assembling and the orchestra is tuning up. The drama is about to begin. The curtain is about to rise. And when it does, we, for a time, will be in heaven itself. Our voices will be united as never before. We will hear a singing unlike any you’ve ever experienced. And if you can, stay with this vision, hold it in your heart, and take it out into the world with you and never let it go.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
All Saints’ Day 2020

[1] St. Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 87.

Both Sides of the Coin

Flip a coin, and it’s either heads or tails. This is a tried and true way of making a random but fair decision. Who gets the first kickoff at the football game? Or which child gets to be first in the game at the party. Heads or tails, which is it?

Whichever it is, a decision is made. It’s one or the other: it’s either heads or tails. You can’t have both. This is something of what Jesus confronts in the loaded question posed by the Pharisees. The Pharisees have set Jesus up for failure, either way you slice it. If you agree that one can pay taxes to the Roman government, then you are, in some sense, betraying your brother and sister Judeans who are being oppressed by Roman rule. You also risk offending God by giving more praise to Caesar the emperor. On the other hand, by refusing to pay taxes, you commit treason against the Roman government. So which is it: heads or tails?

Not for the first time, Jesus is unbelievably clever. It’s heads and tails, he says. You can pay taxes to Caesar and at the same time give God his due. They are not mutually exclusive. The Pharisees are boxed into a corner. They have been bested by Jesus. They leave, marveling, but they will be back.

But today, let’s stay with the coin that gets flipped. There may have been no literal flipping of a coin in Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees, but those Pharisees were asking Jesus to pick a side. And, in the wily scenario in which they try to entrap Jesus, you couldn’t be on both sides. It was either heads or tails.

The coin that the Pharisees presented to Jesus was unlike our American coins. Think of the penny: on one side is an image of Abraham Lincoln, along with the words “in God we trust.” On the other is the United States motto: e pluribus unum. It seems that, even in a nation founded on the separation of Church and state, God and government are intended as two sides of the same coin.

This wasn’t the case with the coin Jesus asked the Pharisees to produce. This coin established quite clearly that the emperor, Caesar Augustus Tiberius, was a part of the lineage of emperors that had acquired near divine status. This two-sided coin was all about Caesar. God was nowhere to be found on it.

We might ask the same question the Pharisees directed to Jesus: is it lawful to pay taxes? Is it lawful to be invested in a secular government? Should we have any part in the affairs of the world, or should we run away from it? Flip the coin: heads or tails? If you pick heads, well, you get some reference to God. If you pick tails, then you’re only in the civic sphere. But flip the coin, and you know that you can’t choose both sides.

Or at least, that’s what many would have us believe, even today. And there are many who want to trip us up, just like those who did the same to Jesus. In our increasingly polarized world, we are told that we always need to flip coins. Heads or tails? Pick one, but don’t pick both. Some would like to blur the lines between state and religion, even at the risk of selling a corrupt Christianity. Pick one leader, and you get Christianity with it. Pick the wrong leader, and you’re on the dark side. Modern hypocrites proclaim that if support this candidate, you are supporting the ways of God. If you vote that way, you are on the side of evil. Others say that you can only have the worldly ruler and God is irrelevant.

Choosing a side is unavoidable in some sense. You have to vote for one candidate for a particular office. And it may be that one candidate represents a more just and godly path. That’s clear enough. But there are some who want to force us into dueling sides where there need not be a duel. Some people are more interested in throwing down the gauntlet when there’s really no gauntlet to throw.

And this is what Jesus confronted, and this is what Jesus upended. Jesus was not some mealy-mouthed politician. Jesus showed us quite unequivocally that one can indeed render to the emperor his things and also be utterly devoted to God.

And yet this can seem like a difficult thing, today, can’t it? In some places, the government embodies much that stands against what God desires for the world. Rulers throughout history have embodied evil, and people have rightly resisted, and continue to resist, this evil with all their being.

And so, returning to the central question posed by the Pharisees to Jesus, can you render to the government its due while also being loyal to God? And Jesus says yes. Jesus says that God does not make you pick sides in the way the world so often wants us to.

Here’s the coin that Jesus offers us. On one side is the image of a human being. On the other side, there is a clear reference to God. So, which side do you choose? God or humankind? God or the world? And Jesus’ answer is yes.

Mired in rigidly opposing loyalties, we have forgotten, at times, that loving the world, living in the world, and caring for the world doesn’t have to be at odds with God. It’s part of what loving God is all about.

The human being is not intended to be opposed to God. The human being is made in the image of God, is oriented towards God. And too often, we flip the coin: heads or tails? Which will it be? Choose the world or choose God. Choose those made in the image of God or choose God. And God longs for us to see both sides of the coin.

When we look at both sides of the coin, we see this: on one side the image of a human being, prone to sin, marred by systemic evil in the world, constantly turning her or his back on God but still possessing an internal navigation system magnetically pulled towards God. On the other we see the image of the One who created us and draws us more into his likeness.

The coin handed to us by Jesus is of one piece. It’s not a game of heads or tails. We came from goodness, and although we have lost our way, God intends to draw us back to that primal goodness. The human side of the coin is disfigured and coated with mud from being dropped in the mud too many times, but it’s nothing that a good cleaning wouldn’t fix. When we look at both sides of the coin, we can perhaps remember that we worship a God who humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might share the divine life.

It remains true that too many people do not know how to remain devoted to God and still live in the world. They are so used to picking sides that they can’t integrate both of them. Worldly Caesars threaten to occupy both sides of the coin by usurping some sort of divine status. And God becomes an irrelevant side of the coin. Pick or choose: heads or tails?

But when Jesus gives us permission to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s, he reminds us that we do not have to choose sides. The world does not have to be at odds with God. It can be and often chooses to be, but it doesn’t have to be.

God is not in a game of competition. God does not require our material sacrifices, unlike Caesars who thrive on it. God doesn’t need our money or our worship or anything. God has no need of any of this to be God. God’s very nature is characterized by this freedom, and this is why God is so different from worldly rulers.

But God is deserving of our worship and praise. It is rightly given to him. And when we are told to render to God the things that are God’s, we are asked to render our very selves. It is our duty to offer our selves, our souls and bodies, and our worship and praise to God. It is our duty to integrate our whole lives in this world with the divine call.

The tribute tax about which the Pharisees ask Jesus was required of Judeans who were under oppressive rule by a hated government. It was a government that was an alien intrusion on a people who were yet required to pay money for being oppressed subjects. But our status as citizens in God’s kingdom is different. God requires no payment for citizenship in the kingdom of heaven except the offering of our whole selves to him.

God does not need to be fed with material things as a condition of his rule over us. And when God rules over us, it is only to draw us back to himself in love, so that the whole world might be reconciled to God.

When we offer our full selves to God, we begin to reclaim that image of God in which we were all made. Although our loyalty should be unswervingly devoted to God, we can be faithful to God and still live in the world. Indeed, because of the Incarnation, it is imperative that we do so.

In our life in God, there’s no need to choose sides. On one side of the coin, see that human face, tarnished by sin though it may be, and remember that it was wonderfully created in the image of God. The image is still there if you go deep enough. On the other side of the coin, see the image of the One in whose likeness you were made. But never forget who made the coin. Try to recall from whence you came, and know that with God’s grace, that is where he intends for you to end up.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 18, 2020

A Feast Where No One Is Speechless

These days, in the midst of a pandemic, Emily Post’s social etiquette has been completely upended. Accepting invitations to social gatherings is fraught with potential landmines. Some people are rightly reluctant to attend in-person social events because of COVID-19, but many also worry about causing offense when they decline invitations.

Some have a stock list of excuses that stretch the truth in order to save face. How do you avoid risking your health at an outdoor, maskless barbecue? Or do you simply tell the truth and acknowledge that you’re scared of contracting the virus? And will the person who invited you feel shunned or insulted, as if you are assuming that they might be behaving carelessly during a pandemic? It’s messy, as you can see.

In the marriage feast described by Matthew in today’s Gospel reading, those invited to the feast responded in a whole host of ways. Some simply wouldn’t go. I wonder if they explained why they wouldn’t. Did they make up false excuses for not attending? Or did they own up to the fact that they really didn’t want to go in the first place. Others who were invited clearly stated their excuses, dismissing the invitation as less important than other more pressing business. As for the ones who killed those who invited them, well, one wonders what would elicit such a hostile reaction.

In any case, it’s easy to focus on those who rejected the offer to the feast. They are either snobs or rude or both. They are ungrateful for the kind offer of a lavish feast. And one can sympathize, up to a point, with the king, who becomes angry at the disregard shown for his numerous, generous invitations. We can understand his outrage, at least until he responds with violence himself.

This parable, as many parables do, has a hyperbolic air to it. It’s full of extreme scenarios, which hopefully accomplish what they are intended to do: get our attention. We want to find someone likeable in it, but it’s hard to do so by the end of it. And we too often allegorize these parables in an overly literal way. The king is usually God. The mistreated son is Jesus. And we are the servants.

This is all fine and well until the king authorizes violence and orders an improperly attired guest thrown into the outer darkness. How unfair is this? This guest was a last-minute invite, so how can we rightly expect him to have the correct clothes on for the party? And I imagine that few of us want to imagine that God condones violence and exhibits an unpredictable, murderous rage. And then there is that one disturbing verse, telling us that many are called, but few are chosen.

If you have a certain evangelical background, those words might be painful. If not, you wonder what to do with them. And in the end, God ends up looking quite unfair and unfavorable. If God is going to be unfair, it should at least be an unfairness that upends the injustice in our world, not one that blindsides the well-intentioned with random pronouncements.

At the vilest nadir of interpretation, this very passage has been used to justify anti-Semitism, vilifying the Jewish people as having rejected Christ. This we should reject with all our being. So, our task this morning is to name all this interpretive history and to start afresh.

Let’s suppose for a minute that God is the king, Jesus is the son, and we are the servants and the invited guests. That does not need to suggest that God will behave exactly the way this anonymous king in the parable does. Let’s take a meaning from the text without being literalists.

Now, we might have a picture that makes more sense. The king hosts an incredible feast. It’s sumptuous and festive. It’s an extravagant and gratuitous offering. We are invited. We’ve done nothing to warrant the invitation, but we have received the gracious invitation.

The reality is that many opt out of the feast. The Church is all too aware of this these days. Many are hostile to the invitation, perhaps because they’ve seen the violence that has happened at the feast over the years.

One response is to fixate on those who reject the offer to this incredible repast. But of all the verses in this passage on which we could focus, it’s the response of the unrobed guest that strikes me as the most chilling and stops me in my tracks.

For a minute, let’s sit with the response of the ill-prepared guest and not with how the king ultimately treats him. This ill-clad guest, called into the banquet at the eleventh hour, is interrogated by the king. How did you get in here without a wedding robe? How did you get past security without your ID? How did you roam the high school hallway without a pass? How did you enter the Union League Club without your fancy jacket on?

The sobering response is nothing at all. It’s dead silence. This guest, we are told, is speechless. We might feel sorry for him. He had actually accepted the offer to the banquet, unlike those who initially rejected it, and now he is bluntly accused of being improperly dressed by the king. Harsh judgment ensues.

Now, remember that at the final call for guests to the feast, the servants invited everyone they could find on the streets, both good and bad? Was the unrobed guest bad? Or was he good but unprepared? Does it really matter?

What is more concerning to me is that this guest, when asked why he had no wedding robe, was speechless.

Now, imagine this: God has called us to a great feast, here on earth and in the life to come. The guest of honor is his Son our Lord. And we are both the invited guests and the servants called to summon others to the feast. But among us there are those, like the unrobed wedding guest, whom we have invited but who are seemingly out of place. They are not properly equipped to enjoy the feast. And when asked how they got in, they are speechless, too. They are without words because those of us who have been at the party for a long time, have given them no words with which to respond.

This, it seems to me, is a challenging conviction of those of us who are in the Church. Rather than casting stones at those who initially rejected the invitation or at the guest who is casually dressed for a white tie affair, we might look into our own souls.

We see on nearly every corner of the Main Line a sign reading, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You.” The intention is well-meaning, but how many have been truly welcomed in so that they can belong? How many people have been invited into an experience beyond the walls of a church but are then left to fend for themselves? How many have a deep understanding of the faith we profess? How often do we take the time and effort needed to explain just what we do on a Sunday morning and then out in the mission field during the week?

It seems that there are many who are speechless among us, through no fault of their own. And those of us who have been immersed in the life of the Church for our whole lives may have the thickest blinders on about this. We may fail to see that behind the persona of a person in the pew is a soul in need of care, of formation, and of true embrace.

On a more sinister level, we also see people who profess to be Christians who nevertheless take for granted their status as guests at the party. They officially accepted the invitation a long time ago, and so they think they can party hard and neglect any interaction with the other guests. I dare say that at times, they mistreat the guests. There are others who proselytize and evangelize to get people into the party, and then the invited guests are left stranded, improperly clad, and standing alone at the buffet table.

It could be that the reason we think the party itself is dying out these days is because we, the servants, who have been charged with inviting other guests to join us, have left our guests speechless after the fact. And the results of that neglect, are God’s judgment.

The reality might be that many are called and few are chosen, but is this eternally carved in stone? Doesn’t God want this to change? What if being chosen means fully accepting the responsibility as a guest at the banquet? What if it means responding with our Christian duty to love and serve the hurting around us? Rather than seeing God as a fickle judge of who’s in and who’s out, could we see God as a generous host of the party who eagerly longs for all the guests to join in the revelry?

God has thrown a feast for us, which is unmerited on our part, and yet God has instilled in each of us a seed of goodness, and an ability to feast joyously at the banquet. Our Christian task is to accept that call. The feast is rocky at times. Frequently, there are family feuds because we often don’t know how to keep it together, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Ultimately this feast is one of joy and love. God calls us to celebrate this day, to partake of his Body and Blood in the Eucharist, to go out and serve so that the least of these among us can join in the feast, too. And God has assured us in his Son Jesus Christ, in whose honor this feast is held, that we can hope for a sumptuous feast in eternity, where every guest will be robed and prepared and no one is left speechless.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 11, 2020

Just a Half Step Away

In a book on organ improvisation, the late church musician Gerre Hancock offered the following advice: “Salvation is just a half step away.” Dr. Hancock, former Organist and Master of the Choristers at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, was known for his brilliant musicianship and also for his clever quips. “Salvation is just a half step away” was one of them.

Dr. Hancock was offering helpful advice to the improviser who might find her or himself in a musical quandary. Suppose you drop a note or play the wrong accidental. What next? Well, salvation is just a half step away. Use the half step to your advantage and glide seamlessly into another key, or cunningly, improvise around your “mistake” and make it seem as if it was intended after all. Are there really any mistakes when you’re creating music on the spot? This may have been a clever quip, but it is useful advice. Salvation is just a half step away.

But in the convicting words from the prophet Isaiah that we hear today, salvation seems much more than a half step away. It seems octaves away. The prophet first sings, on behalf of his beloved, about a vineyard carefully planted. We don’t initially know that the owner of the vineyard, the beloved, is God and the vineyard represents the house of Israel. And so, the song’s audience is lured into judging those who have failed to be good stewards of the vineyard until the listeners themselves are convicted.

This is the genius of the love song in Isaiah. When the twist comes, it’s painful to realize that you yourself are the one being judged and that you have inadvertently judged yourself.

Isaiah’s song itself begins sweetly. Whatever sweetness sounds like to you, whether in a major or minor key, the song is a beautiful one. Dulcet thirds and sixths serenade what God has lovingly done for his beloved people.

But just a few lines in, we sense that all is not right. Dissonance intrudes. The thirds and sixths no longer speak together, and the piece of music seems to be going off the rails. One has the impression that it is a performance that has suddenly gone wrong. Any musician knows what it feels like to lose control of a musical performance. Maybe you’re trying to play by memory, and you have a slip of the mind. Or perhaps your manual dexterity on the keyboard is not what it should be; your fingers aren’t doing what you’re telling them to do. The piece is close to crashing and burning.

In Isaiah’s song, when the music shifts to the voice of God himself speaking in judgment to his people, we know that things are a mess. The voice of God has intervened, and God’s people are in for a scolding.

We are not told exactly what God’s people have done, but the implication behind the text is that justice has been distorted into bloodshed. Righteousness has devolved into the cry of the oppressed. And we are left today with the music, in all its distortion, moving towards a cadence that is left unresolved, a half cadence or, more accurately, a deceptive one. The music halts abruptly with the cry of the downtrodden, yearning for justice. Salvation, it seems, is much, much more than a half step away.

It’s hard for us to hear this lovely piece of music go awry. It’s difficult to listen to the sonorous thirds and sixths warped into grotesque tritones and overwhelming dissonance. And it’s even more disturbing to hear God speak words of judgment, because if we’re even modestly self aware, we sense that, even thousands of years later, these words are also directed to us.

Now, God is going to act. The vineyard’s protective hedge will be removed. The vineyard will be laid to waste and left to be overgrown with briers and thorns. Anyone who walks amid its greenery will find themselves scratched and stung. The provision of rain will be no more, and the vineyard will dry up and wither. The piano will be put out of tune, and the bellows of the organ will be deflated.

We watch as our performance falls apart, and then we start to blame. We blame others for the low state of affairs in which we find ourselves. We point fingers. We judge. We find every excuse to deflect judgment from ourselves. And, ultimately, we blame God. We hurl accusations at God. God, why have you let our vineyard go to waste? God, why have you derailed our beautiful piece of music?

God, why have you allowed the ruthless weeds of this pandemic to destroy the equilibrium of our world? God, why does the gap between the destitute and the rich grow ever wider? God, why does our civil discourse continue to spiral out of control? God, why has the world’s symphony turned into a cacophony?

It’s so easy to point fingers at God, the One who sought out the fertile hill for the vineyard, who cleared the land so it would produce fruit, who selected choice vines for the planting, and who expected it to yield grapes. God was the One who established the tonic key for us and gave us the rules of counterpoint. We forget that God had great expectations for us. And we forget that we live in the dreadful gap created by our own making, the gap between God’s intentions and our actions.

But hear the words of God: O, my beloved children, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? What more was there that God could have done?

God did everything. When the Garden of Eden lost its initial bliss, God nevertheless put clothes on Adam and Eve. God couldn’t send them away naked in shame. When God’s people grumbled in the wilderness, God provided food even though he had just delivered them from Pharaoh’s grasp. In the fullness of time, God sent his own beloved Son for the world’s salvation. What more could God have done throughout the course of history? And yet, we put God in the dock time and again.

And too often, we fail to see that the judgment we experience is the result of our own making. The gap we inhabit is the great chasm between God’s righteousness and our moral irresponsibility. In our musical meanderings, we have wandered ever so far from the tonic key, which God has laid as the foundation of righteousness. But when we are so caught up in where we think we want to go, when we are allured by distant keys that capture our attention, we can easily slide to places far away, and soon, we find we have gone too far from the initial key and we don’t know how to get back home.

And salvation seems not a half step away, but octaves and octaves away in a completely new atonal system. God looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! In the Hebrew, the words for justice and bloodshed are eerily similar. And the same is true for the words for righteousness and cry. These are plays on words where one slip of the pen, one different character, changes the meaning of the words.

This is the reality of our world. One careless or intentional slip of the tongue harms another. One distortion of the facts or the truth leads to the oppression of many. People stick their fingers in their ears and hear what they want to hear, and it means that injustice is implicitly allowed to reign. Just as this deadly virus spreads exponentially through one infected person, God’s foundational righteousness is marred by sin after sin. And eventually, salvation seems much further than a half step away.

But God does not leave us there. We may be left with a deceptive or unresolved cadence at the end of today’s reading from Isaiah, but in the silent gap that follows is our implied response.

Time and again, God has come to our aid to provide, and we have been left with the certain knowledge that salvation is indeed only a half step away. But it is none other than the Evil One who stomps us into despair, ever so gradually, by telling us that salvation is octaves, even tonal systems, away. The inner accusing voices tell us that we have fallen too far from grace. We have messed up one too many times. We are in a foreign key and we can never return to the tonic of God’s righteousness.

But this is not the Gospel. In Christ, we have the assurance that salvation is always, always just a half step away. Every turn in repentance, is a half step towards God’s grace. And when all the half steps in the world are put together, we are so much closer to the kingdom that God intends to reign here on earth.

The eerie and abrupt close to Isaiah’s song is our charge to turn the cries of oppression back into songs of joy. The silence in the aftermath of the cries for help is the imperative to stop the bloodshed and seek righteousness. The voices of despair, loneliness, poverty, hunger, and suffering all around us are our summons to take our fingers out of our ears and to listen.

All is not lost. The music has not gone completely off the rails. Salvation is just a half step away. God has promised this to us. What more could he have done? He has laid the foundation for us in Christ. All is ready. All is not lost.

Listen to the cacophony all around us. It is dissonant. It is painful to hear. It seems to be spiraling out of control.

But remember those half steps. They are easy to find. They are plentiful. And God has told us that salvation is just a half step away. What more could he have done?

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 4, 2020

Into the Bowels

When was the last time you had that sinking feeling in your stomach? Was it on the downward plummet of a roller coaster or in the sudden drop of a plane? Was it upon hearing tragic news? Was it when you suddenly remembered that you had forgotten something very, very important? Do you know the feeling I’m talking about: in the pit of your stomach, a hollow, lifeless feeling?

It could have been something personal that caused a disorientation in your inner geography. But try to remember the last time you had that feeling, in the bowels of your body, when someone else was undergoing trauma, pain, or suffering, when the world was suddenly upended, when the rug of life seemed to be pulled right out from under you.

These days, we usually attribute the anatomical location of the feelings to our hearts. We hold our hands over our hearts or display heart emoticons to express our empathy for someone else. But in ancient times, such feelings were identified not with the heart, but with the bowels. It’s more accurate in a way, because we all know that visceral feeling is way down in the hollowness of our stomach.

If we were to graph this sensation, it would be a downward arc, with the knot of suffering at the bottom of the parabola. In the charting of life, it’s the place at the bottom of the valley, that dry, lifeless place of abandonment. In the trajectory of Scripture, we journey into the bowels in the wilderness wanderings of the newly-freed Israelites as they cried out to God in hunger and thirst. Later, it was in the intensely lonely Babylonian exile when the spiritual center of God’s chosen people had been overthrown by enemies. In the life of Jesus, it was during the solitary prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and at its nadir, in the cry of dereliction from the hard wood of the cross.

Of course, no one wants to be in that place. We are all told to climb out of the pit as quickly as we can. A successful life, we are told, is one that climbs the ladder of success, transposing the sinking feeling of the pit with the light-headed revelry of the top of the mountain. Didn’t Moses speak to God on the mountain? Didn’t he see the Promised Land from a high place? Didn’t the Transfiguration of Jesus occur way up in the clouds?

We are routinely told that, if you set your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. If you work hard enough, you won’t suffer. If you are a health fanatic and an exercise maniac, you can avoid death. Pop enough pills, and you can life forever.

Even the Church itself has fallen prey to the attraction of this upward climb. Prosperity gospel advocates tell us that our place is always at the top of the curve, that somehow the mountaintop is the only place where God dwells. God wants you to be perpetually happy, with a phony smile always pasted on your face.

But we can always count on St. Paul to bring us back to basics. Paul pops the balloon at the party, or, we might more accurately say, puts the right kind of air in the balloon so it can rise. Paul, writing in his Letter to the Philippians, testifies from a valley while alone in prison. Surprisingly, it’s not so much a cry of forsakenness as it is a testament of hope, a call to eternal joy, and not mere earthly joy. Paul’s testimonial is one that rises from the bowels of quiet suffering to voice the true mind of Christ.

Paul, addressing the Church at Philippi, is not complaining. He’s not griping about the poor quality of food or the discomfort of the jail cell. He’s not having a pity party. Paul is proclaiming that even in the valley of life, he knows true joy will find its completion.

Paul’s cry for his brothers and sisters to find the unifying joy even under hardship has been echoed down the ages in others: in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Nelson Mandela’s quiet confidence in South African prison cells for nearly thirty years, in Dieterich Bonhoeffer’s hymn singing while locked up by the Nazis and awaiting execution.

A cursory review of the newspaper these days is enough to put anyone down in the valley. Our world is a mess. In a society bent on punitiveness, many are at risk of being locked up for minor offenses or for none at all. There is no shortage of suffering and pain in our midst. A hurricane could wipe your community off the map, and raging wildfires are lighting the sky red on the West Coast. There are plenty of laments groaning their way into the ether. But too often they go unheard and unfelt in the bowels of fellow brothers and sisters.

And if we were to listen only to the world, we would gather that in the valley we are farthest from God. It is the place that shall not be named. Every commercial, ad, and much of our civic understanding tells us that the valleys are hell itself. And we should fear them with all of our being.

How then can Paul write such an encouraging letter from the bowels of hell while locked away in prison? How is Paul able to maintain hope and confidence while staring persecution in the face? Many would suggest that Paul was out of his mind or a hopeless pollyana, imbibing the opiate of the people, and drunk with foolishness.

But Paul brings us down into the bowels because that is so often where life is. Paul reacquaints us with the pits of our stomachs and reminds us that part of the human condition is an inability to escape that sinking feeling, whether upon filing for bankruptcy as the stock market crashes, upon learning of the death of a friend, or on being diagnosed with cancer.

And Paul also tells us that there, in the depths of despair and suffering, in what seems like hell itself, the mind of Christ is to be found. What silly wisdom this seems to be! But after all, we hear these words of encouragement from the one who calls us to be fools for Christ.

Paul tells us that in the lowest places, we become friends again with the hollow feeling in our insides, and thereby, we are reconnected with one another. The affection of which Paul speaks to the Philippians is where we begin to reconnect with the mind of Christ. Just as our hunger pangs remind us of the gift of food, our pangs of suffering remind us that we are part of a body of people oriented towards God and one another.

In a world that increasingly suggests we have nothing in common with one another, Paul reminds us that the one thing we do have in common is the suffering of the human condition. This is not bad news or cause for despair. This is cause for hope, because it means that we are never alone in this condition, that every person on this planet knows intimately that painful feeling down in the depths of their bowels. And that, paradoxically, through our time in the valley, we find everlasting life.

We learn, too, that the downward movement to the valley, to the bottom of the parabola, is the very movement of God himself. This is the sweep of the Incarnation, of God taking on human flesh in Jesus Christ. This is the self-emptying of Christ living among us and walking on the soil of the Middle East and cutting his feet on the pebbles of the roads of ministry and feeling the piercing weight of the nails in his hands and feet. This is Christ’s journey into hell itself on that lonely Holy Saturday where our Lord demonstrated that no place is too low for the salvation of the living God.

And this incredible, ancient hymn in Philippians—the Christ Hymn—shows us in its very structure that like a pendulum gaining momentum at the bottom of its arc, the pit itself is the fulcrum to swing upwards into everlasting life. In our own self-emptying, where we are hollowed out by the vicissitudes of life, we gain momentum for God to thrust us into heaven. In our own hunger pangs, we sense the aching bellies of the destitute, living in squalor just miles from here. In our own loneliness, we feel the abject despair of those locked up for no just reason. In our own inability to speak, we feel the frustration of those whose voices are constantly silenced. In our own fear, we also smell the fear of those who do not know where to get their next meal.

Perhaps the greatest sin among us today is an inability to be moved in our very bowels by the plight of those around us. We’d rather place our hands on our hearts and smile or send vapid emoticons by text. We seem unable, at times, to strive for one mind, because we are scared of losing control of ourselves. But where we strive for one mind, we seek not to eradicate difference, but to part with the grasping of our own desires and mindsets in order to submit to a greater mindset. And we can only do so if we live for a while in the bottom of the pit.

In some sense, my heart is always with the underdog. And it is the people who have suffered the most or lost the most that remind me what being a Christian is about. The communities that have been reduced to utter poverty of spirit and resources are sometimes the most generous. The people who think the least of themselves are the ones I often respect the most. In such people who have truly emptied themselves to something larger, I catch a glimpse of the mind of Christ.

If we can stop clinging to our own desire to climb out of the pit, we will find God. God will meet us in the pit. When we can part with our perfectionism and the desire to be perpetually happy and content, God will fill our emptiness with his lifegiving and loving Spirit. God will draw us together into the mind of Christ, and God will lift us up, as Christ was lifted up on that cross, to be with him in glory forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2020

Late to the Party

If you’re anything like me, you might hate being late. If it’s an appointment or an interview, I want to be early. Now, of course, we all know that it’s respectable to be fashionably late to a party. Very few people think of showing up early to a party. Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes late is perfectly acceptable. The fun is only getting started then.

But if you show up at 8:15 p.m. for a 7 p.m. party that ends at 9, then don’t expect to have access to the best hors d’oeuvres; they’re probably in other people’s stomachs by now. That bowl of delicious guacamole is gone. The accompanying chips are just crumbs in a basket. And forget about the most popular drinks. If you’re seriously late to the party, you’re going to miss out.

Well, you do unless you’re in a kingdom of heaven party. In the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, it’s not exactly a party; it seems far from it. There’s hard work going on in this story. And unlike the latecomers to the usual party, those who show up to put in some work at nine, noon, three, and five o’clock end up reaping the same financial compensation as the laborers who have toiled since the break of dawn. How unfair is that?

We all know that you earn whatever is equivalent to the work you have put in. The owner of the vineyard is not operating in a logical system; in fact, he is out of touch with how things work. Who does he think he is to dole out one sum of reward to all the laborers, no matter how long they have worked?

Think about it: who is able to summon up charitable feelings towards the student in the large lecture course who never attends class but turns in the final paper, the only grade in the class, and then walks away with an A? And if you’re the student who has been dutifully present at every class and gets a B at the end, you could rightly be angry, even jealous of the slacker who gets an A.

Or think of the avid churchgoer, the person who is on every committee and is always eager to help, who has been a faithful worshiper all her life, who deeply resents the wayward, profligate sinner who repents on her deathbed and receives assurance of God’s forgiveness.

And should a recent hire at a company get the two full weeks of annual vacation after working only a month on the job? I think not. If he did, the longer tenured employees might revolt.

There is no corner of our civic arena that is left untouched by convictions about what’s fair and unfair in how we do business. The argument is frequently made that the poorest among us are unworthy of societal relief at taxpayers’ expense because, well, if they are unemployed or poor, they must not have worked hard enough.

This is the conceptual framework for how we view the world. It’s ingrained in our bones, and the slightest hint of unrighteousness knocks our bones out of joint. If you’re late for the party, then it serves you right to miss out on the creamy artichoke dip and the fancy drinks. Show up on time, and then you can enjoy them like the rest of the responsible people who arrived at 7:10.

But the news of today’s Gospel is that perhaps it is we who have gotten something wrong, not the landowner. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard gives us one window into what the kingdom of heaven is like. It offers us a new semantic system for deciphering moral righteousness.

As we have seen, it’s fairly easy to see how the moral boundaries of God’s kingdom reorient the world’s skewed ones. We don’t have to like what we hear, especially when we think the rules of the kingdom are unfair, but we can at least understand them. I would guess that most of us are inclined to put ourselves in the shoes of the laborers who were sweating under the heat of the scorching sun, all day. We can sympathize with their outrage when the two-hour laborers earned the same amount of money as they did after twelve hours in the field.

But how often do we put ourselves in the shoes of those who are late to the party? Do we ever identify with those who showed up at five o’clock, worked for an hour or two, and then walked away with the usual daily wage? Would we feel guilty about doing that? Would we be elated and proud that we had duped the landowner? Or would we be relieved at our good luck?

There is a strong tendency to assume that the laborers in the field were late to begin their work through their own laziness. Scripture tells us otherwise. When the laborers who are still standing around idle at five o’clock are questioned by the landowner, they reply that no one had hired them. Does this not, then, open up the possibility that those who are late to the party are not necessarily in the wrong?

Could it be that the car wouldn’t start at 6:55 p.m., and that’s why the couple arrived at 8:15? Was the train running late? Did an emergency phone call come in right as they were walking out the door? Or did someone simply forget to tell them there was a party? Then, if they are indeed late to the party, don’t they deserve some of that delicious hummus and warm pita bread?

But let’s also suppose, for just a minute, that the latecomers to the party are late because they are always late. They can never seem to get out the door on time. They don’t plan well. Is it still not possible to extend some grace to them instead of automatically assuming that they received their due?

This parable, as uncomfortable and challenging as it is, reveals something about our human nature. We are usually so quick to compare and make a competition out of something that is supposed to be an enjoyable party. The owner of the vineyard is right to point out to the jealous laborers who have worked all day that he has done them no wrong. After all, the laborers agreed from early dawn to the usual wage. They are not being deprived, even if it seems unfair that the two-hour laborers received the same wage. They got what they signed up for.

While we should be careful about drawing a direct comparison between the landowner and God, if this parable is treated like the holy simile that it is, there is something in the landowner’s behavior that is like God’s reign in his kingdom. This parable tells us something about how God operates. It tells us specifically about God’s freedom.

The all-day laborers’ view is the human tendency to believe that if God shows favor to another it is somehow taking away from God’s favor to us. It treats God’s generosity like the conservation of energy: the total quantity has to balance out in the end. This view simply reveals how little we believe in God’s mercy and compassion. We envision God’s graciousness as a finite supply that will eventually run out, and we want as much of it as possible for ourselves.

But we should rejoice that God has a freedom that is nothing like the boundaries and limits we create. God’s freedom also explains God boundless justice, mercy, and compassion. God’s freedom removes God from our petty divisions, grievances, grumblings, and competition. We should be ever grateful that God’s gifts are distributed as God chooses and not as we would choose.

And this is unbelievably good news for those of us who might be late to the party. In this parish, as we ask God to heal us from our past and seek a new future by the grace of God, we might feel like we are late to the party. Many other churches around here have been partying hard for the past twenty years, and now we are showing up, and all the food’s gone.

Today’s parable reminds us that those who are late to the party might not be trying to pull a swift one with God. They might actually expect to be treated as subpar to the ones who worked all day. They might feel insecure about being late to the game. They might feel as if they can in no way catch up to those who’ve been working since dawn. But the good news is that God doesn’t see things this way. There is still vineyard work to be done, and God invites even the latecomers into this. There is always the potential for more ministry to bear fruit. Sometimes the reason for being late is that no one has hired us.

The Gospel of Christ completely rejects the uncharitable posture of so many people of faith who long to see others get their due, especially when it’s God’s wrathful judgment. This comes from a self-righteous pride that sees any reward for the two-hour laborers to be a travesty of unrighteousness.

But Jesus gives hope to all of us who can identify with the latecomer to the party. We learn and rejoice that the gifts we receive from God are not meted out based on tenure. Those who discover God’s call to them late in life, have the same access to God as lifelong churchgoers. And some of us who have been struggling, get the usual daily wage when we show up late, through no fault of our own, and amazingly, even when we are at fault, if we can receive God’s gift.

When we enter into a faithful relationship with Christ, we sign up for the terms and conditions, and that includes the daily wage. This is the daily wage of God’s overpowering righteousness that re-balances the world’s petty envy and scorekeeping. And it assures us that, even when we are late to the party, there will still be fresh food coming out of the oven for us and delectable drinks to pour. When we have been standing idle in the field all day, desperate for someone to hire us, we will be hired, because there is always work to be done. And at the end of the day, God will give us the usual daily wage, of his unmerited but infinite supply of goodness.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 20, 2020

The Common Denominator

In today’s class, we are going to deal with fractions. It’s that time of year, after all, with the return to school, even if it looks a bit different this year. You probably didn’t think you were getting into a math class, but today, we need to deal for a bit with fractions.

Do you recall how to add or subtract them? It’s fairly easy if you have the same number as a denominator in both fractions. For example, 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3. But it’s much more complicated if you have different numbers in the denominator, such as 1/3 + 3/4. Then, you have to find a common denominator in order to add the fractions. In this case, it’s 12. So 1/3 + 3/4 is the same as 4/12 + 9/12. So, it’s really 13/12. Are you with me? It’s technical, I know.

Eventually, after you have some experience with fractions, your eye develops a special sense for immediately looking at two fractions and determining how difficult it will be to find the common denominator. If the denominators are 3 and 6, it’s fairly obvious. If 3 and 17, not so much.

We could say that finding a common denominator is a way of finding common ground, of finding some base level of unity. This unity does not presuppose eliminating difference. When finding a common denominator, a new denominator must be found in order to add or subtract fractions. In other words, both denominators have to be changed to something else in order to find common ground.

It seems to me that the climate in which we live is one that is not good at finding common denominators. In fact, we seem to relish trying to prevent finding such common ground. We want 3/8 to stay 3/8 and refuse to add it to 2/9. Neither fraction will budge. Even more so, 2/9 will try its mightiest to make a common denominator with 8 by squeezing it into a 9, which is, of course, impossible. These examples might seem silly if the current state of discord in our world today were not so tragic.

And there are value judgments attached to finding common denominators, because we think of the least common denominator. We assume that any budging and any attempt to get two different denominators to a common place means a devaluing of standards and settling for something less than it should be. In a world of extremes, shared ground is abhorred. But to find a common denominator, it is essential.

When Paul wrote to various house churches in his Letter to Romans, he was dealing with seemingly incompatible fractions that were not doing a very good job at finding a common denominator. It’s not entirely clear what disagreements Paul was addressing, but there seems to have been a dietary component involved. It may have been a tension between Gentiles and Jews, with Gentiles expanding their food choices beyond certain restrictions, but I’m guessing it wasn’t quite that simple. I imagine there was a lot more going on beneath the surface of the tensions. This was about a variety of religious practices.

And Paul, rather interestingly, kept these differences oblique. Paul had no interest in fomenting further division. Paul had much more of an interest in encouraging a common denominator. The differences in practice and viewpoints to which Paul referred were more than whether one ate or abstained from meat. The differences in behavior had led to value judgments, and this had led to disputes.

Those who had no qualms about eating meat, for instance, were looking down on those vegetarians they considered weak. The unfair implication was that those who had to have so many bounds around their eating habits were elementary religious people, who couldn’t be trusted to color outside the lines. On the other hand, those who refrained from eating meat must have thought that the meat eaters were carnivorous reprobates.

The sad reality is that it doesn’t take great mental stamina to enumerate similar examples from recent history or current situations. The examples are manifold. The whole basis of Christian colonization of less industrialized countries has been rooted in this mentality. Those who were “better-educated” or more “sophisticated” ventured across the world to “civilize” others, to make them “better people.” Or think of the battles around acceptable ritual practices within the Church. And within our own Anglican Communion, tensions over who can be validly ordained are still creating unrest and threatening schism.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we will each locate ourselves in one camp. Perhaps you’re in the camp of “the weak.” Or maybe you’re in the camp of “the strong.” But either way we slice it, we will find a camp to belong to, and over time, we might discover that we are digging our heels in, deeper and deeper. 2/9 is insisting that it can be added to 3/8 if only the eight will become a nine. But we know that will never work.

When we examine many of the divisions among us today, we can be tempted to write them off as intransigence, immaturity, or stubbornness. It’s a secular world gone out of control, you say. But it’s much harder to dismiss differences of opinion within religious circles and within the Church. Here, we find people dealing with ultimate value judgments and arbitrating within moral territory. A step into the wrong camp can be the difference between heaven and hell. 2/9 insists that it should keep its denominator not merely because it dislikes 3/8, but because 9 as denominator is the right one.

It might even appear that Paul is of no help in such disputes. What we hear from Paul today is perhaps even confusing. “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds.” Well, thanks, Paul, but can you at least tell us which side is right? Or is Paul simply advocating libertinism or moral relativism? Surely, not the Paul we know!

We are so well trained to always expect a clear delineation between right and wrong. And we are so quick to attribute moral value judgments to various practices. Or is it possible that both sides—whatever those sides are—might be right and acceptable to God?

And yet if we read Romans carefully, we will find that Paul does not leave us hanging or give us mealy-mouthed advice. Paul shows us how to find the common denominator. And that common denominator is the Lord, the living God who holds loving discourse with us, who sends the Holy Spirit to direct and rule our hearts, and who endows us with the gift of reason and human intelligence.

Paul, this historically controversial figure, actually proves to be a generous thinker and one of the greatest theologians of unifying love, if we can only come to know him a bit better.  So what does he have to show us about God?

Paul reveals the ways in which our denominators need thoughtful adjustment as we try to add and subtract fractions. Each of us is only concerned with making the square peg fit the round hole that we have constructed. If we hold a view, it must be the right one, whether it is about religious practice or how we vote or what denomination we belong to. If we believe it and if we are passionate about it, then God unconditionally supports it.

And so, rather than letting God become our common denominator, we have used God to justify the denominator we have created. As Paul constantly points out in his Letter to the Romans, this is the root of all evil. The source of unrighteousness is when we usurp the place that belongs only by right to God.

By looking with contempt on those whom we think to be more conservative than we are, we forcefully commandeer the authority of judgment, that precious defense of God’s righteousness that belongs only to God. And if we look at those more liberal than us and piously pray for the reform of their wayward souls, we once again, hijack the moral fulcrum of the universe, which is God’s judgment.

But thanks be to God that we do not have to judge! Thanks be to God that we are specifically charged with tending to our own house and getting it in order, rather than paying for a team of housekeepers to invade our neighbor’s house. Far from being a license for individualism, getting our own house in tidy shape respects the moral conscience of our neighbor and, more importantly, lets God be God. Thank God that the world’s judgment is in the hands of our God who is “full of compassion and mercy” and “slow to anger and of great kindness.” Thank God that final judgment is not in our frail hands.

Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. We cannot run from our common denominator. And this is good news indeed. This means that two seemingly disparate fractions can ultimately be reconciled through the common denominator of God’s gracious love and compassion.

This is no excuse to justify any kind of bad behavior, injustice, or moral evil. But it is a reason to find self-humility and try to assume the best about our neighbors, to try to see that if they are doing something in honor of the Lord, it might be acceptable to God. And if it’s not, perhaps God can still wring good out of it in some wonderful way. We run into evil when we dig in our heels, raise the flag for moral righteousness, and claim that God is on our side, and ours alone.

Jesus Christ is Lord of both the dead and the living. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has left no corner of the universe untouched by his grace, and he has graciously adopted us into a family of all kinds of interesting and diverse fractions, who can be united and added together to make one living Body, his Body here on earth. And to add and subtract all these myriad fractions, we need a common denominator, and that denominator is God alone, whose generous love and abundant mercy is beyond that which we could ever ask or imagine. And let us give thanks that the last word is God’s, and God’s alone.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 13, 2020

Lifting the Needle

In the days when record players were more common, there was nothing more frustrating than a scratched record. First, you would notice the incessant repetition of one or two seconds of music, playing over and over again. Then your ear would be drawn to the irritating scratch of the needle stuck in the offending groove.

With no remote controls in sight or even in mind, you would have to get up from your comfortable seat and lift the needle on the record player, finding a smooth part of the record’s surface. And the music could play on, and all would be well.

What is it about the broken record that so grates on one’s nerves? Is it the knowledge that a priceless record is now defaced? Is it the abrupt disruption of an anticipated stretch of time devoted to musical bliss?

Or is it the sense of stuckness? By this, I mean the insistent sound of musical repetition with no clear trajectory in sight. It’s almost as if the music itself is scolding you: Get up, now, and save me from this rut. Because if you don’t, I will annoy you until you do.

There is something about being stuck—whether it’s a broken record or emotionally in our own lives—that is frustrating, even demoralizing. If we imagine our most downhearted moments, we might recall a feeling of intractability, of being unable to move backwards or forwards. Psychologists tell us that for those of us with obsessive thinking habits, the most constructive way of dealing with them is to disrupt the sense of stuckness. As painful as it may be, you must lift yourself out of the hole you’re in. It’s rather like lifting the needle on the broken record and skipping ahead to the place on the record’s surface that is unadulterated by scratches.

Practitioners of contemplative prayer tell us something similar. When meditation is plagued with unwanted thoughts, the practice of gently letting them go is a means of lifting the needle on the record player, in some sense, starting afresh. The intrusive thoughts are scratches on the record, and they get us stuck.

In the Book of Ezekiel, we hear today of God’s beloved people grappling with a sense of being stuck. You might easily overlook this amid God’s admonishments, calling out the wickedness and recalcitrance of the people, a state of being that can only lead to death.

We hear such warnings all over Scripture: turn from your wicked ways, because if you don’t, things will turn our very badly for you. But hidden in the midst of this language, in these five verses from Ezekiel, is a glimpse into the emotional and spiritual morass of God’s people.

God is speaking to the prophet Ezekiel and commanding him what to say to the house of Israel. He is God’s appointed watchman for the people, to announce their need for repentance. God tells Ezekiel how he shall describe to the house of Israel their current situation: “Thus you have said: “Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?” These words are what God’s people have been repeating over and over again, whether aloud or in their hearts. They have been groaning in a feedback loop of the oppressive burden of their sins and transgressions.

And if we put these five verses in the context of the whole scope of the Book of Ezekiel, this sense of stuckness stands out in an even more pronounced way. For thirty-three chapters, Ezekiel has heard God’s convicting words towards a people gone astray. The scope of these words extends beyond the house of Israel to other nations, those historically at enmity with Israel. And finally at chapter 33, we are on the precipice of a turning point in the Book of Ezekiel. It’s like Moses standing on Mount Nebo and getting a first glimpse of the Promised Land.

Now, just as we are about to enter into a redeemed future, crowned with the glories of the New Jerusalem, once again, the transgressions of God’s people are revisited. They are rehashed. In the particular historical context of Ezekiel, God’s people are dealing with the trauma of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, and the catastrophe is seen as retribution for their behavior. The record is scratched, and they are stuck in the feedback loop. And the record scratches, and scratches, and scratches. . .

We have, in fact, all along throughout Ezekiel, been getting little promises of hope. These promises have balanced out the woes and condemnations. But for this hope to come to fruition, something is needed, and we hear of this today. God’s people must turn: turn back from their evil ways, the ways that lead only to death.

This posture of turning is not just some thing of the past. God indeed commands this of us as God’s people. It’s what Jesus constantly commanded. At Holy Baptism, we make a spiritual about-face from death to life, from sin to repentance, and historically in the Church, people enacted this by turning from west to east during the Baptismal rite. This is metanoia, repentance: turning back to face God.

We are familiar with this language, and yet, we may still get lost in the imagery of wickedness, death, and shame and forget what’s on the other side when we turn. We erroneously imagine a wrathful God who demands the impossible. We hear only vengeance waiting for us.

Truth be told, even when we get to the point of recognizing our need to turn back to God, sometimes we still remain stuck. Do you feel any resonance with God’s people in the Book of Ezekiel? They are stymied by their past misdoings and sinfulness. This fraught past weighs heavily upon them, and they perceive that they are wasting away. All seems to be sheer hopelessness.

Think for a minute of the things that weigh you down. Whether it’s systemic sin that we’ve inherited by virtue of our shared humanity or our individual faults, do you ever think you’re in a feedback loop and stuck? In the middle of a pandemic, do you hear the record scratching again and again because we’ve dug ourselves into a biological and spiritual hole of selfishness leading up to this time? Recurring reports about the fragility of our environment constantly remind us that we could be past the point of no return. Or do you, as an individual, ever imagine that you have finally committed the unforgivable sin, or just one too many sins, to ever be able to move forwards? Do you doubt whether you are worthy of being unstuck from your past? All of this can make us hear the record scratching again and again with no one in sight to lift the needle and move us forward to new music.

But there is an even more peculiar spiritual danger lying beneath the surface of the broken record. It may be that those of us who are most inclined to embrace God’s words of repentance are the most vulnerable to a certain kind of sin. I speak here of the especially pious and religious. Those of us who are all too ready to aspire to holiness are in danger of getting stuck.

There is a kind of perverse satisfaction in being in the feedback loop. Ostensibly, someone in the loop wants to be rescued and for someone else to lift the needle on the record and move them forward to new music. But interiorly, the person in question might relish being stuck in the scratch on the record’s surface.

Here in the groove of the scratched record lies a peculiar comfort, a comfort that is ensconced in immobility. Paradoxically, the obsession with repentance becomes a cover for not wanting to do the hard work of true repentance. Because Ezekiel tells us exactly what that work is in today’s reading. This work is being open to the possibility of a new, redeemed future. But in order to experience this future, one cannot be too proud to receive God’s generous gift of forgiveness.

There is no question that God calls each and every one of us to turn back from our evil ways to God. We will hear this call in just a few minutes as we confess our sins. But after we turn, we have to be willing to receive the gift of new life.

This is because God’s new future is a glorious road that leads all the way to the New Jerusalem. And when we allow God’s grace to permeate every crevice of our lives, the vision of a new kingdom is seen to cover every corner of this earth, not just our own little fiefdoms. Every place where economic justice reigns is affected by God’s recalibration. Every pocket of this planet where the lowly are stomped on by the feet of those more powerful is readjusted to the balancing point of God’s justice. In Ezekiel, we see the great vision of God defending the holiness that belongs, by right, to God. And by agreeing to turn back from our evil ways, God draws us into that recalibration.

We are told in no uncertain terms today what’s on the other side of that great act of turning: it’s life itself. There’s no life in the grooves of despair scratched into the surface of the record. God does not desire for us to stay in those ruts, licking our wounds and taking pride in our self-flagellation. God has no desire in the death of the wicked. God wants only one thing: for us to turn back to God and live. And if we will allow it, God is always poised, over the record player of life, ready to lift the needle on the player when we are stuck in the feedback loop. And we are placed into a new future, where the song of the new Jerusalem plays on and on.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
September 6, 2020
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Uneven Exchange

There are some people, perhaps even in this room, who may be familiar from personal experience with the barter system. A farmer, for instance, trades several baskets of fresh eggs in exchange for a service rendered by a blacksmith, or something comparable to that. There are places in the world where this is still in use, even today, although it’s not so common in this country.

The closest many of us might come to bartering is quid pro quo arrangements. Maybe a church offers use of its space for a musical ensemble to make a recording. In exchange, the ensemble offers to sing a free concert for the church. In such arrangements, good faith is required, trust is necessary, and resources other than money are seen as having an equivalent value. There’s some degree of risk in this way of conducting business, because the exchange is hard to quantify. Somebody just might get the short end of the stick. But it seems to me that the purpose of such arrangements is that they are not completely financial in nature. Services and things are measured beyond a cold assessment of numerical value.

And yet, there is still an exchange. This for that. Quid pro quo. The idea is that, even if money doesn’t change hands, there is still some kind of balancing that takes place.

This doesn’t strike the modern ear, especially the modern American ear, as being unreasonable. Our system of commerce is based on solid principles of this for that, of supposedly equal exchange. The car you buy is evaluated at market value, even if you spend some time negotiating its price. There is really no such thing as a free lunch. But we also know that things get messy in equal exchange arrangements when someone seems to be shortchanged or cheated. If someone reneges on their end of the bargain, there needs to be some kind of justice for the system to retain its efficacy.

Now, I would guess that many of us apply our understanding of the exchange of goods or services to our own spiritual lives. We hear Jesus’ exhortations to decent, godly behavior, and we assume that if we follow those guidelines, things will work out well. The Golden Rule might best exemplify this even exchange. Treat others as you want to be treated in return. Fair enough, right? If I say my prayers and go to church and engage in service to those in need, I can expect some kind of eternal reward. If I welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, I gain some kind of spiritual extra credit. Or at the very least, I get an honest grade for the work I’ve done.

But if we’re clear about today’s Gospel passage, we will find that Jesus’ math doesn’t quite add up in our bartering system or quid pro quo mentality. Jesus’ words are well known: those who lose their life for his sake, will find their life. Those who wish to save their life will lose it. To follow Christ, you not only have to deny yourself—give something up—but also take up a cross. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like an equal or fair exchange.

Jesus continues: If you amass all the things you really want, the things of the world, your life is somehow forfeited. The conclusion is that there is no way to barter one’s life.

We’ve heard Jesus offer this same bad math before. The laborers in the vineyard who only spend a few hours working at the end of the day get paid the same as those who worked from early dawn. The Prodigal Son receives a sumptuous feast from his father, even after wandering away for a while, and elder brother is none too happy because of it. This doesn’t seem fair at all.

And so, we might even expect that Jesus’ arithmetic is a bit off and call it a day. Okay, we say. Maybe the exchange rate is not entirely even in human terms. We give fifty acres of land in exchange for two apples. But we can come around to accepting Jesus’ system of trade. What it means is that we need to expect to deny ourselves and give up a lot of things that are dear to us, but we can fully expect that some kind of beautiful eternal reward is waiting around the corner for us. If it’s not fair from our worldly mindset, we at least get something out of it.

This is how we are tempted to read Jesus’ concluding words in today’s Gospel lesson. Matthew is clear: judgment is nigh upon us. The Son of Man will return and repay everyone for their actions. So, we get on with the business of doing as much good so that we can be repaid well. It’s worth giving up some of our comfort to gain that everlasting reward.

The problem is that we have actually come full circle and are back where we started. Even if we accept the unequal exchange of Jesus’ math, we are now, once again, bartering. We do something and we expect something in return. Quid pro quo.

It turns out that the language used in the original Greek of this passage is quite commercial in nature. It is the cold, calculated, measured language of an exacting exchange. The profit and loss of those who barter with their lives is echoed in the description of the Son of Man’s judgment, too: the Son of Man will repay people for what they have done. Tit for tat, quid pro quo. It’s as if those who treat their relationships with their neighbors as a bartering game can expect the same in judgment.

The rub lies in how we view our neighbors. If our brothers and sisters are seen as mere commodities, the judgment upon us, wrought by our own actions, is that we only see our salvation as something to be commercialized. This way of dealing with everyday life can so permeate our being that we end up applying it to God. We are used to giving favors to gain favors, or consorting with the powerful to earn power, or paying special attention to certain people so we can get something in return, and so God becomes another bargaining deal for us.

But it goes even deeper. Even when we think we are being altruistic towards our neighbor, doing good and not expecting anything from them, it might turn out that we are secretly expecting something from God.

And Jesus, in the words we hear today, encourages us to see things differently. Crucified on the cross, between two criminals, Jesus looked to his Father in heaven while his arms were extended outward in forgiveness towards the condemned men on either side of him. The cross itself entreats us to look not only vertically but horizontally.

When our actions, even if good, are simply geared towards the vertical relationship, then our salvation has become individualistic and narrowly personal. The good we do is quid for the quo that we anticipate from God.

Jesus’ economics are quite different. He did not offer his life to win favor from his Father. He willingly gave his life for those who hated him and ridiculed him. And in doing so, Jesus directed our gaze to the economy of God. This economy is no even exchange. Nothing can be bartered here. For what would it profit us to gain the whole world if we end up losing our life? How can we even put an economic value on our life?

The exchange rate in God’s economy is vastly and gloriously uneven and unfair, and hopelessly stacked in our favor. We gain untold merits by Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection by virtue of being God’s beloved children. We don’t do anything to earn it. We don’t negotiate a quid pro quo for our salvation. It is freely offered. And what we end up gaining is immeasurable. God’s mercy and compassion cannot be squeezed into any numerical system. And when we try to do so, we are repaid accordingly.

It would seem that Paul understood God’s economy all too well from his Letter to the Romans. The system of exchange that still governs much of our world, is an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. A nasty word is returned for a nasty word, and cold shoulders invite more cold shoulders. Broken agreements render more broken agreements. But Jesus breaks this vicious system of quid pro quo by extending his loving arms on the hard wood of the cross so that everyone can come within the reach of his saving embrace.[1]

In God’s economy, salvation cannot be divorced from neighbor. Our actions and intentions must not be oriented towards our own personal reward alone but must come to encompass those around us. And the exchange rate is not even, because if it were, too many people would end up losing.

Our own bishop has constantly reminded us during this pandemic that as the living Body of Christ, we are incarnational, not transactional. The Church doesn’t operate as Walmart does. The life of faith is not measure for measure. Scarcity is not traded for scarcity. Instead, with God’s generous provision, scarcity is always traded for abundance. Mustard seeds are traded for mountains. It all seems unfair and uneven, and that’s why it’s so good.

And thanks be to God that his mercy and compassion are not doled out based on how much we give to others, even if our actions inform how much we are able to receive that mercy and compassion. Thanks be to God that the exchange rate is uneven, because its unevenness is the hope for all the downtrodden and those who despair.

Look at how our vision has changed with Jesus’ disruption of the quid pro quo of the world. The dry vines in our vineyard are still capable of yielding much fruit. And even when—especially when—our resources seem too meager to reach out our arms in love to the neighbor, we do it anyway, not to gain a reward, but because God’s salvation of the world works through our arms extended to another. The vertical is expanded into the horizontal.

The way of the cross is full of potholes and stumbling blocks that threaten to trip us up, but we walk it nevertheless, because in the detours and in the long, circuitous paths off the road, we find our neighbor. And then we find ourselves back on that beautiful path, not bartering our way along to heaven, but losing our lives so that God opens up a new a more glorious one to us.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
August 30, 2020
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

[1] From the Collect for Fridays in Morning Prayer, the Book of Common Prayer

Holding the Keys

Somehow, in the past week, as I have moved onto campus here at Good Shepherd, leaving an apartment and church position in Center City, I have garnered twelve new keys. This is a typical part of transitions: you give up old keys and you gain some new ones. Admittedly, I need to do something about my current collection of keys. I have two very full key rings, and roughly ten or so of those keys all look the same.

At the very least, I must label them, because I have recently spent an inordinate amount of time trying various keys until I find the right one that fits the lock on the door before me. As I was writing this sermon, I discovered that I had inadvertently double-bolted a lock on the parish office door, and a parishioner couldn’t get in. Locks, doors, and keys are complicated. Sometimes, we shut people out of buildings without ever intending to do so.

In some ways, the metaphor of a key ring is apropos to what we in the Church spend a lot of time doing. We unlock and lock the doors of this parish church routinely so that people can be welcomed into this place as friends in Christ. But we also lock the doors at the end of liturgies so that the church can be kept safe.

If we extend this metaphor a bit further, we could say that in an age where the Church often seems to be unpopular, we are constantly in search of the right key to fit the lock, the lock to a new era of life in the Church, where God’s mission is reinvigorated, where pews are once again filled, and where Sunday once again becomes a day dedicated to the Lord.

And yet, I imagine that we frequently feel like I do, standing at one of the many doors on campus, fiddling with my key rings, and trying to find the right key for the lock in question. In the midst of this interminable pandemic, we have had to lock doors that we would ordinarily wish to remain open. We have had to shut the doors to large numbers of people, asking people to register for Mass online so that we can do contact tracing and avoid getting more than twenty-five people in this building. And from the perspective of the Gospel, it all feels quite wrong, although it’s, of course, the right and necessary thing to do for the safety of all. The Church, by the authority entrusted to her by Christ himself, should be in the business of unlocking doors.

This morning, the lectionary has handed us a famous passage in the Gospel according to Matthew. It probably goes without saying that these eight verses from Matthew have been some of the most hotly contested ones in Church history. And sadly, these verses, more often than not, have been used to divide Christians.

When Jesus entrusts Peter with the keys of the kingdom of heaven, he is also giving these keys to the Church herself. This Church, whose cornerstone is Christ, this Church who is built on none other than Jesus Christ the Righteous One, this Church has been given immense authority and power. But such power and authority are a double-edged sword, if you will, where the keys of the heavenly kingdom can be used for good or they can be used for ill.

Part of the reason that the Church sometimes lives in fear behind locked doors these days is because many have seen authority abused by her. Many have witnessed keys that should be opening doors turned into keys that lock people out. And this is precisely why the keys to the kingdom of heaven should be treated with reverence and awe. Those who hold the keys can build up the Body of Christ, or they can tear it down, perhaps even without realizing it.

Scripture tells us these keys of authority involve binding and loosing. You might recall that just two chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus will connect the powers of binding and loosing to practical behavior within the Church, where her members are charged with holding one another accountable in love. It is the God-given responsibility of the Church to treat the keys that bind and loose with holy reverence.

And judgment is bound up with the authority Christ has given his Church. I’m not speaking about a view of judgment in which Peter serves as gatekeeper at the pearly gates, deciding who’s in and who’s out. I’m talking about God’s judgment, in which the present life intersects, if only in glimpses, with eternal life. It’s a judgment that holds us accountable for how closely we choose to conform our lives to Christ’s so that all people become alive with God’s glory.

When, in this life, we choose to be bound by the grievances we hold against others, the doors to paradise can seem locked to us. When, in this life, we decide to be bound by old ways of doing things that have us beating our heads on the wall, it is hard to see an unlocked door letting in some of that light from heaven. When, in this life, we tightly grip our ring of keys and lock the door to those whom we fear or who threaten us with their different ways, the gate of heaven seems to be far in sight.

And it could be that especially in this time of civic unrest, worldwide violence, and pandemic, we might find doors closing that need to be closed, while other doors open before us. But if we peer through such doors, a new, redeemed future awaits.

We, here at the Church of the Good Shepherd, on a warm Sunday in August, stand at the threshold of such a door. In my first day here, I have just joined you at that threshold. And together, we hold the keys to open the door, because God has charged us to do so.

In this historic parish that has witnessed to the faith of Christ for over 150 years, we know there have been difficulties, challenging times, and sorrow. I don’t need to tell you that. Some of you, who have been here much, much longer than I, have seen doors close and others open. You have seen keys change hands many, many times. Perhaps you have even, from time to time, wondered if the doors of this very building would be closed forever.

But thanks be to God, these exquisite church doors are standing proudly open. And before they were closed for public safety due to the pandemic, they were open daily for private prayer. And with God’s help, these doors will remain open to many more years of worship, service, and fellowship.

So, as we stand on the threshold of this new door with our keys in hand, let’s look through together to see what it might be like on the other side. Imagine this.

Imagine these lovely wooden pews filled with people of all kinds, from many walks of life, young and old, rich and poor, lifelong Christians and newcomers to the faith, people with varying perspectives, but all of whom long to be united together around something larger than themselves. Do you see the children playing in the Children’s Space at the back of the nave? Do you hear the laughing voices of children heading off to Sunday School to receive those seeds of faith, planted and watered by us but given growth by God? What about the college students, seeking to hold their changing worldviews with something more true than mere secularism? I see, too, the parishioners who have been here for decades kneeling here at the Communion rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament. Do you smell the sweet incense floating to the rafters, while our brilliant Organist and Choirmaster improvises and the glorious choir raises its collective voice in song?

And across the way at 19 Montrose, you will find Chris, our new Director of Operations, warmly greeting guests to the Parish Office. See, too, the dedicated vestry in their conversations about caring for this parish. In another room, a group of faithful parishioners meet for adult formation, or for now, maybe they’re on the porch outside or in a Zoom meeting room. And perhaps on some future day, on the second or third floor of 19 Montrose, there is outreach to those in need by utilizing the wondrous gift of public space.

I could stand all day at this threshold and look into this glimpse of heaven on earth. I wonder if you see the same things I do, and I wonder what you see that I don’t see yet. We know all too well that heaven is not fully here and that this world does its very best to block the gate to it. But if we look carefully, we can get a foretaste of paradise to come, breaking in by fits and starts.

If we loose the bonds of old burdens, if we forgive the enemy and welcome the stranger, if we loose the constricting bonds of a haunted past and look to a redeemed future, and if we remain ready to unlock doors of new possibilities, God can do anything.

We pray to hold our ring of keys reverently, for we know that they can be used for ill or used for good. We rejoice in the responsibility and authority that Jesus has entrusted to his Church on earth. We pray that God will fill us with his life-giving Spirit so that we can unbind the fetters of injustice and oppression and unleash the powers of freedom and peace.

Let’s not be naïve, either. We will, from time to time, stand trembling with keys in hand, feeling like the powers of death are more than we can manage. We may shiver with fear because the future seems overwhelmingly against us. We may shake with anxiety over our troubled past, but hear this good news and take it to heart: Christ has made a promise to us, and Christ always keeps his promises. We, as living members of his Body, have made our home on a sure foundation. And the powers of death and darkness have no authority here, none. With God’s help and through the redeeming power of the resurrected and ascended Christ, it is never foolish to hope.

Now, if you will, let’s stand bravely on the threshold, hold your keys with holy awe, and let’s unlock the door to a future already known to and prepared by the God who makes all things new. Thanks be to God.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
August 23, 2020
The Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont