The Elephant in the Room

Rising like a behemoth from the midst of the Judean desert, just miles from the Dead Sea, is the ancient fortification of Masada. On this massive plateau flanked by sheer drops of hundreds of feet, Herod the Great built two palaces for himself. Masada, which itself means “fortress” in Hebrew, speaks for itself.

If one were traveling across the otherwise flat portion of the Judean desert surrounding this gargantuan fortress, Masada would obviously need to be circumnavigated. Its towering height is a direct contrast to the nearby Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. You can’t climb Masada without the aid of a cable car or a feat of mechanical engineering, and so you must go around it.

It’s only when one makes the journey to the top of Masada that its purpose stands out in relief. When standing on top of this geological eyrie, with stunning vistas of the surrounding landscape, it’s possible to begin to understand the paranoia of its originator.

Scripture doesn’t mince words when describing Herod the Great. He is consistently portrayed as ruthless, egomaniacal, and extremely fearful. His cruel actions and distorted use of power are tied back to the same motif of his insecurity. Only at Masada must Herod have felt even remotely secure, with a magnificent aerial view of any potential approaching threats.

Just as Masada rises from the floor of the Judean desert as a striking anomaly, so the specter of Herod the Great looms high off the pages of Scripture. And as anyone traveling the Judean desert must go around Masada, it seems that in Scripture, people must navigate around Herod’s ominous presence.

In today’s reading from Matthew, Herod is, in some sense, the elephant in the room. What we don’t hear are verses sixteen through eighteen in chapter two. These verses made their appearance on the Feast of the Holy Innocents this past week, but today, they are left unheard.

Herod is the elephant in the room not because he’s unacknowledged, but because everyone is perpetually rerouting their paths and plans to avoid him. And we might wonder why. Herod the Great was, in all actuality, a mere puppet of the Roman Empire. His claims to power were largely buttressed by his flashy building projects, of which Masada was a shining example. Herod’s claim to power rested solely on his ability to curry favor with the Roman Empire. And this he did with astounding skill.

But behind his mammoth building endeavors was a fragile ego that wielded violence to compensate for fear. Herod is why we find the magi adjusting their travel plans after visiting the Christ child. Herod is why Joseph redirects his family to Egypt in order to escape the massacre of the holy innocents. Herod is the elephant in the room around which everyone is dancing, or from which everyone is running.

No matter the year or century, some things never change. Herod was not the last ruler of his type in the course of human history. It seems that we can never part with the foreboding presence of tyrants among us, determined to build themselves up by wreaking havoc on humanity.

Oppressors of every stripe are, to our own day, the causes of people’s destroyed plans, at least, and their demise, at worst. Power-hungry despots are why many reroute their journeys into exile. They are why many people find themselves wandering in loneliness without homes and family and wondering where God is in such injustice and misery.

It is ironic that Mary and Joseph carry the Savior of the Nations back into Egypt, the land of exile, as they flee from Herod. It is as if the clock has been turned back. After God’s mighty deliverance of Israel from bondage so many years ago, after God’s presence in pillars of fire and cloud in the wild desert, after God’s journey with his chosen people from exile in Babylon back to Jerusalem, now the Holy Family itself is back in exile—and all because of one person around which everyone changes plans and cowers in fear.

Some things never change, we might also say. How did the clock get turned back in some ways, after so much progress and advancement? Why is everything spiraling out of control because of the actions of people in whose hands power is abused? How does a biological tyrant of great mystery cause so much death and destruction in spite of our numerous medical and technological advances? These are the lingering questions of our own day; they are not limited to the time of Herod.

The other elephant in the room is the question many are afraid to name: where is God in the face of looming violence and cruel oppression? How many times have you heard people speak this query? How many times, like the elephant in the room, is this question voiced silently and left unspoken and instead raging in human hearts?

It’s not a question that we can solve with absolute certainty. It’s not a question for which any mortal has all the answers. And it’s not a blasphemous question. It’s just naming the elephant in the room: where do we find God in all this?

When no angels appear to us in dreams to redirect our journeys, what do we do? When will many of our wandering, homeless neighbors finally find a place to rest? How is it possible to move on when what has been lost in exile cannot be recovered,?

These are the questions to which easy answers are dishonest, but they are the questions we need to ask. These are the questions before which we must hold a reverent silence.

And thank God for Matthew, who is trying to help us with our questions, amid the carefully crafted storytelling surrounding Jesus’ birth. He is an evangelist, after all, destined to speak some good news. Matthew does not dance around the elephant in the room. Matthew names it, takes it on, and leads us to God in the midst of it all.

In Matthew’s story, Herod’s murder of the holy innocents is the part left unheard in today’s Gospel passage. But it is there. Like Masada, it sits solidly amid a desert of questions, and it is the reason for two diversions that frame its literary position. Before this massacre, the wise men leave Bethlehem by an alternate route because of Herod’s threat. Because of the looming threat of the massacre, the Holy Family flees to Egypt. And even after Herod’s death, his cruel legacy embodied in his son leads the Holy Family to end up in Nazareth, by various peregrinations.

But what we find clear as a bell amid all the circuitous wandering of the various travelers in this story is God’s abiding presence. God’s presence finds its way into the travelers’ paths, indirectly and mysteriously. This is the way God so often works.

For Matthew’s characters, this presence arrives in dreams. For us, it may be different. This gracious hand of Providence might not be obvious while we’re wandering but only in hindsight. The merciful protection we seek might not seem merciful at all in the moment, but Scripture and tradition tell us that God is faithful and true.

It is the Christ child himself who shows us why God’s presence among us is sometimes hard to find. It is this tiny, lowly babe who reveals that the God we worship and adore does not hurl Herod from his mighty palace of Masada through the might of his own omnipotence. No, God journeys with us around the elephant in the room and gives us power to proclaim justice in all our wanderings. Sometimes, entertaining the elephant only feeds its hungry ego.

As God insinuated himself into the human condition in the flesh of a human baby, and in the face of the monolithic cruelty of tyranny and oppression, God comes to us, often as quietly as a baby moving, to take our hand and lead us around the elephants in the room, not to avoid them but to show us a subtler, more powerful way. God comes to show us what true righteousness is like. God comes to show us the path of life.

Masada still looms today over the Judean desert, a relic of a despot whose legacy is the path of terror he unleashed. But the Word of God still abides. It is living and ever moving among us, giving us grace and power to utter truth and peace in the face of Herod’s modern disciples. Unlike the transience of royal power rendered obsolete, God’s power and might do not depend on monuments and palaces but on the Word of truth. And this Word still changes the world, no matter the size of the elephants in the room.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 3, 2021

The Gift of Freedom

It was the Christmas gift for which she had been waiting for months. The wrapping paper and bow had barely been torn off the gift and the brand new bicycle revealed, than she wheeled it outside for a test ride. This was a new venture for the child, because, young as she was, she had never before ridden a bicycle.

Her enthusiasm could scarcely be restrained. All she really wanted to do was pedal as fast as she could, hunch over the handlebars, and fly into the wind, free as a bird. And yet, she knew this was not possible; at least not yet.

After wheeling the bicycle outside the house, the elated child watched as her parents put the training wheels on the bicycle. With this accomplished, she could now try out the pride and joy of this Christmas.

Her parents watched as she gently but eagerly climbed up onto the bicycle seat, placed her feet on the pedals, hands on the handlebars, and awkwardly began to inch forward. Thankfully, with the support of the extra wheels, the child was unlikely to fall down, but her parents still watched nervously. They would cry, “Don’t get too close to the street!” And in spite of their mild anxiety in watching this new adventure play out, they couldn’t help but rejoice with the contagious happiness of their child.

As the months went by, their daughter became more and more comfortable with maneuvering her new toy. And before too long, it was time for the training wheels to come off and for the real test to happen. Once again, the parents ventured outside with their enthusiastic child and watched as she mounted the bicycle and began to pedal. The first attempt was what they feared. A few wobbly movements forward, and the bicycle came crashing to the ground.

But skinned knee and all, the determined child climbed onto the bicycle again and again, each time, making a bit more progress towards stability. And soon, it was as if she had always been riding without support.

As the months went by, her parents became more relaxed. They realized, at heart, no matter how much anxiety they might have, that they couldn’t strangle the freedom of their daughter forever. They were, of course, torn between seeking the safety of their child and allowing her to be happy, basking in the freedom of doing things on her own.

And so, baby step after baby step, their daughter moved towards independence. First, she could ride down the full length of their neighborhood street, supervised by her parents. Then, they mustered the courage to allow her to ride up and down the street unattended. These expeditions were followed by journeys to school with other companions, and then a bit farther afield to the houses of friends.

The parents soon realized that, while their worry and anxiety might never cease, their daughter was growing up, and they could not hold on to her forever. Their love for her was not rooted in control or smothering protection but in giving her the gift of freedom, the freedom to be a child living and playing in the world.

This freedom undoubtedly comes with risks. There is no freedom that does not carry with it the possibility of danger, whether to self or to others. There is no true freedom that is characterized by total self-isolation. And yet one who is not really free is somehow deprived of a fundamental part of being human.

The slave is not granted the dignity of making choices. This is why to be enslaved or utterly subject to another is to be relegated to a status that is inhuman. This is why it is evil. And the one who cannot grant freedom to another human being is one who is lacking in love. Because true love accepts the risks and the dangers of real freedom.

It is profoundly sad that people of faith often do not fully understand the gift of freedom they have been given. Some fear God, but as nothing more than one who grants access to heaven or eternal punishment in hell. God is simply a remote guardian who doles out rules and boundaries that do little more than restrain freedom. God is seen as so jealous for control that perpetual anger and wrath are necessary responses to such ontological insecurity.

In the minds of others, with God, anything goes, lest his heart of love be betrayed and he interfere in the private lives of any of his subjects. In this view, God condones all manner of behavior because any judgment or censure would be offensive to the truly free individual.

But St. Paul suggests a radically different understanding of God. And I wonder, is God so often rejected because many people cannot possibly imagine that they would be deserving of God’s glorious gift of freedom?

As Paul tells us, God’s reign and lordship are not exercised to enslave us but to free us and to place us in relationship with himself as his own children. Such a God, whose very nature is free, can do nothing other than love us by setting us free.

Here is a God who is not afraid to enter the depths of the human condition and risk the sorrow that comes with rejection by his own children. Here is a God who does not function as the grand puppeteer and give us the illusion of freedom while yet grasping control of the strings of our lives.

Here is a God who enters fleshly existence as a child knowing full well that it will end in suffering and death. And, in spite of all this, this God does not avoid us or stay distanced from us but instead adopts us as children and commands us to call him Father.

It would not be real love if there were no risk involved. It would not be real love if there were no relationship involved. It would not be real love if fear prevented any intimacy.

But we have been so conditioned to misunderstand freedom. We live, supposedly, in a nation based on the core principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but it’s hard to ignore the abuses foisted upon those words. Freedom has come to mean, in many cases, the lack of any boundaries, the ability to do anything without official interference, or complete libertinism without regard for the other. As such, we remain connected to no one. For others, the risk of allowing any freedom is too great a threat to control that the safer bet is to allow no freedom at all.

But our God commands that we call him Abba, Father. God is all too aware of the risk involved. God has seen his beloved children leap the boundaries of relationship, and yet time and again he has waited patiently and lovingly with outstretched arms because love is greater than control. God has, through the years, given us structure: laws and prophets to show us the way so that we are not wandering aimlessly. This God has entered into relationship with us, even to the very pangs of death, because to be remotely and safely ensconced on high would make him less than who he really is.

Even though we have been empowered to call God Father, it can still be difficult to comprehend the incredible degree of trust that God has placed in us. God has imbued us with freedom because God believes that we can use that freedom for the good of the world. God may have given us the bounds, but God will not force us to stay within them. God knows that if we are truly alive and free, we will be happy. And that is what God desires.

But when such happiness is misunderstood, a lesser happiness is chosen, wherein we appear to be free but are once again enslaved by our own obsessions, fantasies, and self-preoccupations. The risk, at times, seems too great to accept true freedom, because we might, from time to time, get hurt.

But God knows all this. God knows that we will constantly skin our knees and scrape our elbows if we are willing to take the risk of love. God understands that we will wander outside the bounds as we take advantage of our freedom. And although it pains the heart of God to see us get hurt, God lets us go. God knows that for us to be free and fully in relationship with him, he must let us pedal into the wind, even if we fall down a few times.

And there will be moments, when we need to bring the training wheels out again. When our boundaries have been obliterated and we forget from whom and whence we came, a little structure can bring us back to our roots.

This Christmas, as we celebrate the gift of Christ to us, we simultaneously rejoice in the gift of freedom. It is unlikely that many of us feel free at this time, either quarantined or staying safe in our homes, but God has allowed us to run fully into the wind, even if we occasionally get hurt through our own poor choices.

And God has sent his Spirit into our hearts, so that when we fall and are down, when we are feeling helpless and constrained, and when we do not know where we are headed, that same Spirit is praying in our hearts and urging us to turn our bicycle back around. And there waiting for us with open arms is God, who tells us to call him Father.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas
December 27, 2020

Look Up

This past Monday, if you were outside in the evening and bothered to look up, you may have noticed an unusual conjunction of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. The two planets have not been so close to one another since 1623, but in that year, the sun’s glare would have obscured the effect of the two planets’ movements. 1226 was the last time the rare proximity of Saturn and Jupiter would have been visible to the human eye.

Of all the years in recent memory, I do wonder if this is the Christmas to look up into the sky more than we might be accustomed to doing. It has been difficult to escape the survival mechanism of looking at one’s own navel or immediate household in the past nine months. And with glasses fogging up from wearing a mask, even looking at the night sky can be quite a challenge.

I confess that I do not often look up at the stars, planets, or heavenly spheres. But now that I no longer live in Center City Philadelphia, I really should make a point of doing so. It could be that precisely what we need right now is to look up, away from ourselves, at an otherworldly realm so vastly distant from us.

This, at least, was the argument made by New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye in an article last Friday, where he suggested that observing the “rare conjunction of planets” reminds us that “there is more to the universe than just ourselves.”[1]      

A look up at the night sky, at least when one can see any stars at all, is a reminder of the astounding number of heavenly bodies, bodies that are light years away. Imagine, gazing upon light that emanated from its source hundreds of years ago, as if we are looking back in time. Contemplating the heavens evokes a sober, if wondrous, recognition that our place in the universe is small indeed.

But this year has seemed much like a year of looking down. For fear of breathing in another person’s breath, we have shielded our faces. We have kept our eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk. And we have vigilantly monitored our own health for signs of a cough or congestion. We have anxiously analyzed our bank accounts, comparing them against the volatile markets. We have stockpiled toilet paper and spent countless hours staring at computer screens. How many times have you looked up this past year?

Admittedly, it has been difficult to appreciate the light this past year, for it has seemed all too dark. In some ways, the past nine months have felt like someone suddenly throwing the lights off in a room, leaving us stumbling to find the switch but unable to do so. We have grasped for the switch that would illuminate a vaccine or some revolutionary cure for a deadly virus. We have searched in the dark for ways to connect with our friends and loved ones when we couldn’t meet in person or exchange hugs or kisses.

For some, this year has been much darker than for others. There have been unfathomable losses, and to deny the reality of the darkness would be insensitive and unconscionable. The darkness, too, has extended into many areas of our lives, beyond the scope of a virus. There has been searing hatred played out on the streets of this country. Many feel stranded in the dark about what individual futures will hold, and they fear for the well-being of their children.

What has seemed permanent in the past has been rendered transient. Customs that were formerly like second nature have disappeared, and we have been groping madly around the dark room, scraping our hands on the walls and praying that we would find a light switch to illumine the darkness. But when we finally find it, the electricity is out.

So, perhaps this is why we should look up. As the light fades in the evening sky, the constant shining of the stars, the carefully scripted orbits of the planets, and the vast multitude of lights in the dark sky, remind us that we are part of something so much larger than ourselves.

Perhaps this, of all days, is the day to look up for a visible sign that St. John’s words are really true. It is on this great Feast of the Incarnation that we celebrate two contrasting things as one Truth. God is beyond time and space, and God became flesh in a tiny infant, living among the toils and tribulations of humankind. We can’t part with either piece of knowledge lest we lose some deeper truth.

When the sorrows of this earthly life have seemed too much to handle, and when the vicissitudes of life on this mortal coil have left us bewildered, looking up might be exactly the right thing to do. Looking up into the night sky, we remember, as John tells us, that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. It is admittedly hard to see this light in our worst moments. Life in the past months has seemed perilously close to the victory of darkness, if light could even be said to exist at all.

St. John writing about the beginning of time knew, of course, what the end would be like as well. John knew that the world’s true Light, Jesus himself, would be shrouded with darkness on the rough wood of a tree outside Jerusalem. But John also knew that on the third day, Light would rise victorious, because this Light could not be extinguished, not by the savage cruelty of humans, not even by the depths of hell.

This Light shines perpetually. It never goes out. Its full power is often masked by deceit, and it is true that the devil masquerades as an angel of light. It is also true that at times the frequency of this Light appears to waver, and its intensity seems to weaken. But this is only a delusion; don’t let it fool you. The Light is always beaming bright, even when it is rejected or goes unseen.

What the Light visualizes is simply what has been present in the beginning and eternally, when there was no beginning. The created light we see is just a visible sign of the one true uncreated Light, the eternal Word, that never had a first appearing, but which simply always was, with the Father and the Spirit.

When the light around us is poor, when it seems to randomly shift colors, when it forsakes us and leaves us lonely, afraid, and unable to move, we need to remember that there is a Light that never fades. There is a Light nearer to us than we are to ourselves which is also so far removed from us in utter constancy that we have to look up to recall that this Light still exists. This Light has run throughout eternity and broken into human time and space to thread its way into our bones and blood so that it could pull us into the eternal stream of life and love.

And even when we turn our backs on this Light, it is still there. Even when we try our best to blot it out through willfulness, pride, and sin, it does not change. Even when we are so turned in on ourselves that we only see the darkness of our own shadow, the Light is still there illuminating the form of our bodies.

And meanwhile, at the end of a dark year, Saturn and Jupiter are passing very close to one another as they follow their charted paths. These planets seem utterly unaware of the pain and travail here below. But there is still some time to look up and see the visual wonders they are performing in the night sky.

They signal that there is a rhythm and order beyond our understanding and control. And while we toil away in the heartache of this moment in time, there is at least some semblance of constancy about us. Even when ICU beds are filled to capacity, and we are tired of keeping to ourselves, and when we long to sing just one Christmas carol in church, even then, Saturn and Jupiter continue on their business, reminding us that when all seems unstable, there is something constant among us, something infinitely more constant than the predictable orbits of those heavenly bodies.

Somewhere, hidden in the mess of the present moment, the eternal Word still abides. Jesus, the constant Light of God’s presence still shines. Even when, and especially when, God’s care and provision seem masked by the dark, we must remember to look up to the lights shining in the darkness to remind us that in the mystery of God, the lights never go out.

And at some point, we will cease our stumbling, and, through God’s grace, our hands will find the light switch, and the room will be flooded with a brilliance that pains our eyes because we have been in the dark so long.

But meanwhile, we wait. And while we wait, we must remember to look up, to remind ourselves, that what St. John said was true. There is a Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. It never has. It cannot. And it never will. Thanks be to God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 25, 2020

[1] Dennis Overbye, “The Solstice, Solace for Our Darkness,” NY Times, December 18, 2020.

From the Inside Out

If you think back to your days in high school English class, you may remember learning about the deus ex machina. When the author of a story or play becomes twisted up in an irresolvable plot of her or his own making, this literary plot device could be summoned to save the day.

The origins of the deus ex machina lie in ancient Greek plays in which an actor, representing one of the many deities, was lowered from on high using a crane or a lift. As the gods entered to perform the great rescue operation, they descended from a remote place, entered history, from the outside in, and left again, having untied the complicated knots of a gnarly plot.

Euripides is usually considered the first to consistently use the deus ex machina device. It later came to be associated with non-machine oriented literary ploys used by writers to enact a twist in a plot, to create facile resolution, or to conclude a drama with a splash. Shakespeare used this device. You’ll also find it in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.[1] Even Faux the Phoenix in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has been seen as an example of deus ex machina.[2]

Unsurprisingly, this eleventh-hour literary technique has been criticized as displaying a lack of imagination. At its worst, it could be used to salvage the most poorly written plot lines imaginable. Anyone, it seems, could pen the most fantastic plot and tie everything up by simple employment of the deus ex machina.

But there’s another aspect of this plot device that places it outside the confines of reality. Often, the hero who swoops in to save the day through the deus ex machina is a remote figure. In the case of ancient Greek tragedies, a member of the pantheon of gods and goddesses, normally distant from happenings on earth, deigns to descend from on high, rescue a situation, and then return to the comfort of Olympus. In other examples, the use of the device itself seems like an intrusion on the normal course of reality and is scarcely believable.

In some ways, it seems that, over the centuries, Christians have come to view the Incarnation as a great deus ex machina event. Perhaps you’ve heard God’s work in Christ described as the wonderful rescue operation through which the world is saved. God, enthroned loftily on high, somewhere up in the clouds, deigns to enter into mortal existence sometime around 4 B.C. God swoops down in the great arc of salvation, enters human history to save it, and then ascends far into the heavens when all is accomplished.

But there is something unsatisfactory about the way God is portrayed in this visual scheme. Somehow the Incarnation is cheapened when we see it as little more than a gargantuan rescue operation when all the world had gone down the tubes.

A more nuanced view of what we celebrate this night is offered by St. Luke. We hear, once again, as we do every year, Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. We have perhaps heard it so many times that it seems to offer little that is new. But hear with fresh ears, if you can, Luke’s account of the nativity. Luke, as he is wont to do, roots Jesus’ birth in the folds of history. During the reign of Caesar Augustus, when Quirinius was governor of Syria, God entered the most impoverished depths of human history as a little child.

Some scholars have spent a lot of ink trying to debunk the reality of a census at the time that Luke offers us. I think this misses the point. What Luke is telling us is that the Incarnation was, in fact, no deus ex machina plot-saving device in the narrative of salvation. Whether there was a census in 4 B.C. or not, Luke is telling something utterly true about God’s work in Christ through his own use of literary details. In the Incarnation, God enters the human story in an unparalleled manner, with such intimacy, that we must pause in order to appreciate its extraordinary magnificence, lest we take it for granted. God, as Luke tells us, was literally enrolled in a census along with the entire known world.

Into a world of countless subjects of a brutal empire, God came. Born amid the meager conditions of a peasant family on the move, God entered the records of a census. The Word became flesh, as Luke describes it, in a feeding trough because, presumably, there were so many others in town for the census registration that there was no more room for the Holy Family in the inn.

When the Name of God was enrolled as Jesus Christ in the annals of the ancient Roman Empire, God entered the records of human history. Into a world where many were kept anonymous by the cruel imposition of power and the incessant machine of efficiency, God entered human existence in a way that might be seen as inefficient and not necessarily convenient.

God came, not swooping down from on high to temporarily rescue a fallen race, but, instead, the Word became flesh in the womb of a human mother. He was himself given a Name in order to bestow a name to all the nameless, both of Jesus’ day and of ours. God became a statistic in the human project of statistics in order to ensure that no person would be just a statistic. God took on a human face so that no person would be faceless in the midst of the dehumanizing system of domination and efficiency.

This was no mere deus ex machina operation, as if God could only save the world by an aloof, momentary descension from on high. The salvation Luke describes is God taking on flesh, a name in a census, a life lived for over thirty years, and a death suffered under the cruel systems of human punishment. Salvation was brought to the poorest village, to the loneliest criminal on death row, to the poorest of the poor, to the forgotten homeless, to the forsaken.

In some ways, our world is no different from the day when God was enrolled in a census. On a globe of some 7.5 billion people, we are all just numbers. Even this year, many of us have been recorded in this decade’s census in the attempt to quantify a motley group of people who are essentially unquantifiable.

Every day brings new statistics of the number of COVID-19 cases across the world, of the number of hospital beds occupied, and of the number of people vaccinated. Without fail, we are constantly confronted with souls whose names are known only to God because they have no homes and because they will never be documented in any census.

Right now, those of you watching via live-stream are being recorded as a view, a simple, anonymous statistic that will be enrolled in the parish’s record of services. In a time in which we are all so seemingly connected by technology, we have become more and more anonymous to one another. In some sense, we might just feel like a number among many millions.

And this is precisely why our salvation is more meaningful than an unimaginative deus ex machina operation. This is why God was enrolled in the records of humanity: to save every aspect of our frail humanity, every detail, down to every face, name, condition, including all who never make it to the official books of history. Salvation became rooted at ground level, in the numbers of a census, in the production system of Galilean carpentry, in the cruel punishment of a Roman execution system.

There was no stalemate in the plot of human existence that required God to lower himself from the heavens, work some magic, and disappear, leaving us to work out our future with a new exit strategy. There was instead a human existence in need of salvation from the inside out. And into this existence, God became a name and number in a census.

In a year that many of us might want to see disappear quickly, this is the intimacy of salvation for which we might long. As we mourn those victims of this cruel virus, we know they were more than just numbers in a newspaper or massed percentages. We know that those lying in hospital beds right now are not mere numbers either. As we wrestle with feelings of God’s aloofness in the midst of unspeakable tragedy, we don’t need to long for another deus ex machina operation to unfold. We have already been given the mystery of God’s presence that continues to save us from the inside out.

Amid our unconscionable divisions in this country, and in the face of anger, enmity, and violence, we rejoice in our salvation by a God who entered all those conditions of human existence and redeemed them from the inside out. There is no corner of human existence that was left outside the reach of God’s saving embrace.

As the great hymn tells us, Christ was born for this.[3] Christ was born, this night, so that no feeding trough was outside the realm of salvation. No device of capital punishment was immune to his saving grace. No child of God roaming the streets this night without a home or a warm bed is beyond the scope of salvation, which works from the inside out.

This night, rejoice. Rejoice, that you and I are not mere statistics in a census every ten years. Rejoice that our salvation could not be performed by some anonymous, remote rescue operation. Rejoice, that our God was enrolled in the annals of human history, in a census over two thousand years ago so that all of us could be saved, not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
The First Mass of Christmas
December 24, 2020

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina

[2] https://screenrant.com/biggest-deus-ex-machina-moments-in-film-history/

[3] “Good Christian, men, rejoice” by John Mason Neale

The Disturbing Gift

In one of the many rooms of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there is a stunning depiction of the angel Gabriel’s Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. This work was painted in 1898 by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Pittsburgh-born but Philadelphia-trained artist. Because the painting covers nearly an entire wall, it’s difficult not to be arrested by this painting upon entering the room.

Tanner’s portrayal of the Annunciation has captivated my attention since I first saw it, not because of its size in the museum gallery, but because of its rather unusual interpretation of the moment when Mary first learns that she will bear the Son of God.

In Tanner’s work, Mary is more realistically depicted than in some other renderings of the Annunciation. Tanner reveals her as a young woman, possibly as young as 12. In Tanner’s painting, Mary is sitting, somewhat hunched over on her ruffled bed in a simple, spartan room. She is clearly a native of ancient Palestine; Tanner, thankfully, makes no attempt to render Mary as an Anglo to suit romanticized Western wishes. Mary does not have her head bowed in self-deprecation or as if she is looking away from the angel’s presence. But her shoulders are slightly stooped, as if burdened with the news she is receiving and the task ahead. Her hands are clasped, maybe somewhat fretfully because of her troubled state.

But what is most striking in Tanner’s representation of the Annunciation is the appearance of the angel Gabriel. Gabriel is not a recognizable, human-like figure. If one did not know the story, it would not be obvious what was happening. There are no angel wings or Cupid-like accoutrement. Gabriel is visualized as a bright, vertical flash of white light, surrounded by an aureole of yellowish hue. To the eyes, the angel does not look like a human at all but instead like a supernatural parting of the veil between heaven and earth.

And Mary sits, undoubtedly confused and overwhelmed on her unmade bed, alone, not shielding her eyes from the light or prostrating herself on the ground, but looking directly at the brilliance before her. She doesn’t avoid the light, as much as she may feel weighed down with the magnitude of her new, unchosen future. The heavenly gift has broken into her world, and she, without making excuses or running away, accepts the gift into her life. Her life has been disturbed by God, but she doesn’t avoid the disturbance. Rather, she looks it straight in the face, if blinding light can be said to have one.

There is a tension in Luke’s account of the Annunciation, especially when compared with that of Matthew. Luke presents the virginal conception of Jesus as something to happen in the future. It’s unclear whether the outcome hinges on Mary’s response. But regardless, Mary is offered some kind of agency. She is presented with the opportunity to respond.

And she does, first, with a question of how such things can be considering her virgin state. This is followed by her assent to be the servant of the Lord. Tanner’s portrayal of the Annunciation extracts Mary from facile moves to label her as meek, mild, and overly submissive. Without question, we know that Mary said yes. But her yes has volition more than meager assent to unsolicited domination. Her yes has power because she chooses to accept the gift of God’s disturbance of her life.

The Church has sometimes tried to downplay Mary’s humanity in order to explain how she could be worthy of God’s particular favor to bear the Incarnate Word. And in doing so, Mary has, in turn, become far removed from our ability to relate to her. The magnitude of what Mary does is paradoxically downplayed. It’s Mary’s sublime expression of her humanity that is actually so inspiring for us. And her embodiment of her own humanity is what makes her so worthy of veneration and a place of honor in the company of saints. From the depths of her very humanity, in spite of her humanity, we might say, Blessed Mary was able to accept God’s disturbance into her life.

And in saying yes to God, but not glibly or easily because of exaggerated demure, Mary directs our attention back to God. Scripture provides no evidence that Mary engaged in vociferous protestations of unworthiness or displays of false humility upon being greeted by Gabriel. As far as we know, Mary didn’t fall on the ground beating her breast out of self-flagellation, and in turn draw attention to herself. Nor did she counter the angel’s message with a vigorous attempt to do something for God in order to try to repay what God had done for her. As Tanner interprets the Annunciation, Mary quietly but boldly gazes with genuine acceptance into the heavenly disturbance of her peasant world.

This disturbance is an unusual gift, but it’s a gift nonetheless. Unquestionably, it is clouded with what the future will hold. Mary’s eyes, gazing upon the shaft of inbreaking light, seem somewhat darkened with an expectation that the future will hold sorrow. Her eyes seem to behold the cross on the horizon. And yet, without turning from the light, she still says yes. Her yes is almost a sacramental expression of the grace operating within her. The disturbing gift that breaks into her world is unsolicited. That’s usually how grace works. But one thing is sure: it’s God’s gift.

This is how God’s grace manifests itself. It pierces the veil between heaven and earth. It disturbs our world. And the natural reaction to disturbance is fear, anger, or avoidance. We find myriad excuses to reject God’s ceaseless gifts. Could it ever happen that the distortion of our ordered ways would be God’s gift? How could it be that, of all people, God would choose me upon which to bestow a gift? How could it be that, of all people, God would choose that person to receive a gift? In this world of sin and willful negligence, is it even possible that God would deign to part the curtain between heaven and earth, much less give us something? What silliness is it for us to receive a divine gift that necessitates our bearing a burden or two!

And so, we find that making excuses for our unworthiness is easier than accepting the gift. We choose comfort over disruption. Or we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into doing things for God, who has no need of any of them, rather than standing still and boldly facing, eye to eye, God’s disturbance of our lives.

We see in the Blessed Mother no attempt to control her own fate. We see no effort at replicating the actions of her husband’s ancestor David. Rather than busying herself with offering God a house through her own endeavors, she assents for her womb to be the house of God through God’s own initiative. Unlike Peter, Mary doesn’t shun God’s stooping down to offer her the gift of grace. She simply says yes.

Perhaps what is most astonishing of all is that the gift with which God overshadows Mary might not seem like a gift at all. God imparts to her a child by the power of the Holy Spirit, conceived out of wedlock, unbidden, into poverty. The gift carries with it the potential scorn of a society enmeshed in a clear system of honor. The gift will hold near unbearable sorrow in thirty years’ time. The gift is the disturbance of a way of life, if poor, at least simple and clear. What kind of gift is this?

It is none other than the gift of God, and it is the reason we so often shun such gifts. These gifts come to us even when we don’t ask for them. These gifts poke holes in our best laid plans. These gifts cannot give us the satisfaction of repaying the Giver.

Mary makes no attempt at trying to figure out why she is the recipient of God’s favor. And she doesn’t try to buoy her self-esteem by floating on clouds of pride because she was indeed the recipient of God’s wonderful gift. She inwardly ponders, and sitting there alone in her room, on a bed whose sheets have been disturbed with sleep, she gazes into the bright light from heaven. And she doesn’t look away.

We rightly marvel at Mary’s sublime expression of her humanity. We rightly contemplate how far her example is from our meager attempts at obedience and humility. And so we, too, sit on our ruffled beds. We acknowledge the ways in which God has disturbed and continues to disturb our lives. We know how difficult it is to accept these disruptions of the status quo as gifts, but Mary teaches us to do so.

Sitting, with shoulders slightly bowed down with the weight of the world’s troubles and sorrows, we nevertheless make a bold move, with Mary as our guide. We ponder and cogitate on what manner of greeting God has chosen to disturb our lives. We even ask a question or two. But rather than retreat inward out of defensiveness, we look up at the blazing light. In the brief time that we can keep our eyes open, we see a glimpse of heaven. And we hold our gaze as long as possible. And without comforting resolution or solid reassurance of our future, we say yes to God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 20, 2020

A Time to Dream

Do you think this might be the year for dreaming? Each of us knows that Christmas is coming soon, and when it does, it’s going to look much different than in years past. Perhaps this is the year to dream.

Maybe it’s the year to gather around the fireplace with a steaming hot beverage and delectable cookies, huddled against the cold, and with our immediate household, recount days of old. We might remember last Thanksgiving or last Christmas, or the one before that, or even a holiday twenty years ago, when the room was filled with laughter and audible sounds of joy.

In those days, all thirty people could line up at the serving table and fight over the last piece of pie. We could hold gatherings throughout the season, as many as we wanted, with as many people as we chose to invite. Those were the days, and we were glad indeed.

As we anticipate the great celebration of the Incarnation in less than two weeks, this year we know it will be different. So, maybe this is the year for dreaming. This is the year to sit still with our memories and relive them, moment by moment. If we can’t actually replicate them this year, we can dream about them. This could be the year for dreaming.

These days, I confess that most of my dreams are riddled with some measure of anxiety. One of my latest anxiety dreams involves being in a large crowd of people, none of whom is wearing a mask. Sound familiar? Perhaps you have your own anxiety dreams: arriving at the final exam for a class that you completely forgot you had registered for or being on stage to play the piano concerto you never memorized. These are not the dreams we want to recall.

But let’s try to summon up the dreams that we remember with particular fondness. Let’s dream, this Advent and into Christmas, about the days that have brought us joy and happiness in the past.

We are so often discouraged from dreaming. Have you ever been labeled a daydreamer? I remember many days in my youth of sitting on a backyard swing and dreaming away, with no worries about the time or how productive I was. But to do so as an adult in the modern age is seen as a royal waste of time.

Dreaming is for lazy people. Dreaming is for those who fail to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make a real living. Dreaming is for fools. Dreaming does nothing to stimulate productivity and efficiency. Dreaming is, well, we might as well own up to it: dreaming is for those who put their trust in God.

From the witness of Scripture, it would seem that God rather favors dreams. Think of the number of people in the Bible with whom God appears in dreams: Jacob, Joseph, and Solomon, among others. Some, like the prophet Daniel, interpret dreams. And of course, the evangelist Matthew loves dreams. Joseph learns of Jesus’ birth in a dream. Because of a dream, the magi decide to return to their native land by way of a different route after visiting the infant Jesus. And Joseph leads his family to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath after a warning in a dream.

But if you have a dream these days and take it too seriously, people will look at you as if you have lost your mind. Dreams are the realm of the fantastical. Dreams are mere fiction. Dreams are precisely where we lose our control.

The psalmist, though, understands the importance of dreams. The author of Psalm 126, either writing in the midst of the Babylonian exile or looking back on that exile, likens good fortune, joy, and laughter to a state of dreaming.

It’s unclear whether the psalmist is dreaming about a past liberation from exile or is dreaming about a liberation in the future. And this ambiguity is exactly what dreaming is like.

For a dream uncomfortably straddles the past, present, and future. Often our dreams at night can be traced to little kernels of events during the day. They conceptualize a reality beyond our grasp, something outside of time. When a dream is glorious, we wake up disappointed, because we still want to be in the realm of the dream.

But the psalmist dreams about a restoration of fortune, of rejoicing, and of God’s great actions on behalf of humankind. This dream enters into the experience of being exiled from Jerusalem for decades, with all its heartache and sorrow. This dream is also the basis for hope in God’s great actions in the future. This dream only makes sense because of something God has already done. God has already done great things. God has already made his people joyful. God has already shown his great goodness. And so the psalmist dares to dream again.

The psalm pivots halfway through from a dreamlike state to a request. The psalmist has spent time around the fire with a hot cup of cocoa, reminiscing about the glorious days of old, but outside the warm room, there is the present reality of a dark, bitter winter. The psalmist is dreaming because he desires for things to be different than the way they are.

The psalmist knows that in the past God has proven trustworthy by his actions. The psalmist is convinced that those who are weeping as they go into the field with bags and bags of lifeless seeds will, nevertheless, return one day singing with joy, and struggling to carry their bags stuffed full of sheaves.

The psalmist dreams because dreaming reimagines the present and the future in terms of the past. The psalmist dreams as the dreams compel him to petition God. The psalmist does not shy away from God. The psalmist is direct and honest. “Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south.” “Restore our fortunes, O Lord.” The psalmist knows that God has done wonderful things before, and the psalmist believes that God will do them again.

It could be that the reason we are so often discouraged from dreaming is because many have lost their imaginations. Everyone is so literal these days, and metaphor and poetry have been relegated to obscurity. It could also be that dreaming is frowned upon because some have simply lost hope that the future can be other than some ill twist of fate already etched in stone.

But we, who have been given so much reason to hope, know that we can dream. We know that we must dream. Our entire liturgical tradition beckons us to dream constantly. We are forever remembering what God has done for us, those things that bring us profound joy. And while we recognize that the present needs some work, or a lot of work, we dare to dream that God will restore our fortunes again. In the midst of sinning and our failures, we remember God’s mercy, as if in a dream, and we dream in the trust that God will work wonders among us again. We dream so that things will be better. And we know that they can be.

Our dreams compel us, like the psalmist, to plead with God. Our dreams urge us to be direct with God and tell him all about our dreams. Dreaming with God is a sign of our trust in him.

We dream about nine months ago, before we were locked down in a pandemic. We recall how good God was to us then, and we remember that God is still being good to us now. And we dream about an even better future.

We dream about a time, perhaps further back than we’d care to admit, when we weren’t fighting so much with our neighbors or other nations or even within the Church. And we remember that those days, if in a dream, were happy. If we dream, then we know how to call upon God, who will doubtless restore our fortunes again.

As we see truth dismantled all around us, we remember, as in a dream, that God became flesh in a human person in a tiny Palestinian village over two thousand years ago. We dream about that time when Truth walked the earth and revealed the very face of God. And while we often miss that face in the chaos around us, we dream that Jesus will come again and fill the world with his justice.

We dream because we are certain that things are not the way they should be. We dream because, at times in the past, God revealed his greatness among us. We dream because our present and our future can be different by the grace of God. And we dream because we know that God will indeed do great things for us.

Right now, we might be bracing for a lonely or disappointing Christmas. We might be utterly discouraged about entering into another lockdown. And because of that, we must dream. We must dream about picking up our bags of seed to go into the fields and sow. At the moment, we are weeping, and we have good cause to weep. But we still dream. We dream because we’ve seen it happen in the past.

We dream that, one day in the future, we see ourselves returning home from the field. And the look on our faces is not weeping but laughing and joyous singing, because on our backs are sacks chock full of sheaves. And we once again remember how good God has been to us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 13, 2020

More Time on the Exam

A month into my first semester of seminary, things began to fall apart—not with my own situation but with the seminary itself. Tension between the faculty and dean had led to a standoff and strike, and students were trapped in the middle of it all. Classes were paused for many weeks, and no one knew what the future would hold in terms of any kind of real education and formation.

As the semester end drew nigh, and when I had already made plans to transfer to another seminary, the standoff ceased, and classes began to resume. This time was traumatic for the student body. Any semblance of order and routine had been shattered in late September, and by late November, somehow we students had to think about exams and grades amid all the mess. It was the last thing any of us wanted to do.

And I will never forget the response of one of my professors. He was a wonderful teacher and a kind man. He had continued teaching his classes throughout the faculty strike, and when the final exam approached, he announced that, because of all the drama and unrest of the semester, the final exam would be open book and take-home. As I recall, the deadline was extended, too.

I will admit that as an overly conscientious student, who was committed to studying and working hard even in the midst of instability at the seminary, I was both relieved and yet a little disappointed. My weaker side wanted to be able to deliver an excellent exam in spite of all that had transpired over the course of the semester. I suppose I secretly wanted to best those other students who had chosen to slack off. They should get their due.

But what I remember most about my professor was his graciousness and mercy. He was empathetic enough to recognize that we students had been put through something painful, through no fault of our own. And his way of demonstrating his compassion, was to change the conditions of the final exam.

Truth be told, I don’t think I learned any less in preparing for the exam because of how it was structured. I may even have learned more. I still remember quite a bit from the semester in that one class. Above all, though, I remember that professor’s kindness.

Of course, my professor knew he shouldn’t cancel the exam. Grades, after all, are part and parcel of the academic experience. As faulty and potentially unhelpful as they can be, they rightly demand accountability. My professor was trying to hold two things in balance: a gentle “carrot” towards good academic performance that would hopefully be an incentive to learn and a merciful stance that acknowledged difficult circumstances.

The author of the Second Letter of Peter seems to be doing something quite the same. He wrestles with a balance between two things. He encourages holy living by reminding his audience of the reality of judgment, and he also emphasizes God’s mercy. The part of Second Peter that precedes this morning’s lesson has some rather harsh images of what happens to those who don’t follow God’s commandments. There has been too much libertinism and moral squalor, and the author knows there must be some bounds. There needs to be the prospect of judgment in order to understand the harmful effects of turning away from God. Such knowledge can incentivize good behavior. Such an understanding in and of itself reveals that God cares about humankind. God knows that holy living is what is good for our souls.

But it seems that the author of Second Peter also can’t avoid the potent reality of God’s great mercy. In spite of all the author’s harsh assessments of scoffers and false teachers, he is irresistibly drawn to God’s compassion. His explanation for the seeming delay in the day of judgment is not just that God’s time is different from ours, but that God is deliberately delaying judgment out of mercy for humankind. It’s an astounding concept!

As Second Peter puts it, God’s forbearance—his abundant and generous patience—is intentional. God is giving humanity every chance to repent. God wants no one to perish and desires that all move towards true repentance. God, it seems, wants no one to be left out.

But should this really surprise us? If we recall God’s incessant blessings of creation as good, indeed very good, why would God not wish all to repent and experience salvation? If we remember the manifold times in the narrative of salvation in which God called his people back to him after they went astray, should God’s mercy surprise us?

True, God’s judgment is quite clear in Holy Scripture. God is depicted as wrathful and punitive at times. But lest we miss the big picture, we should recall the consistent motif that runs like a thread throughout Scripture: God waits with open arms for his people to return to him. And especially when things are looking quite dire, God consistently offers a promise of something more wonderful to come.

Somehow, though, over the course of time, perhaps through false teachers or through the distorted lens of our broken humanity, we have chosen to ignore God’s mercy and focus only on God’s anger and wrath. Why is this? My own instinctive reaction back in seminary to a compassionate gesture of a professor may be some indication. To hope that all the slackers get their due, is often more about human pride than about real justice.

Is our picture of God at times an idol made in our own image? That is to say, have our own sinful desires for revenge and our animosity towards others become the characteristics we erroneously ascribe to God? If the world in which we live is any indication of our values, this might be true.

We seem to be more adept in labeling people as criminals rather than helping them transform their lives. Individual ambition and personal preservation become the reasons to put others down and to hope they in their own endeavors. We rejoice when the wicked get their due. We long for that awful person to experience the full brunt of God’s wrath and anger, because, we say, they deserve it. Fair is fair.

Or is it? How does all this square with a God whose only Son Jesus Christ came into the world not to condemn it but to save it? How does this mean-spiritedness mesh with the heart of the Christian faith, which proclaims that we aren’t out of the game after one strike, or even three, but that we are offered multiple chances to repent and turn back to God?

Could it be, then, that the human tendency to see others get their due is because we ultimately fear God more than we love God? There may be a place for the carrot on a stick to encourage good behavior, just as grades supposedly encourage learning. But at some point, it might be that we have tipped over more into what we fear rather than what we love. We have perhaps forgotten that we are first and foremost to love God, because God first loved us. Holy fear is meet and right, but it is not the same as the miserable fear we so often have of God. Seeking heaven because we are afraid of God misses the point. Then, heaven wouldn’t be heaven.

And so, because of our own insecurity about our status on the day of judgment, we long for others to feel the same. Others should get their due if we ourselves are going to get ours.

But Second Peter reminds us of something extraordinary about God that we might be prone to forget. God exhibits compassion by recognizing that it’s difficult to be a part of humanity. God seems to know that we need more time for the exam. God wants the end result to be favorable because God wants what is good for us. And God knows that by giving us the time to accomplish that, the world will be saved.

Our sanctification is not so each of us can get an A on the exam and the eventual gold star on the diploma. Our sanctification is good for the whole world, and with God’s help, it is the way we encounter a new heaven and a new earth.

What seems like painful destruction to us is evidence of God recreating the world for our own good. It’s only painful to us because we resist it. But when all the dross, sin, and evil of this world have been melted away, we awaken to a pure life where righteousness dwells.

God has provided us with a marvelous gift: the gift of more time on the exam. God knows our struggles in a life of sin. God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and God loves us in the same way. That precious face of yours that God so lovingly sculpted, those strands of your hair that God fully counts, and that heart of yours that longs for God without sometimes even knowing it, all of it is why God is patient with you and with me, because he made them.

God doesn’t want those features molded by his hand to perish, but through our own process of holy living, God desires that they be transformed into a new creation, where righteousness dwells, and where we fear no more, because we see God face to face. And God is patient with us as we try to get all that right.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 6, 2020

Waiting for God

There has been no shortage of predictions of the end of the world. A quick look at Wikipedia will require scrolling through several pages, and centuries, of estimates about the end of the world. In the seventeenth century, the Anglican bishop James Ussher famously, or infamously, predicted both the date of creation and the end of the world. In case you’re wondering, God created everything that exists around 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 B.C., and the world was supposed to come to an end on October 23, 1997.

It’s easy, in hindsight, to write off people like Bishop Ussher who devoted, or still devote, hours and hours of time calculating when the end of time will be. And while all end-time predictions so far have, of course, been wrong, according to contemporary forecasters, Armageddon can still occur in the remaining days of 2020, or irrelevantly for those of us in this room, in 2280.

But these fascinating predictions of that Last Day are indicative of a deeply inquisitive streak running throughout human nature. Before we laugh at Bishop Ussher or scoff at the Left Behind series, we might examine ourselves and realize the extent to which we are all influenced by this desire to know when it will all end, or at least, just how things are.

This hunger for certain mysterious knowledge is as old as creation itself. According to the Book of Genesis, it was at the dawn of creation, that Adam and Eve felt irresistibly drawn to a fruit in the midst of the Garden of Eden. Was it really an apple? We may never know, but even the desire to specify the particular fruit in the garden has been the fascination of people’s curious brains.

Adam and Eve’s illicit eating of the fruit in the garden can imply that it was a harmful fruit, almost as if it were something naughty that they should avoid out of prudish discipline. For the serpent in the garden, the fruit was simply God’s insecure way of keeping the upper hand with Adam and Eve. But as much as we like to speculate about why the fruit was off limits and why it was off limits, Scripture never provides us with the answers to these questions. In any case, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, and the rest is history.

We might take our very human interpretations of that seminal story to be evidence of the story’s very point. The point seems to be that God had decreed that Adam and Eve not eat of the fruit of a particular tree in the garden. And because this seemed arbitrary, Adam and Eve employed creative casuistry, aided by the serpent, to justify eating at least some fruit in the garden. What everyone seemed incapable of understanding was that God said they shouldn’t eat of the fruit. End of story.

It would appear from the Genesis story and also from today’s Gospel reading that there is some knowledge that we are indeed simply not supposed to know. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ description of the Second Coming, even Jesus does not know when that hour will be; only his Father in heaven does.

And this is simply not acceptable to the modern human mind. We might even say that it’s not acceptable to the human mind, period. Clearly, Adam and Eve didn’t want to respect the limitations God put on them. Someone like Bishop Ussher, while not expressly transgressing one of God’s commandments, was obviously tempted by the fruit of knowing unknowable things with certainty. And all this when, according to Mark, even the Son of Man himself does not know that hour. Not to mention that it’s clear that Mark’s expectation about an imminent Second Coming was dead wrong.

Jesus’ own lack of knowledge about something so significant as the end of the world has perplexed theologians and Biblical scholars for ages. Once again, we find evidence of a very consistently human problem: we don’t like not knowing, and the assumption is that if we were just a bit more sophisticated or worked a bit harder, we could solve the mystery.

And we especially hate it when God seems to command things that seem arbitrary. What’s wrong with that fruit in the garden? What’s wrong with knowing when the end of the world will be? What’s wrong with a bit more clarity added to the large mass of mystery?

Scripture itself is not much help since God often seems deliberately to hide things from humankind. We don’t like this either because it seems like God is playing games with us. We want our God to be straightforward and to play by our rules, and if God doesn’t, then it requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to solve the riddle.

And so, we are back where we started, with the fundamental reality that at the root of human nature is a desire for control, knowledge, and certainty. Our perpetual attempts to conquer this dilemma are constantly vexed. So, perhaps we should try another way into this conundrum. What if we asked a different question? What if we assume that the limits on our knowledge are precisely where we meet God most fully?

I think that, among many reasons, the coronavirus pandemic has incapacitated so many people because it has revealed what we do not know. The vast death toll and astonishing numbers of sick people are astoundingly tragic, and behind these sober statistics is a large mystery. We don’t know why supposedly healthy people have fallen ill. Even though we know more about the virus now than last March, we are still frequently told by scientists that there’s much we don’t know about the virus. And hence, we are urged to exercise great caution. What we do know is both disturbing and frightening.

We don’t know when we will have access to a vaccine. We don’t know if the virus will mutate and come back with a greater vengeance in the future. We don’t know what lasting effects the virus has on those who’ve contracted it. We don’t know what life on the other side of this pandemic will look like. We don’t even know who will be left standing when it’s all said and done. There’s so much we don’t know.

We return, then, to our new question: why does a gracious God hide, or at least appear to hide, certain knowledge from us? And is it possible that this is the benevolent gesture of a loving God? Could it be then, that this Advent, we are especially confronted with a more profound understanding of what it means to wait for God?

We all know what it’s like to wait, and most of the time, it’s not a pleasant sensation. Does your heart still drop when you remember waiting for a loved one to come home late at night, fearing for their safety? Do you remember waiting for the college admissions letter? Have you waited for the results of a serious medical test?

This, I think, is not the kind of waiting that God has in mind when our lack of knowledge and control forces us to wait for him. The Gospel reading causes us to imagine anxious servants, riddled by insomnia, because they don’t want to miss the arrival of their master. How many Christians now, too, live in deep fear of a final judgment that will consign them to eternal flames? How many people perform good works or pious acts ultimately because they are terrified of a vengeful God? Their whole life becomes waiting in fear.

But if we turn the focus from the future and the end to the present, waiting takes on a different quality. Waiting becomes about the present, about waiting for God to meet us, to judge our present, and to make it new again. Waiting invites us to encounter the mystery of God, to embrace it, and to let it convert us, without our needing to master it.

I frequently wonder what would happen if we knew the exact day that we would have a coronavirus vaccine injected into our bodies. Would we then throw caution to the wind because an end was in sight? Or would we live each day with our minds only on the future?

And isn’t this how some Christians live their lives? This present reality is only something to be escaped, so do whatever you want. Forget about the environment. Forget about your neighbor. Forget about anything except yourself because in the end, it’s between you and God.

And maybe this is precisely why we need to wait for God. Could it be that God’s gift to us in waiting is to give up our control and learn to love the sacrament of the present moment? Are we to learn to embrace the mystery of God and therefore embrace the mystery of our neighbor?

Advent is not so much about waiting for Christmas but about God coming to us and about our waiting patiently and expectantly for him. God has something to teach us now, right now, in the present moment. And at the heart of that teaching is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with Us. God is with us, now. Not just in the future awaiting the chance to judge the whole of our lives once and for all, but now, in our frustrating lack of knowledge, in our pain, and in our consternation. God is judging us now, so that the rest of our lives can be about living with the mystery of God with Us.

For Christ is coming. He is coming soon, but at the same time, the King, who draws nigh, is already at the door. He stands knocking, and unless you are awake and joyfully expectant in this present time, you’ll miss his knock. So, open the door, right now, and let him in.

A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
November 29, 2020

It's Just What You Do

Recently, I’ve had the occasion, in some casual conversations, to describe the role of a priest. A priest, of course, administers the sacraments, preaches God’s word, pronounces God’s blessing, and gives absolution. But a priest does much more. A priest visits the sick and dying. A priest cares for those in need. A priest is there at all times for pastoral needs. As I frequently tell others, these things are just what you do because you’re a priest.

This is true for other roles in life. The parent ensures that her or his children have the necessities they need for a good life. The teacher provides a quality education so that the world can be enriched by future leaders. The doctor upholds the Hippocratic oath and goes to great lengths to honor it. It’s just what you do.

Actions, tasks, and responsibilities become second nature. Although they may, at times, be difficult, challenging, and even frustrating, they are nevertheless a seamless, integrated part of a particular calling. The doctor doesn’t think twice about doing everything possible to save a life, nor does the nurse. The parent does the same for her child. The priest expects to be awakened from time to time by an emergency call to go to a sickbed. It’s just what you do. The calling itself is inseparable from what you do. Its very essence is defined by it.

I wonder how we could describe the calling of the Christian. Are we easily able to examine the Christian life and say, that’s just what you do? The second century Christian writer Tertullian remarked that pagans observed of Christians at the time, “See, how they love one another!” Is that what Christians do? Of course, it’s what they should do, but is it what they really do? The reason I think we need to identify what a Christian does is because when I look around, I’m confused by what I see. The things that Christians “just do” don’t always seem so obvious. And I often don’t see Christians doing the obvious ones.

Matthew at least gives a window into what a Christian is supposed to do throughout his Gospel. Matthew consistently emphasizes that the life of discipleship is deeply shaped and expressed by ethics. And this culminates in the great judgment scene when the Son of man comes in all his glory with his angels, which we have heard today.

The Son of man’s scattered flock is gathered back in to be separated into the good and bad, the sheep and the goats. Matthew is very specific about what the good and the bad do. Righteousness and unrighteousness all hinge on whether the hungry are fed, the thirsty are given something to drink, the stranger is welcomed, the naked are clothed, and the sick and imprisoned are visited. Failure to do these things is a failure to do them to Christ himself.

It’s an astounding statement about who we are as Christians. We have a place prepared for us by Christ himself, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father. To do something or not do something for another, is to honor or dishonor Christ himself. It seems that God’s estimation of us as humans is rather high.

And yet the clear directives of the Son of man, about what one is supposed to do, are not quite as evident as they might seem on the surface. When the sheep and the goats are sifted according to their deeds, each group claims a certain degree of ignorance. “Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?” The sheep and goats are nothing short of baffled.

How could the righteous and the unrighteous not know what to do? Isn’t it simple and straightforward? The two instances of confusion are different, though, in their degree of innocence. It seems that the righteous are innocently ignorant of the magnitude of what they have done. What they have done, without even thinking of it, is just what you do. The righteous have absorbed a way of being, in conformance with the mind of Christ, deep into their very bones.

The trained pianist knows how a particular scale falls under her fingers. And so the trained Christian knows what it feels like to be a Christian. After all, it’s just what you do. And any experienced musician or sportsman will tell you that what you end up doing, is not manufactured, because it’s just what you do. Actions are not laboriously reconstructed with each new endeavor. Sometimes, what’s performed is not even conscious, because it’s just what you do.

So, the righteous before the glorious throne of the Son of man plead ignorance and are righteous precisely because their right hands are not aware of what their left hands are doing. They are not seeking to earn their salvation or get into heaven by visiting the sick or clothing the naked. They don’t practice charity because they feel guilty about their own privilege. They are righteous because the faith they have absorbed into their very bones guides them in what to do.

On the other hand, there are two ways to look at the actions, or lack thereof, of the unrighteous. Perhaps they are so self-consumed or preoccupied that they have failed to learn what to do. Or a more sinister interpretation is that the naïve question of the unrighteous to the Son of man is not quite so naïve.[1] They feel entitled to a reprieve of harsh judgment because they supposedly don’t know the things you should do, or they want things all spelled out for them. Either way you slice it, they miss the point.

And so for us today the question still remains: can we look around and notice the Christians because of what they do? Is it really that clear after all what you’re supposed to do? Has not ethics become more and more complicated in a vastly technological and modern age? Or are we simply succumbing to the reasoning of the unrighteous? Lord, when did we fail to do these things to you, because we didn’t know what we were supposed to do? Matthew may tell us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, but we know we can’t ever achieve it in this life. Whatever are we to do?

And I think that Matthew gives us a pretty good answer. It’s not a laundry list of specific actions in our Gospel passage today, although those are good places to start. It’s not a heavy list of obligations. It’s not about performing works of mercy as a way to alleviate personal guilt. It’s about none of those things. It’s about placing ourselves under the reign of the Son of man. It’s about whom we choose as our shepherd, and when we choose the right one, and when we let that shepherd form our lives, we are shaped into the right kind of people. We begin to do the right things because it’s just what you do.

Look at what the Good Shepherd does. Both Ezekiel and Matthew tell us. The Good Shepherd gathers the sheep in and provides. He doesn’t scatter us to the wind and leave us helpless. The Good Shepherd is the only King who can give us the authority to do the things we should do.

What shepherds are reigning over our lives, even if we’re not consciously aware of it? And what are Christians around us doing, perhaps without even knowing it? Are they more interested in scattering people than in gathering them in? Are they woefully absent from sickbeds and prison cells? Are they shamefully ignorant of the shivering person on the corner with no coat? Are they immune to the hungry, thirsty people all around us? Are they more interested in separating the sheep from the goats than in proclaiming the Gospel, and as such, usurping the judgment allotted only to the Son of Man? Are they further crippling the crippled? Are they content with butting out the less well-off and scattering them away, where they have nothing on which to feed? Are they putting their trust in bad shepherds rather than in the Good Shepherd, the only true shepherd we have?    

Because if we’re honest, we can admit that this has become the behavior of many who profess our faith. And it’s characterized by self-infatuated ignorance or willful neglect. Lord, when did we not do these things to you? We never saw you is the implied answer. And the corrective to this ignorance or failure is one thing only: to direct our eyes again to the images in Scripture of what the Good Shepherd does. When we have a glimpse of that reign, it begins to form and shape us.

Being righteous, as Matthew describes it, is not about performing a perfunctory list of good works. It’s not about saying the right things. It’s not about getting your own house in order while others are crumbling down around you. It’s about getting Jesus into your bones, so deep, down to the marrow, that you are being a Christian without even knowing it.

And when you get Jesus down in your bones, it’s a seamless integration of right actions into a life well lived. It’s an integrated life that, even in spite of its occasional sorrows, is a happy, flourishing one, because its infrastructure is laid by the King of kings who provides the only sure foundation for our house. And when you get Jesus into your bones, you do all the right things, not because you’re checking them off a list, but because it’s just what you do.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
November, 22, 2020

[1][1] See https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king/commentary-on-matthew-2531-46.

Run with the Gospel

He wastes no time after the cold metal first touches his hand. The icy sting prompts a different reaction in him than it does in the hands of the other two servants.

The third servant runs. . . not to do something with the talent but to hide it. He goes to the farthest outskirts of the town, to a remote place. It’s evening, and so he can conduct his business under the cover of darkness; all the better for his purpose. Before taking another step, he looks around first to see if anyone is watching. He’s embarrassed and afraid at the same time. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s hiding the talent, and he certainly doesn’t want anyone to know where he’s hiding it.

Of course, the talent is not really his money anyway; it’s his master’s. It’s not as if he can hold onto it forever. He really has no skin in this game. But this servant is cunning enough to know that if anyone sees him hide the talent, they might come after it when he is not looking. And then there would be nothing left to return to his master. The master would be furious that his servant had failed to safeguard the talent. If he’s not brave, risky, or motivated enough to invest it, he can at least protect it.

On the other hand, if this servant decides to invest the talent, well, there would be the potential to earn more money on it. But there’s still a possibility that the bankers might take advantage of his lack of financial acumen; he doesn’t trust those bankers. Sure, the talent might produce some interest, but ultimately, the final result could be a scam.

And then, there’s also the fact that it’s just one talent. It’s not as if it’s five talents, or even two talents. Of course, a talent is a lot of money, but would one talent really earn that much interest?

After all this speculation, the third servant feels much better about his reasoning and justified in his decision. It’s safer, at the end of the day, to hide that one talent and not risk a shoddy investment or a failure to earn the right amount of interest. It’s wiser to play it safe.

But when the master does return to claim what he entrusted to the servant’s care, it turns out that this servant got it all wrong. The master wasn’t interested in playing it safe. The master didn’t care that this servant was at least willing to protect the one talent. Why would the master have offered up one talent with the hopes of getting only the same amount of money back? And besides, he had trusted his servants to do something with those talents. It’s true that he gave to each according to his estimation of their potential to make some kind of profit, but he believed that even the servant with one talent could do something with it. And it turns out that he was sorely mistaken.

What the master doesn’t know is that the servant’s behavior when he first received the talent would have been a good indicator of the end result. After he fled, he could have been seen hunched over a patch of dirt, looking suspiciously around. Then he put the cold piece of metal into the cold earth. He gave it a burial. He put a time capsule in the ground; nothing more, nothing less. There was no future for this talent.

The servant’s posture echoed his point of view. Closed in on his fear, he saw what he wanted to see. He imagined a master who was a hard man, capable of provoking fear. But we have no reason to think the master was such a man. Scripture certainly doesn’t confirm this. The master, in fact, had faith that his servants could do something with his money. That doesn’t sound very hard.

But cowering over one talent, the third servant was frankly overwhelmed by his responsibility for that talent and by his lack of confidence in his ability to make any money off it. In possession of a cold piece of metal, the servant could only see the talent as a lifeless object, better preserved than invested, better safeguarded than risked. It was a time capsule to be buried and later unearthed, to remind a future year of a time long past and dead.

How are we like that careful servant? Whether it’s our money, our gifts, or our imagination, do we prefer to play it safe for fear of getting hurt? Do we deem it better to play the piece of music at a slower tempo and sacrifice some of the excitement than play it too fast with passion and drop a few notes? Is it better to forego a pointed word of truth than to risk offending the big donor? Is it better to avoid a leap of faith because if too much risk is assumed, you might never recover?

When the stock market is an unpredictable roller coaster ride, it’s of course safer to hang on for dear life than throw your hands up in the air. It’s more reassuring to hang on to the stash than to part with it in the hopes of some exciting gain.

But the crux of this parable is also a direct challenge to the Church. On the surface, this parable seems to be an unsavory justification of usury and secular business practices. But this parable is actually a charge for us Christians to live a bit on the wild side for the sake of the Gospel.

The Gospel is not meant to be safeguarded and buried in a hole in the ground so it can be protected and defended and preserved in amber. It’s meant to light us on fire so it can be boldly and dangerously proclaimed for the flourishing of the whole world.

And yet many would rather see this Good News as that third servant saw the cold talent: as a lifeless piece of metal to be guarded for dear life and unearthed in a century for someone to gaze reverently upon. We would rather treat the “faith once delivered to the saints”[1] as a special artifact or historical time capsule to be preserved and mechanically passed on from one generation to the next rather than a sword that can pierce souls and divide joint from marrow and baptize us with fire.

We can be so careful because like that third servant, we live in fear. We are afraid of so many things. We are afraid that God will disapprove or smite us because we misunderstand some theological concept. We are afraid that if we don’t determine the right interpretation of Scripture, we will get it all wrong. We are afraid to imagine a God whose very being is creative, because it might mean we are changed in the end. We are fearful that if we color outside of the lines, our picture will be rejected at the art competition.

Or, on the other hand, we are scared that others will think we have lost our minds for some silly religion. Our passion will risk being labeled fanaticism or intoxication from the opiate of the masses. And so we produce neat and uninteresting works of art because it’s safer. Christians are increasingly delivering a sanitized, hermetically sealed Christianity that has no danger or risk, and therefore very little meaning. And that’s how the world sees it, and they are running from it in droves.

But we can learn a great deal from those first two servants, and what not to do from the third. The lesson is not so much how to be a wise investor. The lesson is in how we are to see the talents. The first two servants, unlike the third, didn’t see the talents as material objects to be protected. They reacted differently when the cold metal of the talents hit their hands. That icy sting propelled them off to do something with the talents.

To the minds of these servants, each talent had a latent potential, a teleological thrust that could go somewhere and move toward something fruitful. Each talent was a potential seed that could grow into the largest shrub possible.

This is how we are to receive the Gospel from Christ’s hands. Like the hot coal touching Isaiah’s lips[2], we are hit with a dynamic Word that is meant to set the future aflame with love of God and neighbor, for the sake of the world.

Each material gift or thing that Christ hands to us has the dynamic potential to revolutionize the world. The empty piece of property saddled with deferred maintenance is logically safer to ignore rather than invest money in so it can be a catalyst for ministry. But the Gospel compels our eyes to see such a gift as nothing short of something to be used for God’s mission.

A meager fund can be regarded as potential seed for lifechanging ministry rather than something to be lamented. One talent doesn’t seem like enough to make a difference, so it’s better to hide it. But we know that one talent does make a difference.

The vision for seeing change in the world seems like a pipedream or cliché because the budget simply won’t sustain it. But a little coloring outside the lines and a courageous risk-taking might end in a revelation of God’s unexpected grace.

And I can tell you here today that as I look around this place, I see vast potential, full of barely-contained energy, ready to erupt with passion for the sake of the Gospel and for the flourishing of the world.

The biggest obstacle to taking a risk for the sake of Christ is fear. And Scripture tells us that fear is the enemy of everything rooted in love.

Christ calls us today and moving forward to do one thing: to stop our digging and to look up. Now, let Christ himself place that talent in your hand. Feel the cold sting of the piece of metal. Now, run away from the hole in the ground; run away for dear life. Imagine what this seemingly lifeless piece of metal can do. The potential is all there. Now, run. Run like your life depends on it, and run into those wide open arms and enter into the joy of our Master.      

 Preached by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 15, 2020

[1] Jude 1:3

[2] Isaiah 6:7

Right Side Up

I admit that I’m not a big fan of science fiction, and yet, I have enjoyed watching the recent popular science fiction show Stranger Things. In the small town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s, some middle school kids discover an alternate world, a parallel universe, called “The Upside Down.” In the Upside Down, things are almost a mirror image of real life, except that there is something terribly wrong with everything in the Upside Down. It’s a creepy place. Familiar landmarks in the real world are somewhat recognizable in the Upside Down, but they’re distorted or hard to decipher amid the darkness there, or else they’re covered with goo or cobwebs. Lurking in the shadows are bizarre, otherworldly creatures. This parallel universe is uninhabitable by humans. Indeed, it is deeply dangerous to them.

In the show, the real world in which the human characters live is infiltrated by the Upside Down through an opened portal between the two worlds, which creates the crux of the drama. We might say that the Upside Down is a shadow side of the real world as we know it. It’s the flip side of normalcy. It’s the result of an ordered, normal world gone seriously wrong.

The Upside Down is, of course, no more than science fiction and fantasy. But I have recently felt as if we are living in some kind of Upside Down. In this present-day Upside Down, things as they should be are turned inside out. They are turned upside-down, and when they are upended, a dark scene emerges. Here, to quote the prophet Isaiah, people “call evil good and good evil,” and they “put darkness for light and light for darkness,” and they “put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). To quote the prophet Amos, this Upside Down world is where justice is turned into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood.[1] It’s a dreadful place.

One of the reasons it’s so frightening is that, on the surface, it appears to be the real world as we know it. Landmarks are in all the right places. Geography has not been distorted. North is north, and south is south. But at some point, you realize that this world is not the normal world. Ordinary markers have been twisted. The meaning of words is skewed. Light has been turned into darkness, and evil masquerades as the common good.

The veil between the Right Side Up world and the Upside Down is thin. We don’t know exactly how things get flipped or how the Upside Down world infiltrates reality, but it does so surreptitiously. And this is why it provokes fear.

When the prophet Amos addressed the people of the northern kingdom of Israel in his oracles of judgment, one of which we hear today, he was speaking to an Upside Down world. The eighth century BC was a prosperous time for the people of Israel. They seemed to be on top of the world, which meant that there were plenty of people under their feet. Amos decried the severe oppression of the poor, especially those “who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,”[2] to use his words.

Amos witnessed gross social inequalities. And yet the same people who countenanced, aided, and abetted these inequalities were the very ones who professed devotion to the God of Israel. Their burnt offerings were prolific. Their sacrifices were plentiful.

They longed for the Day of the Lord, that day of judgment when, in their minds, they would be vindicated by their God. It would be a day of great light, of victory, of triumph, because they had done everything right.

And Amos, not mincing words, drives a sharp wedge into this idyllic picture, shreds it to pieces, and reveals it to be false. He shows it to be an Upside Down world.

Amos’s words have, for millennia, spoken justice in the face of injustice, with very little need for explanation. The Civil Rights movement was fueled with the famous verse we here today: with the call for justice to” roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos’s injunctions speak for themselves. And yet they go so often unheard.

Perhaps what is even more disturbing is how everything as we know it gets turned upside down. How does the Right Side Up world suddenly, or perhaps ever so gradually, become the Upside Down? This is the question I have been asking myself. Maybe you have been asking it yourselves.

The circumstances from the eighth century BC seem eerily similar to 2020 AD. People who profess devotion to God, whose ritual offerings are manifold and robust, countenance the neglect of the stranger. Faithful worshippers who receive Holy Communion, read their Bibles diligently, and say their prayers nevertheless throw coals on the fire of division when they leave the church.

Blasphemy poses as a glorification of God’s will. Blessings are turned into curses. Evil is called good, and good called evil. God’s power becomes a justification for oppression. Holiness becomes separation from the world. Prosperity becomes associated with God’s favor.

It’s an Upside Down world because something is very wrong with it. It’s what Amos pointed out. It’s what Jesus pointed out in his home synagogue in Nazareth. Carrying out the message of the prophets before him and embodying it in his very life, Jesus announced what he would do: bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and let the oppressed go free.[3] The prevalence of the poor, the walking wounded, and the imprisoned were the new normal in the Upside Down. But the message of the prophets taken up by Jesus Jesus and embodied in his very life turned all this right side up.

The Upside Down world has always been with us. When Jesus remarked that we’d always have the poor with us, is this what he meant, that the Upside Down world would always penetrate into our midst and linger there? But the question remains: how did the Right Side Up flip?

And I think that Amos offers us a clue as to how we find ourselves in an Upside World. If we read between the lines into the historical context of Amos’s day, we see that he prophesied to a people who were extraordinarily complacent. Amos’s cries convict our own day, too, with its extraordinary complacency.

When we’re on top of the mountain, so to speak, sometimes the dizziness tips us over, and we find ourselves in an Upside Down world. Our designation as God’s beloved people goes to our heads. It becomes a way of justifying our own favor and ignoring the sufferings of others. It becomes our warrant for claiming God on our side and on no one else’s. And when anyone has reached this peak of personal prosperity, it’s not so far of a leap to get turned over into the Upside Down, where anything can be justified in the Name of God. And I mean anything.

It’s sometimes when we perceive ourselves to be closest to God that we are in the most spiritual danger. Whether it’s in our prayer, worship, or religious loyalties, when we think we have arrived at the Promised Land, the Devil has a field day with us.

And this is why Amos’s words are so convicting to his audience. They were mired in the Upside Down. For them, the Day of the Lord would mean darkness and not light, gloom and not brightness. The ritual offerings and pious devotions of the gloatingly complacent were deemed worthless to God. The exuberant hymns were grating noise to God’s ears. Everything had been flipped, because when God’s justice comes, it’s unbelievably painful for those who have made their home in the parallel universe of the Upside Down.

When God’s judgment comes, it turns everything right side up. This is what the prophets testified to. This is what Mary sang of in her Magnificat. This is what Jesus himself embodied in his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus showed us how to put things right side up.

 But the lure of the Upside Down is powerful. It’s powerful because it so glibly masquerades as Right Side Up. It feels good. It seems right. And pretty soon, good is being called evil, and evil is being called good. Lies are seen as truths, and truths are dismissed as lies.

But God has upended the world time and time again. He will continue to upend the world, if we let him. And he is with us, God with Us, right now, working through us, to turn a world that is very upside down.

If we turn things right side up, the Day of the Lord becomes light for all those living in darkness. In this Right Side Up world, goodness is called goodness, and it’s embraced and clung to for dear life. When things are right side up, evil is shunned, trampled on, and cast away for what it is. Complacency is revealed to be the sham it is for tolerating injustice in the Name of God. The songs of those embracing the lost and the suffering are the hymns that please the ears of God. And the noisy displays of phony righteousness are unmasked as discordant bloviations.

And so we are left with a question today, even as we recognize that we inhabit an Upside Down world. The question for us this day and for the rest of our lives is this: will we be content to stay in the Upside Down, or will be let God come and upend our world? Justice is plentiful. Righteousness is ready to spring forth. And if we stand under its fountain, it will flow down and cover us and wash away the cobwebs from the terrible mess of the Upside Down. And we will find that in the Right Side Up, the light reigns and salvation is near at hand.

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost
November 8, 2020

[1] Amos 6:12

[2] Amos 2:7

[3] Luke 4:18

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