Two Pieces of the Truth

Someone in my chaplaincy cohort was on to me. And I’ll admit that I found it frustrating. In our group sessions, she would suggest that I was holding something back. I want to see the real Kyle, she would say. But I didn’t feel like I was being anything other than the real Kyle. What was expected of me?

I didn’t like this. I certainly wasn’t trying to be dishonest; I simply felt that there were certain things I should share, and there were other things that were best left unspoken. I was annoyed by the repeated suggestions that I was withholding something that should be shared with the group. And of course, that annoyance remained unvoiced.

We were in the middle of Clinical Pastoral Education, a chaplaincy experience usually undertaken after one’s first year of seminary. The setting of this chaplaincy was a busy inner city hospital. It wasn’t an easy place. Because it was a Level One trauma center in a major city with a fair amount of crime, we saw gunshot victims and every severe injury or illness that other hospitals couldn’t take.

I suppose I was trying to tough it out. Some of my colleagues expressed all manner of emotions in our group conversations. There were tears. There was anger. But I prided myself on having it all together. No matter how much troubled or bothered me, no matter what irritated me, I was self-composed.

I had all manner of excuses for maintaining my composure and for bottling up some of my emotions. I had had real life ministry experience in parishes before serving in that hospital. You can’t lose your cool in front of others in a church setting, I thought. You must hold it together and know when to speak up and when to remain silent. I assumed that my colleague didn’t understand that because she hadn’t had such experience.

But in hindsight, my colleague understood something that I didn’t, and I couldn’t quite see this at the time. And yes, I knew something about the emotional filtering that’s necessary for a leader, which I’m not sure my colleague fully grasped. Each of us had a piece of the truth.

We don’t get easy words from Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. To be honest, it would have been far easier to ignore this reading altogether and preach on one of the others. But that doesn’t seem right to me. When Jesus says things that make us squirm, it’s our bounden duty to tackle them and spend time with them until we can make some peace with them. And the way to make peace with Jesus’s difficult words is often to hold two extremes together. Both extremes carry some truth, and to find the entire truth, we need both pieces.

The most obvious piece is what’s most visible. In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, he refers to the tradition of the law, a good and venerable tradition that he’s carrying forward into his life. He gives obvious examples. You’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t murder. You’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t commit adultery. You’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t swear falsely. All these laws are common knowledge.

But then there’s the other invisible piece, lurking in the depths of the heart. Here’s where Jesus makes us uneasy. I say to you that anger can lead to murder. I say to you that even looking lustfully at another is akin to adultery. I say to you that offering gifts at the altar is shallow ritual unless you seek reconciliation with your enemies. I say to you that divorce should not be an easy exit strategy to avoid embracing the difficulties of marriage. I say to you that you should forego oaths and, instead, speak plainly and honestly.

These are the two pieces of the moral picture handed to us by Jesus, and we need both to arrive at the truth. If we only have one piece, we assume that our visible actions are enough. If we refrain from murder, adultery, or swearing falsely, then we’re doing just fine. On the other hand, if we’re incapacitated by guilt because of the disturbing emotions that seep unsolicited into our hearts, then we will be of no moral use. Visible actions and the invisibility of the heart are both needed.

Part of knowing the depths of one’s heart is also the wisdom to know what should be said and what should be left unsaid. It’s knowing when the nasty email should not be sent in haste. It’s knowing when a mean glance or a rude word should be avoided.

According to Jesus, it all starts with the heart. And here, he has provided fodder for a piece of ancient wisdom from the early Church, which holds that the inner world inside each of us is merely a microcosm of the larger world. Perhaps this is what my colleague in Clinical Pastoral Education instinctively knew. If each of us is honest, we’ll see within us things that terrify us. We’ll find murderous impulses lurking in the hatred that festers within. We’ll find urges to steal because we so covet what someone else has, whether a gift, talent, or material object. We’ll find a deep-seated fear of not having enough that might lead us to do anything to feel like we do have enough. If we look deep within, we’re probably horrified. Heinous crimes are not the sole provision of criminals behind bars; they reside in our hearts, too.

We’ve heard it said, give voice to your anger so that the truth can be named. But Jesus says to us, tell the truth and name your hurt, but then let it go. Otherwise, it’ll eat you alive. We’ve also heard it said that ignoring our erotic urges is mere prudishness. But Jesus says to us that none of our urges is hidden from God and that God can take those feelings and transform them into desire for him. We have heard it said that sometimes divorce is the lesser of two evils, but Jesus says to us that perhaps we in the Church often fail to uphold and support all who live within the covenant of marriage, especially when things get tough.

It’s only by tackling all the frightening things inside our hearts that we can begin to live as Jesus calls us to live. And to do this, we need both pieces of the truth. First, we must look deep within, where the demons hide, and call them out. We recognize our tendency to claim power by holding onto anger and resentment. We acknowledge our inherent cowardliness when we’re passive aggressive or utter unkind remarks rather than approaching someone and asking to be reconciled.

But then there’s the hard reality that frequently when we look within our hearts at the monsters lurking there, we can’t simply make them disappear, which is why the visible things we do matter. In full awareness of our aimless interior posture, we behave as if we’re better than our hearts seem to be, not to be dishonest but to train ourselves to live towards God’s glory and not towards sin.

It's a deep tragedy that people who feel unworthy of God’s love or who are angry at God stay away from church. Why should we presume that God wants nothing to do with our anger, lust, or rage? Why should we assume that we can decide whether or not we can approach God’s altar for grace and forgiveness? Isn’t the first step to go there in the first place because we want God to change us?

And this is precisely why our presence to one another, in person, in the flesh, is so crucial. When we come into this holy place, we bring everything—our selves, our souls and bodies. We can’t keep anything from God. It’s all here. All our anger at the person we see in another pew, all our jealousy of the person who has more money or a better job, all our envy of someone else’s childlike faith. It’s all here. And this is exactly where God wants it to be.

When we come here each Sunday, we bring it all. God asks that we hold nothing back, because all of it—not part of it or some of it, but all of it—is to be placed on the Altar. God reaches inside our hearts, touches our rage, and heals it. God reaches in and puts salve on the wounds where we’ve been broken by the Church, society, or one another. God takes our emotional urges and redirects them to love of him, so that we can in turn share that love with all. God doesn’t want only some of it. God doesn’t want us to filter certain things out and control access to those most favorable parts. God wants all of it. God wants all of you.

And when we let God in, the most miraculous thing happens. We find that we are free. We are no longer chained to our inner demons. We no longer hide the little world inside our hearts. We open it up and offer it to God.

You have heard it said that church is the place to be prim, proper, and polite. But Jesus tells us that God wants all of us, no secrets and no doors on our hearts. Because God wants to take it all into his loving arms, transform it, and give it back to us so that we can be whole again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 12, 2023

Where No Secrets Are Hidden

On Thursday, after the Candlemas Mass, a few of us were cleaning up following the potluck dinner, and someone commented that it’s difficult to see the church building at night. That’s true. Despite its size, you could easily drive past this church at night without even knowing it’s here. There’s virtually no light on the outside of the building.

So, those of us doing the dishes after the potluck supper imagined how helpful it would be to install lighting that would illuminate the façade of the church. Someone pulled up pictures on a smartphone of beautifully lighted church buildings. We gawked at them and wondered how that might even be possible here at Good Shepherd. How many more people might be drawn to stop in for prayer or even a weekday evening feast day Mass if they saw the church ablaze with light, both inside and outside? After all, if no one knows we’re here, how can we be a light to the world?

But lighting the exterior of the church is only one step towards Christian evangelism. Let’s face it. There are many churches that are well illuminated and have engaging signs but no people in the pews. There are plenty of churches that have the wherewithal to invest in extensive social media campaigns in the hopes that they will reach people with the Gospel. But does it always translate into Christian discipleship? I don’t disagree with these evangelistic methods. In some cases, I think that we at Good Shepherd would benefit from a more robust engagement with the world outside the stone walls of this church, whether illuminated or not.

And yet the fact remains that despite social media engagements, illuminations of stone facades, and neighborhood canvassing, the Church is too often not seen as a light to the world. Some would say that it has lost its salt. No matter how grand our buildings are and no matter how central our locations may be, more and more people seem not to be interested in who the Church is and in what she’s doing. The Church may be a city set on a hill, but there’s no light on the exterior. People act as if we’re not here.

As a parish priest who is passionate about the Gospel, I wonder a lot about why this is. And as I pondered the familiar words of St. Matthew from today’s Gospel, I realized that perhaps the answer to this predicament lies deep within the walls of our buildings. The answer is found even beyond the evangelistic actions of the faithful in the pews. The answer lies hidden within our hearts.

We are given a clue towards this answer in the words the celebrant prays at every Mass. They are frightening words if we’re really listening. Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. . . Here in this place, we are laid bare before God. Here in this place, as the Church gathered for worship, there are no secrets. So, could it be that the Church is decreasingly seen as relevant to those outside her walls because we are not always good at telling the truth?

This might seem controversial. My experience has been that the most faithful in the Church can often be the quickest to take offense at any intimation that the Church is broken or, at times, dishonest. And perhaps this says it all. If we can’t even be truthful about our imperfection, how can we be salt to the earth? How can we be a light to the world if we keep certain corners in the shadows?

But the truth is that I do see in the wider Church, and across denominations, a fear of telling the truth. From within the Church, I see a tendency to excuse poor behavior by using confidentiality as a veil of secrecy. I see within my own self the proclivity towards trying to keep certain things from God in my prayer, as if I could ever succeed in doing so. I see a desire to sweep under the rug the haunted moments of the Church’s past rather than giving voice to them. I see people encouraged to lead double lives. There is no shortage of convincing excuses about why we shouldn’t tell the truth.

And all this flies in the face of what St. Matthew is urging us to do. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew knew quite well that we could never be perfect in this life, so the irony here is that we are becoming perfect by acknowledging most honestly our imperfection.

Like it or not, the Church is a city set on a hill, illuminated for all to see. Those on the outside are not meant to look only at our beautiful stone walls or stained glass. Those outside the Church are meant to watch us tell the truth. The Church is commanded by Christ to tell the truth. We are commanded to be a place where there are no secrets.

The Church has within its sacramental power, the means to tell the truth. Ironically, the Sacrament of Reconciliation is what teaches us how to avoid keeping secrets. When we come before God in the presence of a priest to confess our sins, the seal of confidentiality of the confessional is morally absolute. It's the most confidential place on earth. And yet, it’s a wholly public act. Confidentiality does not mean secrecy. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is the truest place of trust because there the deepest, darkest secrets are unearthed and voiced into the loving embrace of the Church. In this place, there are no secrets. There is no judgment except by God. In confession, we learn best how to tell the truth.

We then move from the safest and most confidential place on earth into the world to be salt that seasons its monolithic, spineless conformity. We’re called to be light to a world that delights in turning the light off in certain seedy corners. The salt we bring to the earth in our honesty has an uncomfortable bite at times. In a time when most people are expecting only sugar from the Church, we are nevertheless asked to bring some spice, to keep ourselves and the world honest. Salty truth can sting when it hits the wounds of our world, too. But in this full authenticity, we let our light shine before all so that they may see our good works.

Our good works are not simply acts of charity or kindness, our responses to social injustice, and our faithfulness in showing up for worship. Our good works are the visible manifestations of truth-telling in our lives. Our good works are seen when we become a community where there are no secrets, but only shared trust, a place where we can tell the truth and still love one another.

This does not mean that we break confidence. It means that when we agree to have no secrets, we agree to be fully honest before God, we acknowledge our frailty, and we build a place where the Church is the most trusted place on earth. And above all, it means that others see in our actions the rigors of the Christian life into which we have been baptized.

Here in this parish, I see truth telling. We haven’t been shy about naming the unsavory parts of our history. We haven’t tried to sweep them under the rug. And at the same time, we have also acknowledged that our past does not define our future. Being honest about our past secrets has helped us find new ways to heal. Being honest about our past has allowed us to submit to the new creation that Christ is preparing out of the old. Being honest means that redemption is always a possibility.

I rejoice that this is not a place for secrets. I rejoice that what I see among you is trust, openness, and transparency. No one must lead a double life here. At the Altar rail, we find our deepest truth telling. We confess with mind, heart, and body that we’re broken and in need of healing. We confess that although we don’t always agree, we trust that God will help us live together in love. We open the deepest corners of our hearts as we receive Christ’s Body and Blood into our bloodstream. Here, there’s nowhere to hide. And that is not scary, but comforting, because God wants to take our secrets and redeem them.

One day, perhaps the exterior of this church building will be better illuminated, drawing more people’s eyes to this glorious place. I hope they will stop, drop in, and see with their own eyes the trust and love within its walls. It’s all so very good. But more than anything, what I hope they see is not kind conformity or complacent congeniality but truth-telling. What I hope they will find most inspiring about this place is that here, we have no secrets.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 5, 2023

Prompt and Response

Back in the fall, I decided to hone up on the Spanish I learned in high school and college, and I started using the free online language program Duolingo. It was enjoyable and helpful for a few months, but I came to realize that something crucial was missing in how I was learning. I couldn’t effectively practice conversational skills. No matter how much vocabulary and grammar rules I practiced, it was no compensation for the lack of conversational practice.

So, this past week, I began the Pimsleur online language learning program. Dr. Paul Pimsleur, for whom the program is named, was a scholar of applied linguistics who developed a method of learning based on scientific research of how the brain most effectively absorbs a new language.

The method has several core principles, and two of them stand out. One is the principle of anticipation. Learners in the Pimsleur program don’t just repeat phrases verbatim. They are prompted in their native language to render an appropriate response in the foreign language. Learners must engage with the prompt and think about what comes next. The other notable principle is that of “organic learning,” which happens in contextual conversation and dialogue. The speaker and the listener must engage with one another. The tone of the speaker’s voice, the rhythm of speech, and pronunciation are essential. Of course, these principles, however, scientific they may be, simply reinforce what we all know. To become fluent in another language, you must immerse yourself in conversation.

And a conversation is exactly what we find in today’s words from the prophet Micah. If you ask me, the most striking thing about this excerpt from the Book of Micah is not that God has a bone to pick with his children. It’s not that God’s children have lost their way and are more focused on ritual than ethical behavior. It’s not that God is calling the people back to simple principles of acting justly, kindly, and humbly. The most striking feature of Micah’s words is that when God states his contention with the people, God doesn’t just lecture them. God doesn’t simply scold them or tell them what they have done wrong. God invites them into conversation. God asks them to engage.

Did you notice that? Did you notice the quotations marks in the passage? Did you catch the multiple voices in dialogue with one another? It’s rather easy to miss when reading the text or hearing it read by one reader. For this passage to come alive, we need multiple voices. We need to hear the verbal exchange between God and people.

This passage opens with the prophet announcing God’s words, and then we hear God’s words. We shift from the prophet’s voice to God’s voice. God lays out a case against the people, for they have forgotten how to live justly. There are wide chasms between rich and poor. But above all, the people have forgotten how to live as a grateful people.

God lays out his contention with them but notice how God does it. God doesn’t talk at the people. God talks with them. “O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!” God affectionately addresses the people as his own and then demands an answer. God wants the people to engage. God wants to be in relationship with the people, however apathetic and stubborn they may be.

Although God prompts the people with a question and then offers the answer himself, it’s as if God is longing for the people to supply the answer instead. God desires for the people to be as passionate with him as he is passionate with them. God yearns for the people to respond. Yes, God, we realize now what we’ve forgotten. Now, we remember by responding with what you’ve done for us. You brought us from slavery into freedom, from death into life. You sent us leaders like Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. You saved us from the curse of Balak. In all things, you’ve always looked out for us. You’ve never forsaken us.

But as we know, the people don’t respond in that way, because they don’t really know how to respond. God must provide the answer for the people. God must remind the people of what he’s done for them, because the people have forgotten how to be grateful, how to care, and how to engage. We, too, can so easily forget how to be in conversation with God.

And when the people finally do respond to God’s plea, they make a rather strange reply. Either the people are desperate to earn God’s favor, or they are speaking in hyperbole. Shall they bring young calves, or thousands of rams, or ten thousand rivers of oil, or sacrifice even their first-born children? The people have entirely missed the point. Don’t we miss the point?

The answer, it turns out, is rather simple but apparently hard to implement: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. God doesn’t demand our desperate offerings to be appeased. God is interested, first and foremost, in a relationship with us. When God speaks, God asks us to respond, not with things but with ourselves.  

It's as if God is teaching the people of ages past and also teaching us how to speak his language. It’s easy to think that we only need to add some fancy words to our vocabulary or to repeat our regular rituals until God is appeased. It’s easy to imagine that our conversation with God is either God talking at us and ordering us to do things, or our talking to God and asking him to do things for us.

But God’s language is far deeper. To learn God’s language, we must let God prompt us so that we can respond. When our actions have strayed far from the mind of Christ, it’s time to listen to God’s grievance with us, and then to remember how to be thankful.

God is quite deliberate in how he teaches us, even though he has been quite explicit in teaching us through his Son Jesus Christ. God also knows that for us to speak his language more fluently, we need to practice. We need God to invite us into conversation. We need for God to remind us repeatedly that he has never given up on us. When we have grieved his heart, he hasn’t canceled us or silenced us. Time and again, God has shown his unending compassion and mercy by asking us to speak with him. Every day of our lives, God is helping us to learn his language, because God knows that we can.

Could it be that the most chilling sin against God is that of apathy? Does anything break God’s heart more than our unwillingness to be in conversation with him? What is more appalling than for God to speak to us, hoping for an answer, and to hear nothing but indifferent silence? Isn’t it grievous to be offered God’s gifts, whether in Word or Sacrament, and to refuse them?  

The God before whom we come this day knows nothing of apathy. This is a God who cares enough about us to contend with us, to hash it out, however uncomfortable it may be. This is a God who never looks away, even when we offend him yet again. This a God who will not force goodness upon us but, instead, invites us into it by learning how to speak his language.

Today, something has brought you here. Perhaps it was a sense of obligation or duty. Perhaps you were stirred by a longing to praise God. Perhaps someone made you come. It matters not why. You are here, but now God asks something more of you. God asks for more than your presence in the pew. God asks for more than your money in the collection plate. God has laid out his case against us where we have fallen short of the demands of Christian discipleship. God has laid bare to us the ways in which we have been apathetic and turned a blind eye to injustice. God is asking us to speak. Answer me! In what have I wearied you?

Now, here before God’s altar, make your answer, not with mere lip service but with your whole selves, souls, and bodies. It’s time to remember all that God has done for us, all the times he has forgiven our laziness and pride, all the times he has been with us in our sorrow, all the times he has brought us from death into life. Don’t be silent. Don’t ignore God’s summons. Respond to God’s prompt. Learn God’s language. Accept God’s gift, and then you will learn how to live.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
January 29, 2023

Let Christ Step In

Well-behaved churches rarely make the news. And to be honest, I’m fine with that. Pick up a newspaper these days and if you see any reference to Church or religion, it’s often disturbing. There’s a brewing schism in one denomination threatening to tear churches apart. There’s an abuse scandal in another. Some priest or pastor has committed financial impropriety. A church leader has sued other church leaders. And another one has drawn a line in the sand on a controversial issue.

As I said, well-behaved churches rarely make the news, which is why the first-century Church in Corinth received a letter from St. Paul. Paul had a practical need to write to the Corinthians, and it’s not because they were behaving well. We don’t know everything that the Corinthians were up to, but they were up to no good. There was petty quarreling. Some of the Church folk decided to side with certain leaders, favoring individual charisma over unity. Some claimed Christ themselves for their own specific causes and purported to have a monopoly on truth. Many were perversely thrilled by fighting rather than by living together in love and peace. Does this sound only like the first-century Church or eerily like the Church today?

It's perhaps one of the most unfortunate ironies of history that St. Paul’s theology has been coopted to promote rancor and schism, when his theology is, at its core, a moving explication of sacrificial love and unity. It’s easy to dislike Paul because of how we sometimes interpret his more controversial words. But could it be that Paul gets under our skin because his theology cuts too close to the bone, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative? Isn’t it easier to use Paul’s words as ammunition against targeted scapegoats rather than accept his challenging call to unity? Isn’t it easier to give up on Paul than to admit that we are being summoned to dialogue with those most different from us?

When we think of news headlines and making history, we might think of the unfavorable tones of Paul’s theology. If we move down to the subheadings or to those news clippings that never make it to the front page, we will find the real meaning of the apostle’s controversial message.

It's not surprising that well-behaved Church people rarely make the news. The media knows what gets people’s attention, and what gets people’s attention makes the most money. And this is why Paul is suggesting something so very foolish. He knows it’s foolish, too. “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The word of the cross may not make the news headlines, but it doesn’t need those headlines to work its power. Its power is in its understated simplicity, its denial of competitiveness, and in its focus on the Body of Christ rather than on the self.

To most ears, St. Paul’s understanding of Christian living is, at worst, nothing short of stupidity, and at best, nothing short of naivete. To lawmakers who pass the popcorn while their political rivals fight among themselves, it does seem foolish that we can agree to disagree. To autocratic leadership that demands monolithic conformity, it seems ridiculous that we would choose to be in relationship with one another even if we don’t think alike. In an increasingly polarized political climate, it seems absurd that we could have a common mind on anything when we vote differently, have a variety of opinions, and are so different. To some in other denominations, Anglicanism seems mealy-mouthed because it paves a via media of humility rather than of dogmatism. When life is merely survival of the fittest, it seems like a death sentence to put not self first but the whole. And if we’re convinced that we’re right, then it feels like a compromise of our values not to force others into thinking as we do. No wonder manipulating St. Paul’s theology gets you into the headlines. It’s much easier to use him to help you put others down and puff yourself up. Which is exactly the opposite of what his theology is about, if we’re not afraid to let his difficult message convict us.

Paul’s words—the words of the cross, we might say—leave no one untouched and unjudged. Preachers, point not to your brilliance or your eloquence, Paul says. Point to Christ, step aside, and let Christ step in. Churches, point not to your wealth, success, or power. Point to Christ, step aside, and let Christ step in. Church leaders, point not to your own authority or so-called monopoly on truth. Point to Christ, step aside, and let Christ step in. Moralizers, consider whether your judgmental speech is really about immorality or, rather, about your own ego. Point to Christ, step aside, and let Christ step in.

The risk is that, before too long, we are simply repeating the behavior of those we perceive as judged by Paul’s theology. We rejoice at the conviction of those who skew Paul’s words and render them towards anger and hate. But the invitation is to look at where the fingers of Christ’s true disciples are pointing. They are pointing not to division, schism, and fighting. They are pointing to those acts of love, mercy, and compassion that rarely make the headlines or history. The truest test of whether something is of the Gospel is whether it manifests reconciliation instead of division.

We can be sure that Christ is truly present when enemies are reconciled. We can be sure that Christ is truly present when two very different ideologies meet at the Communion rail. We can be sure that Christ is truly present when people who disagree nevertheless agree to sit together and talk. These actions rarely make the headlines, but they don’t need to because they are all pointing to Christ.

It’s a lovely gift of the lectionary that on the day we hold our annual parish meeting we are forced to reckon with Paul’s theology of the Body of Christ. In an age when the Church commandeers more bad headlines than good ones, we may wish to make our own headlines. Isn’t it sorely tempting to prove to the world that some of us are trying to do good? Don’t we want to defend the Church, whether Christianity, our denomination, or our parish church? And it might seem foolish not to.

But Christ’s call is simply to point to him, step aside, and let him step in. Our job is not to make the headlines. It’s enough to be in a subheading or no heading at all. It’s enough to be praying daily for the kingdom and for others. It’s enough to show up for Mass when others sleep in. It’s enough to pray in our rooms with the doors closed. It’s enough to be one of two people at a Low Mass or a weekday service of Morning or Evening Prayer. It’s enough to visit the sick and care for the poor without others knowing about it. The quiet witness of a faithful remnant[1] energized not around fighting but around common purpose has the potential to change the world. The ordinary life of prayer, and not newspaper articles, will bring souls to Christ. And submission and obedience to a rule of life and a way of being together in community–not individual stubbornness–will lead us towards the vision of God. It’s enough to point to Christ, step aside, and let Christ step in.

Dear people of Good Shepherd, as I say this to you, I say it perhaps most to myself. We can lament our past and throw stones at it, or we can ask God to present it to us as a gentle gift of memory, a quiet reminder that we are always at risk of letting our own viewpoints, our politics, our preferences, or our anger and emotions, supersede the place rightly accorded to Christ himself. Those who can most effectively decide whether we are living cross-shaped lives are those on the outside. We should pay attention to the ones who affirm that the quiet power of reconciliation, unity, and the fruit of the Spirit are manifest among us. And I believe they are.

We may never make the headlines again, and in some sense, I hope that we don’t. It’s enough that we are striving, in all our diversity and difference, to be of one mind and one heart. It’s enough that we are making our lives about Christ and not about ourselves. And above all, it’s enough that we point to Christ in our own authentic way, step aside, and let Christ himself step in.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 22, 2023

[1] The use of the word “remnant” is inspired by Martin Thornton’s theology of the remnant in The Heart of the Parish (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1989).

From the Inside Out

         Don’t you want to know what happened between four o’clock that day and the next morning? In this mystery, an entire evening and night are unaccounted for. We know many details about the first couple of days. Here’s what we know. On the first day, before we pick up the story in today’s Gospel, some priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask John the Baptist who he is. Are you Elijah? Are you the prophet?

         We know that John clearly denies that he’s the Christ. He’s merely the one crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way for the Lord. He’s not the Messiah. He’s not even worthy to untie the thong of his sandal. We know John was baptizing with water only, not with water and the Spirit.

         We also know that on the second day, John sees Jesus and announces that he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John says he didn’t really know Jesus but that he performed baptisms in order to reveal Jesus to Israel. It’s implied that Jesus was baptized by John, and John bears witness that Jesus is the Son of God, the one on whom the Spirit descended.

         We know that on day three, John is standing with two of his disciples and once again identifies Jesus as the Lamb of God as he walks by. Something about this proclamation intrigues the disciples so much that they follow Jesus immediately. We know that as they follow Jesus, he turns to them and asks them what they seek. They ask him where he’s staying. Jesus invites them to come and see, and they go to the place where he’s staying. They stay. It was about four o’clock, the tenth hour. We also know that Andrew was one of the two disciples and that he brought his brother Simon to Jesus, who named him Peter.

That’s what we know in this story. After the disciples go to stay with Jesus, the next thing we hear is that, on the following day, Jesus decides to go to Galilee.

         There’s a lot we do know in this story, but there’s something important that we don't know. I’m dying to know what happened in those lost hours after the disciples went to stay with Jesus but before they went to Galilee. Why is it that St. John the Evangelist gives us so many details but says absolutely nothing about what happened in that house?

         It’s a frustrating omission because the movement in the story has been from the fringes of relationship with Jesus to an intimate sharing of time and space with him. We start in an outer circle, where John claims he didn’t really know Jesus, although he was the one preparing the way for him. We then move from John talking about Jesus to literally pointing to him as he walks by, proclaiming his identity. And then we reach the center of these rings of concentric circles, where the two disciples follow Jesus, speak with him, and choose to see where he is staying. It’s the tenth hour, about four o’clock. And suddenly, as John tells the story, it’s the next day. An entire evening and night have disappeared into thin air.

         Could it be, though, that St. John the Evangelist omitted these details not because they are unimportant but precisely because they are so important, too important, perhaps, to express in words? Could that time in the house with Jesus have been so sacred, so precious that St. John was reticent to render them into fallible language? Were those moments in the place where Jesus was staying so personal that to confine them to human language would have been a kind of blasphemy?

         The more I spend time with Scripture, the more I appreciate that every move, every choice of word and, yes, even every omission, is meant to tell us something. I suspect that what John has chosen not to relate is, in fact, the heart of this story. And what we don’t know is too fragile to be encoded in words. It’s also what was inspiring enough to create a long chain reaction of disciples calling others to follow Christ.

         Imagine, if you can for a moment, what happened in that place where Jesus was staying. We are only meant to imagine it, after all. We’ll never know, and we’re not supposed to know. All we know is the effect that experience with Jesus had on future generations of disciples, and especially on us.

         I imagine that Jesus reclined at table with his friends over a meal. It’s odd to think about this beautiful time together when Jesus and those first disciples hardly knew one another. Can you imagine staying for so many hours with an utter stranger? Can you imagine being so transformed by the encounter that you decided to change the rest of your life’s course as a result? Something happened in those moments. Were tears shed? Was sin confessed? Were great periods of silence held? Was there laughing? More crying? My own heart yearns to know what happened in that house. But we’ll never know. We’re not meant to know.

         Whatever St. John himself knew about those moments, he could not write them down. To do so would have been to betray confidence. To do so would have been to distort a wondrous mystery that could never be articulated in words.

         It’s like trying to describe the mystery of our presence at this Mass and at every Mass. How can we sum up the ways in which we are transformed at this feast? Every encounter with the living God in this place is different, precious, and sacred, and every encounter would only be made smaller if rendered in human language.

         Our movement into worship is rather like the movement in today’s Gospel story. We journey from the fringes of relationship with Jesus into deep communion with him in Word and Sacrament. We move from mere chatter about Jesus and from our lives, work, and play into this sacred space. Every time we come here, we heed a call to come and see. We keep coming back because we have seen, and we have believed. When we have come to see, we have been changed forever, in a way that we can’t put into words.

         At the Communion rail, so much inner transformation and miraculous healing has taken place, that we could never share its profundity. Sworn enemies have been reconciled. The hungry are fed lavishly by God. The lonely pariah finds a moment of pure welcome, if for a fleeting moment, in an otherwise grim week.

         But those on the outside looking in are like us when we hear today’s Gospel story. In that story, we see the movement from the fringes to the center, from talk about Jesus to an abiding relationship with him. Those who aren’t here with us on Sundays and who never darken the doors of the church see us leave our homes and disappear for a few hours each Sunday. Those few hours are, in some sense, unexplained. They remain unaccounted for.

         Do others wonder what we do when we come here? Do they wonder why we keep coming back? Have your friends ever tried to ask you to explain it? Have you ever tried to explain it? And maybe this is why we can be such reticent evangelists. Maybe it’s not so much a fear of sharing Jesus with others as it is an inability to articulate just why, week after week, we heed Jesus’s invitation to come and see.

         There’s one final thing that today’s Gospel has to teach us. It teaches us that if the Church is to grow, she will grow from the inside out, not from the outside in. It’s on the inside, at the core, at the center of the rings of concentric circles, that we find an abiding relationship with Christ. That’s our destination when we accept Jesus’s call to come and follow him. And we stay a while with him, even as he abides with us eternally.

         Our experience in this inner circle is the one that drives us back out into the world to invite others in, a constant going and coming. We cannot explain it. Our transformation here is one that touches each of us deeply, in ways that must remain a mystery and which we can never put into words. Our response to that mysterious encounter is to run back out into the world, not to explain it, but to issue an invitation.

Come and see. Come and see the One who will give you true life. Come and see the One who will offer you food that does not perish. Come and see the One who forgives our sins, heals our brokenness, and puts us back together again. Come and see the One who leads us into all truth. Come and see the One who must be experienced and who will change your life. Come and abide for a time with him who abides with us forever. Come and see, and you will never be the same again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 15, 2023

The One Who Says Yes

         Picture it. The stage of a grand opera house, perhaps the Met in New York City. Before us is an extravagant set with magnificent props and expensive costumes. There are hordes of people on the stage, most of whom have insignificant roles. There has just been a major dramatic moment in the opera. The lights on stage dim, except for one bright spotlight that comes to rest on the star singer, whose aria has arrived.

         The singer is now the sole source of our attention. We’ve forgotten about the grand chorus, the fancy props, and the other lesser talents on the stage. Now, the singer opens her mouth, and pure brilliance springs forth. We are captivated for a moment. This singer is not simply an amazing talent; this singer is the primary character around whom the entire drama of the opera revolves. We sit on the edge of our seats as her aria unfolds.

         Now, picture it. Not an opera stage in the Met, but sometime in the early first century AD. The setting isn’t a dramatic set. It is, in fact, a barren wilderness, which is flat, except for some dramatic cliffs that rise in the distance. The air is dry, the terrain is arid. John the Baptist has been spewing forth fire from his mouth and also baptizing in the Jordan River. Crowds of people have come forth to him, some of whom challenge him and receive fiery rhetoric in response.

         But suddenly, the excitement around John loses our focus. Indeed, the spotlight that has been hovering on John in this great drama moves, over the arid terrain, passing glibly over the gathered crowd, and it comes to rest on a man who has traveled from Galilee, from some nowhere town called Nazareth. They say his name is Jesus. And he has come to be baptized by John, his cousin.

         An initial exchange ensues between John and Jesus, in which John tries to relieve himself of the request to baptize the one he considers greater than he. He tries to say NO. But ultimately, the request is granted. At the request of Jesus, John says YES. And the star’s aria begins.

         At first, there’s only a silent, visual feast for the eyes. The man named Jesus descends deep into the water of the Jordan until he can no longer be seen. We in the crowd, watching, are hushed by the drama. When will the singing begin? Where has Jesus gone? Will he emerge again? Is he still alive? And suddenly, he springs forth from the water, his face gazing up into heaven, and the heavens themselves are rent apart. Something like a dove descends, and suddenly the singing begins. Another voice, unseen but clearly heard, sings to the world, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” God says YES. And the scene closes. And the spotlight moves off into the margins, into the wilderness to follow the One named Jesus.

         Every year on the First Sunday after the Epiphany we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord. It’s a familiar story, and it’s all too easy to begin to mesh this story of our Lord’s baptism with our own. Of course, there is some relation, but when I invited you to picture the extraordinary drama of Jesus’s baptism, I invited you to join me in reclaiming its uniqueness and what it means for us.

         In some sense, after Jesus’s death and resurrection and after the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’s followers, the spotlight moves from Jesus to us, his contemporary followers, to highlight our status as his living Body on earth. But the tendency is for that spotlight to stay on us and leave Jesus behind.

And this spotlight leaves nothing hidden from its blazing light. It illumines the corners of the Church that we’d rather keep in the dark, showing the Church in all her brokenness and misshapenness. The spotlight shines unforgivingly on the mess of systemic sin in our world. The spotlight reveals for all to see the secrets we keep, the sins of omission, as well as the sins we flagrantly commit out of defiance. And soon, we have forgotten where the spotlight first rested. We forget that the spotlight initially shined on the star aria of this great drama of our salvation, in which God said YES to a new creation in Jesus Christ.

         But when this spotlight rests too long on us, all our misdeeds and omitted deeds are brought into the light, and it begins to seem as if we are living in a great drama of NO. It’s as if we have forgotten how to say YES to anything. We have said NO to God. We have said NO to our neighbors. We have said NO to ourselves. We have said NO to opening our hearts and our pocketbooks to the Lord who calls us to give generously of ourselves for his sake and for the sake of the world. We have said NO to anything that doesn’t serve ourselves.

         Which is why today’s feast reminds us where the spotlight once rested. It rested, and should still rest, on Jesus our Lord, who was baptized in the Jordan River. This drama is God’s great aria of YES to the renewal of creation in Christ, the perfect One who nevertheless submitted to be baptized for us. It was a submission so  vexing to the early Church that St. Matthew was compelled to highlight John’s objections to Jesus’s request. Jesus needed no baptism of repentance, for he needed to repent of nothing. And yet, in the face of John’s initial NO, Jesus said YES to baptism, echoing God’s great YES to his beloved creation.

         Jesus said YES because his life is more profound than a simple NO to evil, sin and death. In Christ, even those things on which we rightly turn our backs are more than NOs. They are a magnanimous YES to a way of living and being that lives towards something rather than against something. It is a YES to living with the hope of a new creation that redeems the old.

         Have we forgotten how to say YES? After all, it’s rather easy to say NO, and even when we shirk from saying NO, our YES may be more half-hearted than we wish to admit. Do we say NO to being a people of generosity and trust? Do we say NO to giving our whole selves, our souls and bodies, to God? And why do we say NO? Do we think we don’t have enough to give? Or are we scared that saying YES will mean forsaking some of our coveted control over life?

         And when we rightly say NO to evil, sin, selfishness, systemic injustice, and everything that is not of God, do we have the strength to say YES to something greater? How do we become a people who stand for God rather than against all that is not of God?

         When Jesus consented to be baptized by John, even though he had no need of it, he embodied the perfect humility of God. He didn’t accept John’s NO, but he said YES to stoop to the depths of the human condition, to identify as fully with us as possible, to show us the way to say YES for ourselves and for the sake of the world.

         In baptism, when we say NO to evil, sin, and wickedness, we are also, at the same time, turning to say YES to God. We are saying YES to let Jesus rule over our lives to give us true freedom. We are saying YES to trust that God can redeem all to which we say NO and help us say YES to a new way of living.

         It’s not always difficult to say NO to evil and sin. It’s much harder to say YES to being used by God in his grand project to heal the world. It’s harder to say YES to living the Gospel than to say NO to all that seems to go against it. The YES of Jesus’s consent to be baptized is the great YES of God that can make all things new again.

         So, picture it. Not the Jordan River in the early first century AD. Not even the moment in which we were baptized or in which we are to be baptized if that has not yet come. Picture a whole lifetime ahead, and then a life beyond the grave, in which the spotlight that has rested for too long on our NOs comes to rest once again on the eternal YES of him who was baptized for us, the One who is the center of this drama of salvation. And then picture it. Picture him, right now and forever, turning our NO into YES.

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord
January 8, 2023

What's in a Name?

In Act 2, scene 2, of William Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet, we have one of the most famous scenes in literature. Juliet stands at a balcony window in her home, overlooking a garden where Romeo is in hiding. Romeo hears Juliet speak, although she has no idea he is there.

Juliet laments the fact that she and Romeo, who are deeply in love, are kept apart by a silly feud between Juliet’s family, the Capulets, and Romeo’s family, the Montagues. The two lovers are caught in the middle. So, from her balcony, Juliet waxes aloud, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?/Deny thy father and refuse thy name;/Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,/And I'll no longer be a Capulet.”

She continues as Romeo listens in: ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague/What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,/Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part/Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!/What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet;/So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,/Retain that dear perfection which he owes/Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,/And for that name which is no part of thee/Take all myself.”

In her balcony speech, Juliet suggests something with which we would probably agree. Romeo is not defined by his name. He would still be her dear Romeo as she so profoundly loves him, even if he were Giovanni, Pietro, or Francesco. Juliet would still be herself—that true part which could not possibly be summed up in a name—even if she were called Antonia, Isabella, or Pelegrina. If Juliet and Romeo could simply forsake their names—those family names that have tragically created a dividing wall between them—they could be together forever, united in their love.

There is truth in Juliet’s musings, and yet there is also hyperbole. Names do mean something, even if they need not define our destiny. We can’t avoid our family surnames. Some of us are given first names that we might treasure. Perhaps we are given specific names in the hope that we will embody something of those names. Some of us have names bestowed upon us that we might wish to forsake for various reasons.

And yet, of all books, the Bible itself may testify most powerfully to the importance of names. Frequently, a name-change signals a life event of great consequence. Abram, “exalted father,” becomes Abraham, “the father of many generations.” The new name says something about who Abraham is to become. Sarai becomes Sarah. Jacob becomes Israel after wrestling all night with an angel of God. Hoshea, son of Nun, becomes Joshua, the one who will lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land. John the Baptist is named John because an angel says it is God’s will. Simon son of Jonah becomes Peter, the rock on which the Church is built. And as we are reminded today in St. Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is named not by Mary and Joseph, but by an angel sent from God. Back in chapter one, at the annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, Gabriel announces that Mary’s son, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, will be named Jesus.

What’s in a name? we might ask. That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet. It may be the case with Romeo and Juliet, or with Jack and Jane, or Miriam and Fernando. They do not need to be defined by their names. A Guerrero need not be a person of violence. A Beau need not be the most handsome guy in the class. A Jocelyn may not always be the happiest girl in the family. Humans can be so much more than their names, or even so much less. We might decide to change our name for good reason, to signify a new period in life. We might go by our nicknames. We might even use a first initial instead of a full name. So, really, what’s in a given name? For each of us, the answers might vary. But for Jesus, his Name is everything.

Is there any other name on which so much hinges and depends? This Jesus, Jeshua, or Joshua, means something like “Yahweh saves.” Incontrovertibly, with Jesus, what’s in the name is everything. With no other name and with no other person can an identity be so perfectly tied up with the name. Jesus’s Name is his identity.

At his Name, “every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.”[1] In his Name, demons are cast out. The blind see, the lame walk, and the lepers are cleansed. In his Name the powers of evil tremble with fear.

On this first day of the new calendar year and on this feast of the Holy Name, we are reminded that in Jesus’s Name, all things become new. In his Name, sins are forgiven, death loses it sting. In his Name, what is broken is restored and made whole again. In his Name, we are brought to the font, baptized, and welcomed into the Body of Christ. In his Name, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.

In his Name, the Gospel has spread to every corner of the earth. For his Name, people have given their lives. In his Name, bread has been broken in every imaginable circumstance and in every time and place. Because of his Name, people in places of deep anguish have found reason to hope. In his Name, the poor have been comforted, prisoners visited, the hungry fed. In his Name, we are gathered here today while much of the world sleeps off last night’s partying. So, what’s in a name? In the case of the One who makes all things new, everything is in that Name.

And yet, can we in good conscience deny the harm and evil that have also been done in that Name? The Name of the One who comes to save, heal, and redeem, has been used to ostracize, exclude, divide, even murder. In the precious Name of the Prince of Peace, crusades have been launched. In the Name of the One who came not to condemn but to save, too many have been unjustly judged and condemned by their fellow brothers and sisters. Too many souls have fallen away from the faith because they have seen the beautiful Name of Jesus used and abused to manipulate others, assert control, and justify all manner of injustices and blasphemous rhetoric. Is it any wonder that some have eschewed the Name? Is it surprising that some shudder to mention it too frequently lest they seem like those who have blasphemed the sacred Name through distortions of the Gospel? So, what’s in a name? With Jesus’s name, it’s everything.

Which is why today’s feast is not to be taken lightly. Today is an opportunity to bow our heads in profound humility before the only Name under heaven given for the salvation of the world. When we bow our heads at the Name of Jesus, as we do so often in worship, we are not performing a perfunctory ritual. It is not a magic incantation or an obsessive habit. When we bow our heads at the Name of Jesus, we are allowing our bodies to tell us how precious and sacred that Name is. We are reminded of the cost in forsaking that Name. We are reminded that in this Name, we are given fullness of life, we are healed, we are saved by God’s grace. We are reminded that even when confronting the greatest of blasphemies, this Name bears something impeccably sacred.

This Name is everything. When it is used in vain, it has power to destroy. When it is used to manipulate, harm, or abuse others, souls are lost. When it is taken for granted, it becomes less of the gift that it is to us and to the world.

Jesus, called by any other name, could not be so sweet. His Name is his very identity. His Name is the one that binds us to one another. His Name is the one that rights all wrongs. His Name is the only one with the power to break cycles of vengeance and retribution. His Name is the only one with the authority to reorder a disordered world.

May this Name be more than a sign for us. May this Name become our identity. May we bow in wonder and awe before this Name that has been carelessly used at times to great destruction, but which is intended by God to draw us all to himself. May this Name forever be the source of our life. May it be the impetus for all we do. May we never take this Name for granted. What’s in this name? Nothing less than everything.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Holy Name
January 1, 2023

[1] Philippians 2:10

The Reality on His Sleeve

This week, in the aftermath of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to the United States Congress, there was much speculation on his choice of dress. Some criticized his decision to wear an olive-green sweatshirt before such an esteemed government body. In the photo of President Zelensky emerging from a diplomatic vehicle at the White House to greet the president and first lady, his rather ordinary dress contrasts vividly with the dapper suit and elegant dress of our nation’s first couple.

But an astute fashion critic from The New York Times offered a more profound way of assessing Zelensky’s dress for the occasion. Rather than criticizing his choice of apparel, she suggested that Zelensky was not being sloppy or careless; he knew precisely what he was doing. As she put it, Zelensky “came to Washington, wearing his reality on his sleeves.”[1]

Before a nearly monolithic audience gathered at the United States Capitol, almost uniformly bedecked in dark, expensive suits, the Ukrainian president stood alone at a podium in a dark, olive-green sweatshirt, cargo pants, and boots. It has been his consistent attire since the beginning of the war in his country. The decision to wear this stark outfit before Congress was, it seems, an intentional move so as not to blend in with the cushy environs of a first world Congress, which might be tempted to pretend as if the ten-month old war was less of an issue than when it commenced. Into the halls of a nation immune from the direst aspects of war, President Zelensky wore his reality on his sleeves. It was a clear public, political, even ethical, statement about what is at stake in his own country, and what might correspondingly be at stake in the world.

Every Christmas Day, those of us in comfortable situations gather in our Sunday best, in the glow of gift-wrapping, eagerly awaiting the delicious spreads of food on our tables, the fellowship with friends and family, and the nap as our body processes a stomach full of turkey. And every Christmas Day we come to this familiar passage from St. John’s Gospel. The cosmic words of St. John’s Prologue roll across our mental screens like the opening words of a Star Wars movie. We know this story, even if we receive it as if from outer space. The eternal Word becomes flesh in a human person, “immensity cloistered in [the] dear womb” of Mary, to use the words of John Donne. We get goosebumps at St. John’s words which mark the moment the eternal Word is enfleshed within humanity. It is this day, of all days, when we find God coming to us, wearing his reality on his sleeves.

Yet it might at first appear that God is wearing only our reality on his sleeves, that God has come to blend in with us, to be one of us. In such a view, God has come, not wearing heaven on his sleeves, but allowing himself to be dressed in the swaddling clothes of a baby, and eventually in grave clothes for his burial.

But isn’t there more to it? It is true that God came among us, looking, living, breathing as a human. God came to experience the full reality of human life, for only from within could this world experience its full salvation. But there is more.

For God to enter this world only wearing our own reality on his sleeves would be to countenance no change. To simply blend in with a world unmoored from its original goodness[2] would be to acquiesce to injustice and sin. It would not do justice to the Incarnation we celebrate this morning.

In Jesus Christ, God came into our world, wearing his reality on his sleeves. Yes, he wore our reality, too. Jesus experienced fully, apart from sin, the depths of the human condition. But God entered the human theatre in Jesus Christ with God’s reality on his sleeves so that we could have a taste of a different reality. God came among us dressed in the reality of heaven so that we might be changed, healed, and saved.

And perhaps this is precisely why the world from the birth of Jesus Christ until the present day has so often failed to notice the One who comes among us, wearing his reality on his sleeves. This is our own hazy incomprehension, the darkness that must be pierced by God’s light, according to St. John. We struggle to imagine a God whose deepest reality is the vulnerability of a little baby cradled in a manger. We cannot fathom “immensity cloistered” in a human womb, of which John Donne writes. We cannot imagine a heavenly king dressed in peasant clothes. We suppose that when God’s reality wears human clothes, it's the royal apparel of kings. God’s reality is military might and raw strength. God’s reality is unlimited wealth, unbridled power, and unparalleled status.

But God comes to us wearing his reality on his sleeves, and strangely, God’s reality seems enticingly familiar, though it wears the reality of heaven in the clothes of our reality. And this bewilders us. In some way, without the distortions and warts, we instinctively recognize this reality. Which is why St. John brings us back to the very beginning of this story, which really had no beginning.

There in the beginning, was the eternal Word with God. Indeed, this Word was God. And through the Word all things were made. Nothing—not one drop in the ocean, feather on a bird, or crease in our skin—was made without the eternal Word’s presence and agency. In this marvelous time before the fruit in the garden was taken and people started making their own rules, God’s reality was our reality, God’s rules were our rules.

And then something changed. We started putting on expensive suits and stealing money to buy them. We started using manipulation to get our way. We forgot what our original clothing looked like. We forgot what it was like to be a baby, doted on by loving parents. We forgot what it was like to trust, smile, and share the fellowship of others without criticism or judgment. We forgot what it was like to live without fear. We began to think that what we had was not enough and would never be enough.

And so it was, many years ago, when we had forgotten who we were and who we were to become, God entered our world in a new, unique way. God came among us, not via a grand parade or with blaring bands. God came among us, not in a fancy suit or with a scepter in hand. God came among us wearing God’s reality on his sleeves to teach us what we had forfeited.

In that moment, where St. John’s words give us goosebumps, God came, wearing his reality on his sleeves so that we might recall the clothing we once had worn. And although that moment in time has come and gone, its power has not evaporated. That we continue to gather on this day to sing and share God’s gift of the sacrament is proof enough that we still remember something of our original clothing. It is proof enough that we have received God’s power to become his children.

In baptism, we have been clothed with God’s reality, which strangely enough is the reality that has been ours, too, from before time began, even though we forgot it. And when God entered our world with God’s reality on his sleeves, God brought us heaven to remind us from whence we came and where we are intended to go.

To stare only at the crèche on Christmas Eve, with the straw, animals, and holy family would be to forget what we remember here every Christmas Day. It would be to forget from whence we came and where we are intended to go. It would be to forget the clothes we once had but which we exchanged for fancier ones, no matter the cost to our souls. To cherish the goosebumps this day of “immensity cloistered” in the womb of a virgin is to remember that God came to us—indeed, still comes to us—wearing his reality on our sleeves. God brings us heaven so we will never forget what it looks like. God wears his reality on his sleeves to show us what our reality can be. God captures our hearts and stops our breath with his glory so that, even if for a little while this day, we will remember the reality we once had. And above all, God shows us the reality that is still there for us to have. God holds before us the shining garments of salvation, fitted for our bodies, ready for us to put on and step into heaven.

[1] “The Olive Green Sweatshirt Goes to Congress,” by Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times, December 22, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/style/volodymyr-zelensky-washington-army-green-clothes.html

[2] Term used by John Macquarrie A Guide to the Sacraments (New York: Continuum, 1999)

A Christmas Lullaby

Is it possible to hear St. Luke’s story of Jesus’s birth as if for the first time? Every year on this night, we hear the same story. We have witnessed countless retellings and enactments of it. Its characters grace nativity scenes in our homes and on Christmas cards. We all know this story. It may be the most familiar story of the Gospels. But just for a moment, join me in pretending as if you’ve never heard this story before.

Its setting is historical time, traceable on a calendar and in archaeology. This story opens on the world stage, and its characters are not unlike many on the current world theatre in their lust for domination. In some remote place, a power-hungry ruler sits in isolation from his subjects, but his empire is the heavy boot holding down the foreign nation. The census is simply one more ounce of pressure from the empirical boot, one more unwanted invasion of a nation’s pride and identity.

The child has been expected for some time, and his arrival unhappily coincides with the emperor’s inconvenient demand of a census. There is no choice but to acquiesce. Some worship the emperor as a god, and many fear him, if only to save their own necks. So it is that in a small village—not a New York City or a Chicago or a Philadelphia, but something out of Lancaster County—the baby is born. The only place to lay him down is in a feeding trough, with its rank odor and rough straw. The child’s parents have been on the move. They are refugees, we might say, because of the edict of a power-monger sitting in comfort many miles away. In today’s age, the emperor would have access to the nuclear codes, but in ancient Palestine, he had to rely more on the brute force of his minions. Into such a world, this child is born, helpless, meek, mild, born to poor parents whose destiny is somewhat uncertain.

Already, I imagine, our maternal and paternal instincts have probably kicked in. How indeed can we really hear this story as if for the first time? How can we unhear what we know will happen in the end? How can we not feel a deep desire to cradle and protect this baby from ensuing harm? Perhaps on this night, of all nights, we plead for just a few moments to stay close to the child in the manger, to comfort, hold, and protect the one who cannot stay in the manger forever.

This is the sentiment of the beautiful Ukrainian carol “Sleep, Jesus, sleep,” which the choir will soon sing. It will be the first time the piece has been heard publicly on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, but it tells a story we know all too well. We know about the sheep, the shepherds, the mother, the father, the donkey, and the stable. But hear with me, this night, if you are able, Mary’s voice, weary from labor, singing to her newborn child, in a dank, smelly stable while the shadow of the emperor’s boot moves across the manger scene.

Into a world as unjust and raucously violent as ours, this little baby is born. After harrowing the riskiness of labor, the mother sings with all her mustered stamina, Sleep, Jesus, sleep, go to sleep, I will rock you, ‘til you’re dreaming, sing to you ‘til you’re sleeping; hushaby, dearest, hushaby.*

Is not Mary’s song, in some sense, ours, too? Knowing the world into which the baby is born, and knowing what his end will be, is not this night, of all nights, the one on which we want to sing her song? Sleep, my flower, sleep, rest your head, fall deep, Mary’s arms will hold you closely, soothing you, she strokes you gently.    

Unless we have hearts of stone, couldn’t we cradle the child for just a few moments before releasing him into a world where the cruel boot will come slamming down to try and contain the baby’s provocations? Tonight, of all nights, can’t we just rock the baby, sing to him, and let him sleep, sleep, sleep, and dream?

Sleep, Jesus, sleep, open up your heart. Let me rest my soul beside you, here on earth and in heaven, too. Sleep, Jesus, sleep, close your eyes. It’s a bitter, harsh world outside the stable. The baby is small and helpless. The straw of the makeshift bed is rough. The world is in fear. Even the shepherds must stay awake to guard their sheep from harm. The young parents in the stable are rookie parents, too, and this birth was no ordinary birth. They have no idea what the future holds. They have no inkling of how to raise a child, much less this child.

So, for just a few moments, little baby, sleep. Do not ask what life will do, when a cross is made for you. Hushaby, dearest, hushaby. Sleep, Jesus, sleep. No, that cross is over thirty years down the road. No need to borrow trouble yet. We know the trouble is whispering down from the future, but the parents don’t. Can’t we let them just rock the baby? And can’t we simply let the baby sleep, sleep, sleep?

We know the maternal and paternal instincts of these new parents. If we are parents, we know them acutely. If we are not, we can’t shake the protective urges we feel towards our loved ones, towards our godchildren, towards the children entrusted to our care. Is Mary’s song as she rocks her little one in the manger so foreign to us? The world from which we wish to shield our most vulnerable is not so very different from the one we sing of this night.

Don’t we want to rock our loved ones to sleep to numb them to the unwanted assaults of each day? This night, even if for a brief time, can’t we just sing a lullaby? Can’t we climb into the crib with the Christ child, to seek its warmth and safety, and for a moment to insulate ourselves from the harsh world outside? Can’t we sing carols to drown out the sounds of gunfire and raucous rhetoric? For a moment, after a season of expectant waiting and preparation, can’t we finally let our guard down for a bit, and relax into the dreamy pose of the baby in the manger? Yes, Sleep, sleep, go to sleep, I will rock you, ‘til you’re dreaming, sing to you ‘til you’re sleeping; hushaby, dearest, hushaby.

But the mystery of this unique birth is that even while the lullabies are sung into the fetid air of a pasture, the baby’s swaddling clothes signal his grave clothes, too. And although it is sad and poignant, it is nevertheless the remarkable sign of the world’s salvation. It is the strange sign of our hope. While cruel empires displayed their military parades and lowered their boots on the necks of the poor and helpless, God had other plans on that night, this night. While no one was looking for it, God came to heal the world not from above but gently, subversively, from below.

As thousands marched to their hometowns to be registered so that tribute could be demanded, the one to whom all tribute belongs was born in a cow’s trough. While the empire sought to become more powerful, God humbled himself so that there would be no tiny corner immune from his salvific reach. While the shepherds cowered in fear at the bright light and angels’ song, God announced his good news to break that fear. Without even knowing it, while the world slept, it had been saved.

It is true as well that at some point, the child of the parent becomes the parent to the parent. When old age comes upon the mother and father, the child, once cradled in a crib, becomes the parent. The roles are reversed. And in the story of our salvation, the child once rocked to sleep by his mother became the father and mother of the whole world. The one whose eyes closed in sleep and who dreamed away while the cold, harsh world outside raged on, this one refused to let his eyes close, because he is the Good Shepherd who never falls asleep while his sheep are in danger. And despite our urgent desires to safeguard this little baby from harm, it is the baby himself who puts us in the cradle and sings us a song.

Yes, this is the night for it. While war rages across the globe and in our streets, while fear enslaves too many, and while strife infects even the Risen Body of the Prince of Peace, the baby now become a parent, places us in the crib, and sings us a song. Hear his gentle song to us.

Hush, Jesus says to us, I will rock you. Close your eyes, sleep, and dream. Dream of a world that I desire for you. Dream of a world where the whine of missiles turns into the songs of angels. Dream of a world where swords are beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Open up your heart, and I will be there, too. I am there. I always have been. And I will take your soul with me into heaven. Do not ask what life will do, when a cross is made for you, because I have already turned the world upside down by the cross I carried, and I will help you carry your cross.

I do not come to stamp out the darkness of your world by force, but I come to guide you into freedom with my light, which pierces all darkness. I have come to dispel your fear of all those things that make you afraid. I have come to subvert the powers of cowardly force by my gentle might.

So, sleep, child, sleep and dream. Close your eyes, and I will keep watch over you. And when you awake, you will see that the world can be different. Sometimes you must sleep to dream. Now, as I have been a parent to you, become a parent to the world. Help the world to rest from its quarreling and fighting. Help it to sleep and rest its eyes and then dream that this world can be something more than it is.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2022

*The words of the lullaby are from the setting by Roxanna Panufnik of a traditional Ukrainian carol.

When Everything Is a Gift

There may be no bigger challenge at this time of year than to reclaim Jesus’s birth narratives from the grip of Christmas pageants. Admittedly, pageants play a helpful, if sentimental, role in introducing the story that changed the world to generations of young children, and perhaps, even to adults. But we are not yet at Christmas, despite the superficial visual testimonies along Lancaster Avenue and even—gasp—in some churches. And yet, here we are today on the Fourth Sunday of Advent with St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth. It might be that hearing this well-known story in the context of the diminishing days of Advent is precisely what we need to rescue this story from Christmas pageant renderings.

If I’m a bit critical of Christmas pageants, it’s because they tend to oversimplify the story. All the crinkles and inconsistencies are papered over with a thin veneer of narrative uniformity. Little do many people realize that Christmas pageants put both St. Luke’s and St. Matthew’s birth narratives into a blender and spit out something less mysterious than what we have with two different accounts.

And so, this time of year as we anticipate Christmas, the temptation, I think, is to read or hear the birth narratives in one of two ways. The first is precisely what often happens in Christmas pageants. Jesus’s birth is overly romanticized. After a brief quest for room in an inn, the baby is born, cuddled in a cozy manger with warm animals nearby. And Mary and Joseph, I’m afraid, are dangerously reduced to little more than naïve, obedient simpletons who readily accept an upending of their lives.

The other way to read or hear the birth narratives is through the lens of the cynic. The cynic scoffs at belief in a virgin birth. The skeptic queries whether Mary had any agency in her assent to the angel Gabriel’s surprising news that she will bear the Son of God. The critic labels Joseph a fool for heeding information gleaned in a dream and marrying a woman who seems to have been unfaithful and is now expecting a child. In such a view, there is nothing but injustice and unfairness in the Bible’s birth narratives.

But today, focusing on St. Matthew’s birth narrative, even in the waning days of Advent, I wonder if there’s a deeper, more helpful way of understanding Joseph’s response to the angelic visitation in a dream. Although Mary makes no direct appearance in St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth, she is, of course, there in the background. What can we learn about Mary and Joseph? What can we learn about ourselves and God?

I fear that in an overly rational world, which is increasingly less tolerant of mystery, Matthew’s birth narrative seems to be full of holes. How, we ask, can this virgin birth take place? How can Joseph receive news of the miraculous birth in a dream? How can he even believe any of this? How can Mary so readily say yes to God? How can Joseph so readily say yes to God and Mary?

But stay with me for a moment. Let’s pause in our quest to make logical connections. Let’s play with trustfulness for a time rather than skepticism. Let’s be poets rather than logicians. Let’s entertain the possibility that there may be more to Mary and Joseph than we give them credit for. Could it be that there is more to this story than mere obedience on the part of Mary and Joseph? Could it be that in them we learn what it means to see everything as pure gift?

As our children’s Godly Play curriculum so beautifully says, during this time of year, people are hurrying to and fro, running through the malls, doing this and that. Everyone is so very busy, but they completely miss the mystery of Christmas. We have lost an ability to pause and understand the nature of a gift, especially a gift from God, and Christmas buying, giving, and receiving will probably teach us little about that.

In our day, gifts are predictable. They are material things we need to get at various points in the year. We buy them, sometimes to prove how clever we are, sometimes to compete with others for the best gift. When we give, we so often expect something in return. And all too often, we are given gifts that disappoint us, or things for which we have no use. Gift-giving these days, is a commercial exchange, even though we find moments of joy and blessing in it all.

But this is wholly different from how God gives. God’s gifts are usually surprising and unpredictable. Sometimes they please us and are recognizably generous, but maybe more frequently they don’t seem like gifts at all. At times, God’s gifts seem like misfortune, curses, or conditions of our lives that are most unwelcome.

God gives even when we don’t like his gifts and even when we reject them. God continues to give even though we may offer him no love or adoration in return. God doesn’t always give us what we want, but God always gives us what we need. God doesn’t force us to receive his gifts, but he invites us to accept them.

But there may be nothing more controversial about God’s gifts than the fact that they are meant to be received, not controlled. And this we usually struggle to understand, because we tend to hoard our gifts. We cling to our money as if it’s ours, and when the world is anxious about it, we imagine that we should cling to it even more, rather than give it away. We cling to our children or family as if they shouldn’t have independent lives, because letting them go is one of the hardest things we can do. We tightly grasp power and status because they promise to give us security and self-worth. We flaunt our talents as if they are the products of our own making and not marvelous gifts from God. We don’t usually treat these things—our money, our property, our children, our friends, our talents—as if they are gifts, because they are meted out and handled on our own terms, not on God’s terms. But the true gift extends beyond itself.

And this is why Joseph and Mary are the supreme recipients of gifts. It seems that the most surprising gifts are the ones most liberally shared. The advent of such gifts can’t be predicted, and so they have less ability to be controlled. It is so with the gift of Jesus.

Why should we imagine that Joseph and Mary couldn’t have understood that Jesus was a gift to them and to the world? Maybe they said yes to God precisely because they understood more than any of us what a gift is. We underestimate their spiritual depth and intellectual acumen when we assume that they simply said yes out of fear or brute obedience. We do a disservice to them, and to God, when we imagine that they had no say in the matter of whether to receive the sublime gift that God offered.

Jesus’s miraculous conception and birth, in a mysterious way, itself points to its being pure gift. Conceived and born in any other way, Jesus could have been owned or coopted by biological lineages. But in the miraculous way of his coming to us, he is unblemished surprise. Unable to be possessed, the gift of Jesus to Mary and Joseph was to be shared with the world. Neither Mary nor Joseph could protect Jesus from his death. A gift is received, even when first contact with the gift brings uncertainty, doubt, sorrow, and confusion.

Our approach to gifts may be very similar to the way we read the Christmas birth narratives. If we only romanticize our lives, then good things alone are seen as gifts. We recognize gifts when they seem obviously good for us and when they surprise us with their abundance and generosity. But if we are cynical, then the bad times are devoid of gifts. They are merely trials to bear, and we can’t imagine that God might hand us a gift when all seems bleak and dark.

But if we could only let go of our money, our status, our possessions, even of those most dear to us, and most especially of our fear, God will surprise us. God always does. In all things, God teaches us the art of receiving a gift. The truest sign that we have received his gifts is our willingness to share them with the world.

In Christ, we have been given the greatest gift of all. He is not for us to control, nor can he be controlled by us. Christ is to be received into our hearts, where we are to open the many rooms of the mansion prepared within. And then, if we truly accept him as gift, we are to share him with the world, abundantly, prolifically, and without fear.

As Christmas draws nigh, may the intercession and witness of Blessed Mary help us become obedient in response to God’s gifts to us. May the intercession and witness of Blessed Joseph help us aspire to more than mechanical faithfulness so we can become blessed receivers of God’s gifts. And may everything, by God’s wondrous grace, be a gift to us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 18, 2022

The Grace Always Gets In

As prisoner number 999513 in the state of Texas, Ramiro Gonzalez is a forty-year-old inmate on death row. He’s been there for sixteen years, ever since he was convicted of murder. Indeed, Gonzalez is only alive because his execution, which was originally scheduled for July 13, was stayed at the last minute. Over the course of sixteen years on death row and its torturous anticipation of the inevitable reality—waiting and waiting for an end with no mercy—Gonzalez seems to have had a spiritual transformation. While in prison, he decided to become a kidney donor, a way of enabling someone to live as a reversal of the life he took away.

Gonzalez’s situation came to the attention of Dr. Rachael Bedard, a physician who had served for five years as a palliative care doctor at Rikers Island in New York. In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr. Bedard wrestles with the relentless denial of mercy to the worst offenders and the ironic reality that some of these worst offenders often experience the most surprising grace while in the least forgiving of places, that is, prisons.

As proof of her point, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has still not approved Gonzalez’s attempts to donate his kidney. In other words, a needy person is being deprived of a new chance on life. As Bedard eloquently puts it, “[t]he sanctity of that person’s life must seem, to the department, theoretical or abstract; or, to put it another way, it must seem less real than the risk perceived in allowing Ramiro Gonzales this opportunity for grace.”[1]

 While acknowledging that there must be legal and spiritual accountability for heinous crimes such as the one committed by Ramiro Gonzalez, we must also ask why we can be so afraid of extending mercy to others and even to ourselves. Is the world outside the prison cell really freer than the world behind bars? Do people who walk about without orange jumpsuits and tracking devices attached to their persons really live as if they are free? Or is it shockingly possible that those who are identified by prison numbers and are staring death in the face are freer in some ways than those of us on the outside? According to Ramiro Gonzalez, “[f]reedom is not a place. Just because you’re out there doesn’t mean you’re free. Just because I’m in here doesn’t mean I’m locked up. I’ve learned the true sense of freedom internally, that that’s where it comes from.”[2]

When I stumbled across Dr. Bedard’s article, I immediately thought of John the Baptist in prison. Of course, John the Baptist’s scenario is in many ways quite different from that of Ramiro Gonzalez. John the Baptist was unjustly imprisoned because he was perceived as a threat to the political and imperial forces of his day. We are told later in Matthew’s Gospel that John was locked up by Herod Antipas because Herod caved to the desires of his step-daughter, known as Salome. Her dancing, of opera fame, had pleased Herod so much that he promised whatever she wanted, which happened to be the head of John the Baptist. John the Baptist had had the temerity to criticize Herod’s marriage to Herodias, his brother’s ex-wife. John told the truth, no matter how difficult it was to take. The historian Josephus tells us that John was put to death because his popularity was a threat to Herod’s power.[3]  

For a moment, let’s join John the Baptist in his prison cell. It’s where we meet him today in Matthew’s Gospel. John is probably wondering whether his prophetic ministry was simply a waste. If John had really prepared the way for the Messiah, why was he in prison? Something was not adding up.

And so, John sends his messengers to Jesus with the loaded question: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” How can we fault poor John for wondering whether his whole ministry had been worth it, especially as he stares his own impending death in the face? From John’s point of view, his imprisonment is a fearful power play, a profound indictment of corrupt worldly forces who can’t deal with the truth and who bend like a reed in the wind to every whim of human emotion. No wonder John questions whether the real Messiah has come. If the Messiah has already come, how is it that John looks out through the prison bars and still sees the same injustice, the same sin, and the same disorder as before? Has anything changed?

But in his prison cell, alone with his doubts and questions, John is greeted with the surprising grace of Jesus’s response to his incisive question. In his inimitable fashion, Jesus doesn’t answer John’s question directly. He doesn’t overtly proclaim that he is the Messiah. He points not to himself but to the works he has done. In those incredible works of healing, preaching, and raising the dead, Jesus unlocks the prison gates and sets us free. And by virtue of the Holy Spirit and our identity as living members of his Body, Jesus gives us the key to the prison gates. When the world locks the prison doors on us, Christ helps us let the grace in.

None of Jesus’s contemporaries understands him. Even John is questioning whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah. Everyone is expecting a king who will exert earthly power in the way they’re used to such power being exercised. Everyone wants a king who will make them feel good and affirm the status quo. Everyone wants Jesus to announce his kingship with great might, sit on his royal throne, and reign. They expect a king who will lock up the enemy, but this king is different. He reigns through gentle liberation, rather than enslaving others to demonstrate his power. He shows his power by unlocking the prison doors and unleashing true freedom, which is available to all.

When Ramiro Gonzalez and other death row inmates look out from behind their prison bars, what do they see? Do they see a society in bondage to retribution? Do they see people who are still imprisoned to their own resentments and anger? Do they see the reeds of Christianity shaken by the winds of politics, power, and earthly mammon? Do they see Christians who profess belief in forgiveness but withhold it from some? How many have the spine to speak truth to power and name the hideous injustices that are clothed in soft robes? Is the world outside the prison bars really free, or is it enslaved by an inability to speak the Gospel truth, especially when it’s hard to hear?

Ramiro Gonzalez may be justly accused and rightly held accountable for his actions, but could it be that from within the direst and least hopeful of places he has discerned something that many can’t see? Could it be that despite the locked doors of his prison cell, Jesus has let the grace in for him, too? As Gonzalez himself says from behind bars, while staring death in the face, “Freedom is not a place. Just because you’re out there doesn’t mean you’re free.”

When the gates appear to be bolted shut all around us, maybe we ask, like John, “are we still to wait for the one to come?” How can things be the way they are? From which side are we staring through the prison bars? But all around us, perhaps even behind bars, there are visible signs of Christ’s reign. And though there are some who stew in their resentment, there are those who are yet breaking the cycle of resentment. When the prison doors lock us in, Christ yet gives us the key to open them. Even when the doors are shut, his surprising grace can get in.

This Gaudete Sunday, we rejoice that Jesus has already loosed all that chains us to sin and death. Freedom is precisely what the Messiah has brought to earth. When the prison gates are unlocked, illness, sin, death, poverty, injustice, and anger can no longer hold us in their grip. And Christ has given us the key to unlock the gates and let him in.

The most pressing question facing the Church right now is whether we will be content in our soft robes while others have no clothes. Will we let ourselves be shaken by the winds of spineless fickleness? Or can we face what imprisons us, even though we like to think we are free? What is keeping us locked up? Who is visiting us in our prisons to let Christ’s surprising grace in? And whom do we need to visit behind bars? What are we waiting for? Why are we making excuses? The door has already been unlocked. Christ is beckoning us to step through and be free.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 11, 2022

[1] “On Death Row He Is Grasping at Grace” by Rachael Bedard, in The New York Times, December 9, 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/opinion/death-penalty-texas-ramiro-gonzalez.html)

[2] Ibid.

[3] The HarperCollins Study Bible, Harold W. Attridge, ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006), annotation, p. 1693.

Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley

What a joy it is to be with you this morning at Good Shepherd, and to share in the lovely Advent prayer and liturgy and music of your parish at this very special time for reflection, self-examination and mission. For Advent is a unique time, isn’t it, an almost spine-tingling time: of expectation, hope, and  - as we have heard in our first two readings this morning – of a veritably counter-intuitive insistence on the possibility of our world’s ultimate capacity for divine peace, harmony and justice. Always we press forward, and always we pray for these, in faith; for God has promised them, and will not disappoint us.

And yet there is also the other side of this same Advent coin, the one we have just heard announced in the gospel this morning, the one we find harder to stomach in a world so much in need of immediate comfort and reassurance. And this is the theme of divine demand, divine judgement, and the accompanying call to human repentance – precisely in search of that ultimate peace, harmony and justice that God always offers us. And that is why I want to think with you this morning about the apparently discomforting topic of fire and its metaphorical force; and about that scary figure, John the Baptist, whose teaching seems to have been largely concerned with it. This is truly Advent ‘stuff’ too, and we need to muse on it.

Look closely at today’s gospel text from Matthew, then, and you will see that what John the Baptist presents to us, in announcing Jesus’s imminent arrival, is first, of course, his own central call to the ‘baptism of repentance’ for the sake of the coming kingdom; and then, a double threat of fire to come.  It’s important to distinguish the two references to fire going on here, and it’s easy to conflate them too quickly. Peruse the text more precisely. First, there is the ‘unquenchable fire’ of judgement for those who merely feign repentance, but are unaware of its seriousness: they, the ‘brood of vipers’ go out to the Jordan and get their baptism, all right - they go through the motions of repentance – but their hearts are not in it, and it’s obvious because there are no spiritual ‘fruits’ to show for it. For them, there is to be a terrifyingly final, judgemental fire, according to the Baptist. Secondly, however, there is the more mysterious fire promised in virtue of the superior baptism that John predicts that his successor, Jesus, will bring:  he will baptize, says John, not with the water of John’s own baptism (which of course the Christian church actually still uses) but ‘with the Holy Spirit and fire’.

So what are we to make of this? And what is at stake for us this Advent?  Let me offer three, succinct, points to begin to unravel the puzzle.

First, this very distinctive teaching about ‘baptism by fire’ almost certainly goes back to the historical John the Baptist himself, as mediated by a very early ‘source’ that only Matthew and Luke share in common – termed by the NT scholars ‘Q’ (for Quelle, or ‘source’, in German). Whether there actually was a ‘Q’ text (and thus a ‘Mr [or Mrs] Q’, so to speak) or simply an oral tradition with some rather particular theological interests, is perhaps neither here nor there; but what’s interesting is that it preserves this very striking dimension of John’s teaching on judgement, the Holy Spirit, baptism, and fire. Moreover, we find in later Christian tradition that only certain, quite spiritually demanding, writers and circles particularly take up this fiery theme seriously in relation to baptism and the Holy Spirit:  these are slightly outré monastic groups associated with fiery ecstatic prayer on the edges of the Greek Empire in the fifth century (represented in the so-called ‘Macarian Homilies’); or the wonderfully creative Syriac-speaking monk in the early 6th century who illustrated the so-called ‘Rabbula gospels’ with a picture of Jesus’s baptism by John with a sheet of flame descending on Christ alongside the dove (because he himself was reflecting a well-developed Syriac theology of ‘fiery’ baptism, from across the edges of the Roman empire); or – supremely and much later in the Western tradition – the teaching of St John of the Cross (the reforming 16th-century Carmelite friar), that to aspire to ‘union’ with Christ, as all Christians should, in his view, is to be thrown into a crucible of purifying flames, to be burnt up in order for our sins to be spat out, just as imperfections in a log are gradually ejected in the fire, so that our one, imperfect chunk of wood may finally be fused into the consuming fire of God, ‘the living flame of love’.

So, secondly, why is this distinctive teaching about transformative, purgative, baptismal, fire-in-the-Spirit so hard for us to take on, even now? Let me suggest that it is because we have over the years concocted an idolatry which American Episcopalians are perhaps particularly subject to (though we are by no means alone); and that is the very subtle idolatry of enunciating God’s (so-called) ‘unconditional love’ as an easy and ‘cheap grace’ answer to all problematic theological questions relating to the profundity of our own sin; in short, it seems we often cannot stand to acknowledge our overwhelming need for repentance and ‘fiery’ transformation-in-the-Spirit. So perhaps we should now code-name this subterfuge the theory not of ‘unconditional love’, but of ‘unconditional lurve’; and I think you know what I mean:  the idea has become a sentimental and self-deluding mantra, a refusal to face precisely what John the Baptist meant when he preached that the Holy Spirit of Jesus’s baptism is fire. ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’; and that is precisely because it cannot leave us unchanged, but burnt, moulded, chastened, reformulated, and purified … if, that is, we will cooperate with the fiery power of the Spirit’s love in our lives. We need repentance, we need sacramental confession, we need deepened prayer and service to the poor, we need to be changed. And this is not to represent God as merely a punitive threat (another dangerous idol, of Freudian nightmares), but rather the God of real, life-transforming, love, who seeks our perfection in Him. William Temple, who was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury in the WWII years, put it thus, in his celebrated and fearless book, Christus Veritas (1924), chastising those who, even in those days, underplayed the reality and destructiveness of sin: ‘there is a real antagonism of God’, he writes, ‘against the sinner so long as he continues in his sin. It is true, of course, that God loves the sinner while He hates the sin. But that is a shallow psychology which regards the sin as something merely separate from the sinner, which he can lay aside like a suit of clothes. My sin is the wrong direction of my will; and my will is just myself so far as I am active. If God hates the sin, what He hates is not an accretion attached to my real self; it is myself, as that self now exists. He knows I am capable of conversion … He loves me even while I sin … but it cannot be said too strongly that there is a wrath of God against me as sinning …. And therefore, though he longs to forgive, He cannot do so unless my will is turned from its sinful direction into conformity with His, or else there is at work some power which is capable of effecting that change in me’ (p. 258). Yet that power, of course, as we now see, is precisely the inexorably fiery power of the Holy Spirit, already given to us in our baptism, and waiting to be further ignited.

Thirdly and finally, then. A thought now presses inexorably (or I hope it does for you too):  I started by making a rhetorical distinction, based precisely on today’s gospel text, between the final, judgemental fire against the ‘brood of vipers’ whom John the Baptist calls out in his preaching, and the baptismal fire promised to all Jesus’s followers in the Holy Spirit, for their final consummation in divine love.  But now we begin to see afresh that these are perhaps but two sides of the same coin.   Recall T. S. Eliot’s ‘Dove Descending Breaks the Air’, a poetic meditation precisely on John of the Cross’s teaching on mystical union, which ends: ‘We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire’ – that is, consumed either by the fire of divine judgement, or by the purifying fire of the Spirit. Both are the impress of the inexorable and eternal presence of God’s love, always on offer. But in the way of our response or lack of it this is experienced either as divine judgement or as equally divine, transformative, grace. The Spirit is always there to lead and allure and enable and inflame us; but ultimately the choice is ours:  God does not bludgeon us, because our freedom is too precious to Him. We step once more freely this year, then, into this purifying fire, with courage, steadfastness and hope, for – if John the Baptist is right - it is our baptismal birthright, along with the Christ who stepped into it for us.

Advent is no time for sleep, as St Paul reminded us last week, no time for evasion from the extraordinarily demanding pressure of divine love that once again this season asks of us, as costing nothing less than everything.  Unconditional ‘lurve’?  No, not ‘lurve, actually’, in the sentimental ‘Christimas’-film mode; but ‘actually love’ - the consuming fire of divine love which beckons us this Advent once more into its purifying flames. The founders of this church were serious Anglo-Catholic Christians, who wanted to be changed-in-God, and for society to change with them, as they ministered to it in its desperate needs; and you are their inheritors in that quest for holiness that God ever holds out to us in all the particular vicissitudes, agonies and joys of our lives. For ‘he [has] baptize[d] us with the Holy Spirit and fire’. Amen.

Preached at the Sung Mass at The Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 4, 2022

More Real than We Could Imagine

I have recently been making my way through the television series The UnXplained, which explores every imaginable aspect of human existence that remains, well . . . unexplained. Episode topics probe everything from belief in the afterlife, searches for the lost ark of the covenant, to supposedly natural phenomena that have no natural explanation. In an episode focusing on the end of civilization, I first learned of the simulation theory.

Clearly, I have not seen the movie The Matrix, and I am no scientist, so I was shocked to learn that there are legitimate scientists and others who dabble in science, such as Elon Musk, who subscribe to the simulation theory. This theory, as I understand it, is that the world in which we live is nothing more than a grand computer simulation controlled by higher beings with technological capabilities far more advanced than we could fathom. You and I in this church are not really here, despite our emotions, feelings, and desire to be here. We are simply pawns in a very sophisticated computer simulation. We are, in fact, puppets on a digital string.

As some have pointed out, it’s ironic that in a quest to rationally explain the nature of human existence, scientists have landed on a theory that sounds remarkably like the creation story, but with a skeptical, technological twist. The haunting question of simulation theory is this: what happens when whoever is running the computer simulation gets tired of the game and pulls the plug? Simulation theory posits an existence that is tenuous and perfunctory, where we are no more than virtual pawns.

But those who compare God’s creative and providential powers to a computer simulator seem to have little knowledge of a loving God who is in dynamic relationship with his children and who in some mysterious way allows us true freedom while also caring for us. If simulation theory is true, then do we really have any volition at all? Does it matter what we do if everything in this world is simply a game? Aren’t we merely robots in such a view? And is life more than a state of constant state of anxiety about when the plug will be pulled on the game?

We might be troubled by a similar kind of anxiety when hearing St. Matthew’s account of the Second Coming. Many Christians, and especially Episcopalians, have tended to shy away from the historic Advent preaching of old, which focused on the four last things of death, judgment, heaven, and hell. These topics make us uncomfortable. But why? Are we uncomfortable about the idea of our own deaths? Are we worried about where our souls will go after we die? Do we wonder what is on the other side of earthly life? Or are we simply terrified that the plug could be pulled on our lives at any moment and all the work we had planned or hoped to do would evaporate into thin air?

It’s very difficult to read Matthew’s text without feeling a slight rise in blood pressure. The end of time is so mysterious that only God the Father knows when it will be, at least according to Mathew. The last day will come upon us like the disastrous flood that swept away most of the world in Noah’s day. It will enter our lives as suddenly as a thief in the night. Is Matthew trying to scare us into belief or frighten us into action?

For centuries, Christians have been obsessed with understanding the end times. Predicted dates of the apocalypse have come and gone. And many have so longed to be raptured from this earth to be with God that they have lived as if this life were no more than a computer simulation. Perhaps the fact that many Christians still live as if they are in a computer simulation game is an even greater irony than skeptics devising a theory of existence that sounds quasi-religious in nature.

If the end of all things is to be eagerly welcomed as an escape from reality or dreaded with ceaseless anxiety over avoiding hell, then this world is to be treated as if it were nothing more than an illusion. The goal in such a view is to be with God after this life, and so the sooner the plug is pulled, the better off we’ll be because we will have escaped this vale of tears.

Consider, for a moment, what such an illusory world looks like. The Gospel is supposedly preached, the Bible is read, and church is attended, but everything else is simply ephemeral. The never-ending mass shootings are only an illusion. Climate change is a figment of our imaginations. Social inequities are beyond our control. And the indigent blend in with the dirt on the city street.

The only real concern, it would seem, is that moment when the plug will be pulled on this virtual simulation. The only difference between the way some Christians live and simulation theory is that on Judgment Day, when the plug is finally pulled on this video game, those of us who have worshipped correctly and believed all the right things will have the privilege of being swept away into another blissful game beyond this one, a game which never ends.

Is it any wonder, then, that the apocalyptic scenario that Matthew presents tends to provoke anxiety rather than hope? And can this really be the view of the evangelist who is primarily concerned with Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us? Is it possible to be a virtual disciple of one who uttered his first cries in a lowly stable and whose physical hands healed the poor and sick? Can we really be virtual disciples of one who made the blind to see by mixing his saliva with dirt on the ground and rubbing it on damaged eyes? Can we really be only virtual disciples of one who was less concerned about the end of time than about those who were abandoned by the roadside of life? Can we be virtual followers of one who told us that to visit the prisoner and the sick, to feed the hungry, and to give water to the thirsty was also to look into his own face?

The real challenge of Christian discipleship is to hold eschatological urgency with hopeful living. We need both. Eschatological urgency alone will enslave us to unhealthy fear. Hopeful living alone will turn our eyes from the face of Jesus in those we most wish to ignore and from the reality we want to forget.

Some scholars tell us it’s possible that in Matthew’s account of the end times, the man in the field and the woman grinding meal who are taken away are actually the ones who have gotten it wrong. It is the man and woman left on this earth who have chosen to live as Christ’s disciples. They are the ones for whom this world is more than just a video game. They are living with their feet on the ground. They are the ones who see the advent of Christ’s kingdom as if it were more than a future illusion. They are the ones who can hope for heaven and yet enjoy being with God in this life.

Can you join me for a minute in rethinking this world as more than just a computer simulation? Can we reimagine what Matthew’s conception of judgment looks like when it’s not simply raw fear but a dynamic gift? In such a world, every moment is pregnant with the real possibility that among us and through us, Christ will still work his miracles. Each of us is invited to live beyond mere hedonism and towards the enjoyment of the other. Our feet are not simply trained to walk to the altar but also from the altar out into the streets again, to the poor, needy, lost, and forsaken. Our hearts are not only lifted up to heaven in Eucharistic fellowship but back down to earth once again, bringing heaven down to it.

If we can only envision this world as something to escape and shun, then when Christ comes again in his majesty and glory, it will seem as if our world has had the plug pulled on it. Everything will seem to be an illusion because we will have failed to see what we could and should have done. We will have overlooked all those who needed to see Christ in us.

St. Matthew is right. Our world needs to wake up. We continue to live as if we are in an illusion, as if the problems that have solutions are beyond our control or, worse, not even there. We delude ourselves if we think that our own hands and feet, our own small community, and our own gifts of time and money will make no difference. We are living in a virtual world if we are numb to the expectant possibility in each moment of our lives that God will do something among us and through us. We are living in a virtual world if we think that things can’t really be better than they currently are in this earthly life.

The end is near because its radiancy is touching our skin and our hearts. Of that final day and hour of judgment, no one knows the specifics. Let it not trouble our hearts. Let us not worry about its time. Let us give heed to today as we yet await a glorious future. Listen: Christ is knocking on our door, crying for us to wake up. We are no longer living in a dream. Everything around us is real. And the kingdom is nigh at hand.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
November 27, 2022

The One Who Never Forgets

By the time I was in the tenth grade, my vision had deteriorated significantly enough that I failed the mandatory school vision test. It was an odd experience, to tell you the truth. I showed up to the exam with no clue that I wasn’t seeing properly. My eyesight had declined so steadily and slowly that I didn’t know what I was missing.

I thought everyone was seeing the world as I was. The edges of objects in my view had gradually become fuzzy. Colors were less vibrant. It took more effort to make out letters on the chalkboard in class. And it was a humiliating blow to realize that I could no longer avoid wearing glasses. Only when I donned my new pair of glasses did I realize how constricted and impaired my vision had become.

In fact, the new vision with glasses was almost painful in its clarity and strength. I recall getting a headache for the first day or so of wearing glasses for the first time. It was as if my old weak-eyed self was being assaulted by the advent of 20/20 vision. But it didn’t take long for me to enjoy the novelty of the sharp edges of letters on the printed page, of the greater ease of seeing things from afar, and of a world that was far more vibrant and colorful than I had remembered.

Vision is such a wonderful metaphor for spiritual awareness. It fills the pages of Holy Scripture. Not only does Jesus physically cure the blind in his ministry, but physical blindness is sometimes a metaphor for spiritual blindness. Jesus does things, but people simply don’t see the full import of what he's doing.

Have you done a spiritual vision test recently? What are you seeing? What is the Church seeing? Do we see what we want to see? Have we put on glasses with colored filters from the world around us rather than with the filters of Christian discipleship? What indeed are we missing? And is 20/20 spiritual vision too painful for us to take?

Reading and rereading the end of Luke’s account of Jesus’s passion today is like being put through a spiritual vision test. When we pick up with the passion narrative today, something is wrong with our vision, at least if we read it from the perspective of those in the story who don’t fully understand what is happening. We are being presented with an array of letters from a vision test projected onto a screen, and at first, the letters are hazy. If you will, put aside for a moment the fact that you know how this story ends, and imagine yourself there at the cross, either at the foot of the cross or, shockingly enough, nailed to one of the crosses to Jesus’s right or left. Let’s check our vision. What does it look like based only on the perspective presented by Luke’s text?

For starters, Jesus clearly names the impaired spiritual vision of those around him. “They know not what they do,” he says. Those who are nailing him to the cross, and perhaps more chillingly those who stand idly by, watching, have distorted spiritual vision. For Jesus’s closest followers, he is only a disappointment. He was the hoped-for Messiah who has ended his career ignominiously as the victim of capital punishment. For those pounding the nails into his wrists and ankles, they are simply doing the work of the state in executing one who has been condemned. They know not what they do. Some who are watching from afar have come for a guilty pleasure, watching the dirty and morbidly pleasing spectacle of public execution. For some present at the cross, this dastardly deed is a relief. Jesus will no longer be a threat to their power.

The first sets of scoffing words hurled at Jesus’s dying face are voiced out of a skewed spiritual vision. All the scoffers can see is a row of blurry letters on a vision test. On a spiritual level, the mocking words of the scoffers make no theological sense. In hindsight, we know that, of course. We know that this Messiah is not here to save himself. But try to pretend as if you don’t know this. Imagine that you’ve waited your entire life for the Messiah, and the one you thought was the Messiah is dying on the cross before you. He has disappointed you and failed you. He’s a troublemaker. And so, you remark with sarcastic distaste that he should save himself. This man, if he is truly who he says he is, should be able to rescue himself, just as he cured the lame, made the blind to see, and caused the deaf to hear. He should be able to prove his kingly authority. But spiritually speaking, this really makes no sense. As I said, the letters on the spiritual vision test are too blurry to recognize.

Surprisingly, the row of letters on the spiritual vision test starts to gain clarity with the mocking and yet somewhat incisive remarks of a criminal who speaks from one of the crosses at Jesus’s side. Now, Jesus is being asked to save not only himself but others. We are getting closer to 20/20 vision, but we are not quite there yet. Isn’t the criminal’s plea voiced merely out of desperation? Does he have any concern for all those other souls who need saving, too? Isn’t his understanding of salvation rather perfunctory? And, for him, is salvation anything more than a desperate rescue mission?

It’s only with the insightful and repentant words of the second criminal that the row of letters on the spiritual vision test comes into focus. Suddenly, after struggling to see the letters through our spiritual blindness, it becomes crystal clear. It’s coming from the least likely of persons, a convicted criminal who yet understands all too clearly his own faults.

What is it that this criminal sees that the others don’t? What does this criminal see that even we may not see? He sees just what kind of king Jesus is. He sees just what kind of kingdom Jesus reigns over. This criminal, despite his troubled past, doesn’t ask to be rescued from his plight. He doesn’t ask for a quick fix or a last-minute ticket into heaven. He only asks to be remembered, because he must know that of all the things that Jesus will do, he will remember. And if Jesus remembers him, perhaps he will remember others, too.

I wonder if we, if even the Church as a whole, have lost this vision? We who know how this story ends and who still worship the living God who made himself known in this crucified Savior must have some innate sense that Jesus’s kingship is not of this world. That must be obvious to us. We know that his death on the cross is not the end of the story. We know that resurrection, not death, has the final word.

But do we fully see what the end of this story really looks like with 20/20 vision? Has our spiritual vision deteriorated over the years without our awareness? Are we willing to accept the naked vulnerability of Jesus’s humiliating death without defensively trying to make him into the king we want him to be? Sometimes, I fear that Jesus must be for us the triumphant, muscular victor who pounds death and sin into the ground. Jesus must be the one who uses as much force as is necessary to rescue each of us from sin and death rather than subverting the powers of darkness through forgiveness, mercy, and healing. Have we become too comfortable with a savior who will forgive each of us but not forgive others, especially our enemies? Is 20/20 spiritual vision still too painful for our eyes?

Do we really see the ones crucified next to Jesus on either side? They are our enemies who have offended us, who hate us still, whom it is popular to loathe. They are the repeat offenders in our society who can never fully enter again into community life because they are forever stigmatized by their past. They are the death row inmates whose deaths are really about retribution than about public safety. They are all those we simply cannot imagine that God would want to save and whom we wish to ignore.

But Jesus remembers them as well as us. With 20/20 vision, we see that Jesus, our true King, unlike the kings and rulers of this world, always remembers. Unlike earthly kings, he doesn’t scatter and divide; he unites. He never forgets who we are destined to be despite all that we have done to impair our destiny. When Jesus remembers us, he doesn’t simply call us to mind; he literally puts us back together, re-membering a world that has been torn apart. He saves us by remembering each of us because the picture of salvation is never complete when someone is left out. Jesus doesn’t just rescue individuals. Jesus saves the entire world by binding up and healing its wounds.

How is that for a spiritual vision check? What ever happened to forgiveness as part of salvation? Can we really know salvation until we forgive? And can we really know salvation unless we rejoice that others are forgiven, too? Now, with this new vision, we see more clearly than ever that death has no power, because even when the world forgets those it puts to death, Jesus never forgets them. To see salvation is to see more than one’s own future. To be saved is to long for the whole world to be put back together again, because Christ never forgets.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
November 20, 2022

The Grace to Respond

In our weekly Pilgrims in Christ adult formation class, we recently looked at the story of salvation in Holy Scripture. Our task was to extract a large story from the varied and sometimes conflicting micro-narratives of the Bible. As preparation for this class, I asked class members to create three timelines of their own lives. These timelines are all charted on three parallel horizontal lines drawn on a ledger-sized piece of paper. The first line is used to graph notable moments in one’s life through peaks and valleys. Presumably, one’s birth would be a peak, and the loss of a job or a death in the family would be a valley.

The second line on the piece of paper is used for mapping one’s life in relationship to the Church. Here, baptism and confirmation would be high points, but a period away from the Church would be a valley. And then on the third line, one charts a relationship with God, which can often be very different from one’s relationship with the Church.

After creating these three separate timelines, the task is to see where peaks and valleys line up by sketching vertical dashed lines connecting the three timelines at key moments. When I have done this exercise myself, I have found that times of struggle with the Church have often been times of profound depth in my relationship with God. And, surprisingly, a seemingly robust phase in the life of the Church might prove to be a valley in one’s relationship with God if it contains no more than lip service to the Gospel.

This timeline exercise is, of course, subjective on many levels. The shape of the graph depends on the person doing the graphing. But the advantage of prayerfully undertaking this exercise is that it challenges, even subverts, grand metanarratives that logically follow from our ordered Western minds. Isn’t it true that we value neat and tidy stories? Don’t we often make easy causal connections between earthly disaster and divine punishment? Can we find anything other than despair in the valleys of our lives?

This is a fitting question when today in Luke’s Gospel we hear Jesus predicting terrifying events that will mark the end of time. From the vantage point of the historical persons in Luke’s narrative, these times are in the future. But the vantage point of Luke the evangelist and all who have heard or read his Gospel since its conception is different. Some of what Jesus predicted has already happened. In the aftermath of Jesus’ passion and death, in the earliest days of the Church, persecutions of his disciples had already begun. And in 70 A.D., the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, before we believe Luke’s Gospel to have been written.

If we were to chart all these disastrous events on timelines, what would they look like? Wouldn’t the graphs depend on the perspective of the one creating them? From the perspective of those in the Gospel story who are hearing Jesus’s terrifying words, I would imagine timelines full of deep valleys at some undetermined point in the future. On the line charting one’s relationship with God, perhaps there would also be a series of valleys.

But I wonder what a timeline would look like for us, hearing and reading this story millennia after Luke authored his text? Would the persecutions and tragic events predicted by Jesus be only valleys on a timeline? Or can we see more at work? Sometimes it’s only in hindsight that we can discern where God has been at work in our lives.

It seems that Jesus was all too aware of the human proclivity to react rather than respond. This is, after all, the essence of his words in the passage we have heard today from Luke’s Gospel. When the first signs of trouble appear, it will be an age ripe for charlatans. False prophets will come and lead many astray by pretending to be the Messiah. People will prematurely think it’s the end of the world. Many will be tempted to cower in anxiety and fear. There will be earnest attempts to pinpoint the exact date of the end of time. Indeed, a knowledge of the destruction to come will be yet another temptation to plan for one’s defense ahead of time. It will be a temptation to react to events rather than respond to God.

It’s rather difficult, I think, to listen to Jesus’s words and predictions without being overcome with anxiety. There is a reptilian fight-or-flight instinct that we can’t shake when we think of natural disasters, persecution, and final judgment. The greatest temptation is to reactivity.

Is it any surprise that we are conditioned to behave in this way? There are many reasons to be reactive. As we gather here in this church, our world is in the midst of war. Our local community is awash in senseless violence. Divisive partisanship has rent this nation apart. The Church herself is fractured by schisms, infighting, and petty squabbles. And while we may not be physically persecuted for our faith, our general culture is hardly supportive of Christian discipleship, if not outright hostile.

Add to this the other anxieties of life. Rising prices, an unstable economic market, and environmental destruction do not lower our blood pressure. It is, in fact, very difficult to discern anything good in the news that is blasted our way 24/7. The temptation is to plan, plan, and plan in an attempt to attain a security the world cannot offer. And when disaster strikes, whether it’s financial or personal, our only help seems to be to plead for God to rescue us from the valley and raise us to a peak in our life’s timeline. Indeed, wouldn’t we rather just dispense with every valley on the timeline of our lives?

But Jesus’s words are a reminder to avoid easy deception. They are a reminder to respond, not to react. It’s precisely in the times that are most difficult for us that we will be most vulnerable to deceit because we will be reactive. When we are broken and beset by tragedy and when we are aimless and without guidance, there will always be others to swoop in and promise to raise us from the valley to a new peak in life. Many false prophets will give us easy answers and impose their own metanarrative of triumphalism on our suffering and pain. Some within the Church will try to give us facile assurance to take the edge off discipleship.

And on this Commitment Sunday, where we offer our pledges of financial support to God’s ministry in this parish, we are perhaps more acutely aware than usual of our precarious financial situation. In a valley of anxiety over fiscal sustainability, our greatest temptation will be to assume defeat and to live out of scarcity rather than abundance. Unless we plan every detail of our future, there will be no more peaks on the horizon. We will be tempted to react every time another part of the roof leaks or our meager investments drop yet again. We will long for some miraculous bequest to raise us from the valley to a new financial peak.

But hidden in Jesus’s difficult words of impending destruction is the best news we could possibly imagine. If we could imagine a timeline graph, the valleys of our lives might actually align with the moments where we are most in tune with God’s will and desire for us. Zooming out on these timelines from God’s perspective can show us that times of difficulty are, in fact, our shining moments. They are perhaps our most profound moments. From out of the depths, God himself will give us the words and wisdom to respond with his good news for the world. In these valleys, the good news is most needed. With patience and endurance, God will help us respond and not react.

Dear people of Good Shepherd, there will always be a temptation to react rather than respond. There will never be a moment in our parish’s future that will be free from anxiety, since temptations to worry will always be a part of our lives on this side of heaven.

But we should not fear our unknown future. This is not a time to react. The present time is a gift. It’s a time to respond. When we are deep in a valley on our life’s timeline, God is yet giving us a mouth of wisdom to proclaim his good news. God is giving us a future, but we must wait patiently on him to tell us what to say and to do. God is inviting us to respond in love and not to react in fear. And no matter what happens and no matter how low our valleys may seem to be, if we wait on God, he will show us how to respond. And not a hair of our head will ever perish.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
November 13, 2022

Life or Death?

Depending on your choice of a calendar, this past Wednesday was either All Souls’ Day, or if you are a Phillies baseball fan, it was the day of game four of the World Series. And on Wednesday, two very different gatherings occurred.

Here in the church at 7 p.m., around thirty-six people, including musicians, gathered to pray for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed who have gone before us in the hope of the resurrection. Shortly after 8 p.m. on the same night, just sixteen miles away at Citizens Bank Park, over 45,000 people crowded the stadium to watch the hometown team play the Houston Astros. At the risk of creating a false opposition between Church and a perfectly enjoyable sport such as baseball, Wednesday’s two different gatherings might tell us something about two different ways of living.

Every year on All Souls’ Day, I’m moved by the power of praying for the dead. Indeed, if attendance at Masses here was any indication, All Souls’ Day was a greater draw for people than All Saints’ Day. On Wednesday, I stood at the altar, reading several pages of names of people who have died and are beloved of this parish. I read the names of my grandparents, my spouse’s grandparents, and of your family members and friends. On the list were former teachers of mine who were influential in shaping my future as a musician. There were names of former rectors of this parish, as well as parishioners who died in the past year, to whom I was privileged to administer the last rites of the Church and whose absence here is deeply felt. On the list, too, were friends who died far too young and suddenly. And there were, of course, many names of people I knew nothing about. In the blank space at the end of the list, at some undetermined point in the future, my own name might appear, as well as yours.

In the church, at the crossing in front of the rood screen was the catafalque draped in a black pall, representing the souls of all who have died. It’s an odd ritual in an age where death is constantly spoken about in euphemisms, where people “pass away” and don’t die, where with increasing infrequency the bodies of the dead do not even darken the doors of churches for funerals, and where people shudder to prepare for and anticipate their own deaths. Indeed, we do everything we can to avoid death. We shield our children from it as if they are better for it. We inhabit an age that is terrified of death.

And yet, if you were to sample any random person entering Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday evening, they would probably have told you that they were living life to its fullest by enjoying America’s greatest sport and supporting the hometown team. Of course, in and of itself, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with relishing baseball and rooting for the home team. Part of life is indeed enjoying our time on earth. But on the simplest level, could it be that the gathering in this church on Wednesday, if small, was the truest celebration of life? No one would necessarily guess it, with the black vestments, pall-covered catafalque, and somber music. But, yes, I dare say that here in this church at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, all who gathered here were celebrating life to its fullest.

This existential question about the nature of life versus death prompts the dialogue between Jesus and the Sadducees in Luke’s Gospel. The point of contention is whether there is a resurrection from the dead, and so, the central issue at the core of Jesus’s engagement with the Sadducees is the nature of true life itself.

Recall that the Sadducees were strict interpreters of the Torah, and because they couldn’t evidence of the resurrection from the dead in the Torah, they didn’t believe in it. And so, the hypothetical scenario they proposed to Jesus was meant to highlight the preposterous character of the resurrection. In this hypothetical situation, a woman and seven brothers follow the customs prescribed in the Torah, which were intended to provide for the sustenance of a family’s biological line and care for the widow. Whose wife would the woman be in the resurrection? Jesus’s responding words are perhaps strange to our ears. But as I’ve said, at the root of the exchange between Jesus and the Sadducees is the nature of true life itself.

And maybe another concern arises from this hypothetical scenario, too. There are no children from the seven marriages. What will happen to the bloodline? What will happen to the family name? How, indeed, will this family live on? Can there be real life beyond the biological family? And are these questions at all strange to us?

Although it may be unstated, this is the great fear of not just the Sadducees but of our own age. Even for many who call themselves Christians, this earthly life is smothered with the fear of losing all that seems to constitute our lives. We fear the loss of all those attachments that pose as the source of life but are really the source of death because they hold us in their grip and prohibit our freedom.

I’m talking about the fear of losing respect and status in the eyes of others. I’m talking about the fear of losing one’s wealth and having nothing to leave to one’s biological descendants. I’m talking about the fear that we will not have done enough to merit advancement in our careers or get into the right college. I’m talking ultimately about a fear that’s often unexpressed and yet is palpable and real. This fear is that there is nothing beyond this earthly life with its joys and sorrows. Or on a shallower level, eternal life is simply an escape from earthly woes rather than a glorious way of living that surpasses all we can imagine. Even though many will tell you that they believe in a resurrection from the dead, they live as if it does not exist.

This fear is expressed in all kinds of ways. It’s seen in the preference of the sports field over the pew on Sunday mornings. It’s seen in the preference of one more activity on a resume instead of participation in a life-changing ministry. It’s seen in idolatry of the biological family over a valuing of the family of God. It’s seen in the scorekeeping we do to buttress our own sense of worth and in the cutthroat competition that sucks us into its black hole of death. Our busyness convinces us that we are living when we are really dying.

Maybe the question is this: why have we failed to grasp the power of resurrection life? Do we need to find all our life’s meaning in bloated resumes, promotions, and biological lineages because we don’t know how to find joy in the true life that God gives? Or is it perhaps that we fear God more than we can rejoice in his love for us? What do we fear the most about death?

But maybe there’s another way of looking at this that rises above bleak, false dichotomies of comparing church versus stadium, spirituality versus secularity, or life versus death. In the midst of life, we are in death, and vice versa, we could say. This past Wednesday, here in the church, people did show up. They showed up, I believe, because we have not completely lost a sense of resurrection life. It’s the Church’s duty—our duty—to give voice to the hope of the resurrection in a world that will quickly deny it while also giving lip service to it. Resurrection hope and reality does not simply lie in the future but touches even the present.

The power of the All Souls’ Requiem, at least for me, is in how it moves me beyond myself. There’s something almost impersonal about it, and yet its most personal quality focuses only on the souls of the faithful departed and the incredible power of God to sustain life beyond the grave in a way and form that we cannot even begin to comprehend.

Page after page of the names of the dead read by the light of unbleached candles reminds us that those souls for whom we have cried and mourned do not live on through mere memorials, recitation of names, bloodlines, and financial legacies, but solely by the power of God. Remembering the dead is a sure and certain acknowledgment that true life awaits us as a freedom from the chains that are all too familiar to us. Resurrection life assures us that our value lies not in our accomplishments or possessions but in being a child of God and being baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And perhaps the greatest gift of resurrection life is that we are freed from sin and fear. We are unshackled from all that yokes us to proving ourselves worthy in God’s eyes. We are freed from the strings of this life’s attachments, which make us less than who we really are and lead us to fear losing God’s favor. And the best news of all is that, in the resurrection life, each of us lives only to God, who has called each of us by name and made us his own.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
November 6, 2022

The Power of Small

If you drive westward on Montgomery Avenue past Rosemont College, just a few minutes from here, you will notice their current advertising initiative, which promotes “the power of small.” This motto is a clever way of marketing a tiny college that might easily be overlooked among the other larger colleges and universities on the Main Line.

According to Rosemont College’s website, “the power of small” means that you can dine with the college President in the Community Center, engage in a research project side-by-side with a professor, and your coach will know your mom’s first name and your backhand swing.[1]

Thinking about the power of small is rather countercultural, isn’t it? I hail from the state of Texas where we were constantly told that bigger is better. Machismo pride is usually considered an asset rather than a deficit. Churches are obsessed with the size of their congregations. Majorities rule and call the shots. The loudest voices get the most publicity, and the biggest mouths are the most convincing. So much for the power of small.

But I don’t think the power of small motto is an excuse for not growing. Growth, if you ask me, is a wonderful thing. I, for one, believe that the Church is being called by God to grow. I believe this parish is being called to grow, because the charge we have been given by our Lord is to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Perhaps, then, the power of small is more than a justification for laziness. Perhaps the power of small means that what is typically valued for its flashiness, size, or power is no more important than the forgotten, the marginalized, and the voiceless. Perhaps we could say that God himself operates out of the power of small.

Look at the witness of holy Scripture. Stammering Moses is the chosen prophet to lead the Israelites into freedom. David, Jesse’s youngest son, is chosen as God’s anointed, although many would have guessed that any of his brothers had more of a chance at being selected. The barren are given the power to conceive. The humble and meek are exalted.  The proud and powerful are brought low. The widow’s mite is a more valuable offering than the loud clang of larger denominations thrown into the Temple treasury by the rich. And a helpless little Child enters the world as the Messiah. This is the power of small.

Zacchaeus, that well-known Biblical character from Sunday School is defined by his smallness. His short stature justifies his need to climb a sycamore tree to get a better look at Jesus. But Zacchaeus’s shortness is more than a passing detail. Anytime we are given such vivid descriptions of a character in Scripture, we should pay close attention. Zacchaeus is not just physically small.

Zacchaeus, if we were to measure his stature by his wealth, should be powerful and important, because we are told he’s rich. But he’s small because of his profession. He’s among the most hated of his day, considered a vile sinner for participating in extortionist practices and representing the loathed Roman empire. He's a traitor to his own Jewish people. The crowd has no use for insignificant, disliked Zacchaeus. They are blocking his view of Jesus, and they don’t care. But Zacchaeus is undeterred. Zacchaeus demonstrates the power of small.

A short person can probably scale a sycamore tree a bit more easily than a larger person. Zacchaeus can rest comfortably in the branches so that he has the best view of all. And Zacchaeus, however small in stature and favor he may be, is the one Jesus notices.

Zacchaeus stands for every person in the past, present, or future who is small. He’s the person ostracized because of an egregious crime committed and forever marked by his offense. Zacchaeus is the neighbor who struggles to pay bills and who can’t find the systemic help needed because the crowd stands in her way. Zacchaeus is the lonely octogenarian, who is shut in and whom everyone forgets because he is not seen as contributing to society. Zacchaeus is the migrant who is eager to work but is seen as unwanted competition for legitimate citizens. These many Zacchaeuses are the ones looked down upon, which is why it’s so striking when Jesus looks up at Zacchaeus.

Amid all the jostling of the crowd and the jockeying to vie for Jesus’s attention, Jesus pauses and looks up into the most unexpected place. He looks up into the branches of a sycamore tree to see this small man who is yet so powerful. Jesus looks at an adult who humiliated himself by behaving in such a shameful fashion by scaling a tree as if he were a child or an animal. This powerfully small person is the one with whom Jesus chooses to stay.

How little has changed since Zacchaeus climbed that sycamore tree! Oh, how we have lost the power of small! The poor and struggling are usually written off as lazy and more willing to stay at home and collect a government-funded paycheck than work. The small congregations in our Church are often closed or given a death sentence. The quietly effective leaders go unnoticed because a superficial society tends to favor gimmicks, tricks, and emotionally powerful sound bytes. Conflict and fighting attract more attention than peace and reconciliation.

But one small, powerful glance from Jesus to Zacchaeus in a dusty street in Jericho upends our automatic preferences for big. To the one who is so often looked down upon, Jesus looks up and offers himself as a guest.

What a lesson this is to us and especially to this parish as we grow. To those outside, we symbolize what is small. We are the parish that has barely survived, nearly torn apart by its past. How can we not feel small in the presence of gargantuan financial challenges, deferred maintenance, and an uphill battle of proclaiming the Gospel in a world that seems unwilling to hear it? We are the kind of parish that others have historically liked to mock, joking about imminent closure. We are the parish that has had to fight an unfavorable reputation because of its past behavior.

And yet we are a Zacchaeus parish. Zacchaeus and Jesus teach us never to underestimate the power of small. Yes, for a time, we have struggled to catch a glimpse of Jesus while the crowds blocked our view, but we have learned something valuable from Zacchaeus’s shamelessness. We have not been too proud to climb the tree, despite being mocked. We haven’t been ashamed to share the precarity of our financial situation, past sins, and current challenges with the world, because honesty is the first step towards healing. We have climbed to our embarrassing and unstable perch in the branches of a tree because, like Zacchaeus, we have been curious about Jesus. We have wanted to do more than just catch a glimpse of him. We have longed to see who he was.

And Jesus has not disappointed. Despite the boisterous crowd of raucous voices and super egos, we have been noticed by Jesus, who instead of looking down on us, has looked up at us. And he has told us that we have experienced his salvation and that today he will come to be a guest in our house. He will abide with us. Yes, he will abide with us here in this place to lead us into a new future. He will be with us in just a few moments’ time in the sacramental presence of bread and wine.

But there is one other striking thing about Zacchaeus. In the face of the negative grumbling of the crowd, Zacchaeus manifests joy and generosity. Zacchaeus who could have been bitter, skeptical, and angry because of his small stature and status, expands his heart to welcome the Guest who always offers abundance.

Never forget the hidden power of our Lord’s abundance. Never underestimate the power of small, whether it’s your own individual gifts, the small but growing ministry of this parish, or yes, even what seems like a small amount of money that you might consider pledging to this parish. Every ounce of it is bigger than you realize.

A generous heart knows nothing that is small. A spirit of thanksgiving sees not pennies or lack of potential but seeds for God to use to give the growth. A sinner, whether me, you, or Zacchaeus, who is self-aware can’t help but see the greater power of forgiveness and mercy. A small person forgotten by the world who clings to the branches of a tree is not looked down upon but is gazed upon lovingly from below. And a small home that has opened its doors through generosity is the one to welcome the Messiah himself, who must stay in our house today. Because salvation has come to this house.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 30, 2022

[1] https://www.rosemont.edu/admissions/tuition-and-aid/pdf/undergraduate-college-viewbook.pdf

A Study in Similarities

So much of how we make meaning in life is just a study in contrasts. We appreciate light because of the darkness. When the first hints of spring appear after a long, bitter winter, our breath is taken away. After the scorched earth of a dry season, the first signs of fall foliage are striking.

The drama of a Mozart symphony lies in its terraced dynamics, where loud punctuated sections alternate with quieter moments. Major keys are juxtaposed with minor ones for added tonal effect. In visual art, the most important objects are set in vivid relief against an unassuming background. We live in a world defined by contrasts. There’s the yin and the yang. The contrasts must go together for us to find meaning in the larger picture.  

There are theological contrasts, too. In the Book of Genesis, God created light because in the beginning, there was only darkness. In Scripture, light becomes an image for goodness, where darkness often symbolizes wickedness. Evil, said St. Augustine, is merely a privation of good. As I said, we so often make meaning through studies in contrasts.

In some respects, Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and tax collector is a giant study in contrasts. The Pharisee and tax collector are stock characters. They are, in some respects, hyperboles of themselves. The Pharisee represents a dutiful and pious religious person of his day. The tax collector is the pariah of society because he participates in an immoral system of unjust financial practices. He is an agent of the oppressive Roman empire.

On the most obvious level, and in the simplest reading, the Pharisee and the tax collector could not be more different, which is really the point. The Pharisee conscientiously keeps the law. Indeed, he goes above and beyond, fasting not just at the appointed times but even twice a week. He doesn’t just tithe on some of what he has; he tithes on everything. The Pharisee, as I said, is a stock character in this parable, not simply a historical one. He stands in for everyone who comes after him and is faithful to how things should be done.

I’m talking about the person who never misses a Sunday in church. I’m talking about the parishioner who’s involved in everything and who goes beyond the call of duty. I’m talking about the one whose morality isn’t questioned and who appears to have everything in order.

On the other hand, the tax collector stands for all those who have abused the system, taken advantage of others, been deceitful, and slept in on Sundays. I’m also talking about the person of loose morals, or pretty much anyone who doesn’t check all the boxes of the ethical code. I’m talking about the person we whisper about behind shielded mouths as we tell our other pious friends how dirty he or she is.

There’s a point to all these contrasts, which is why Jesus uses them. But there’s also a problem. The point is that we have two very different persons and orientations toward prayer. The simplest way of reading this rather complicated parable is that the person we might expect to have earned favor with God—the Pharisee—doesn’t offer so much a prayer but a lecture to God about why he is good and why the tax collector is bad. On the other hand, if we see this parable as a study of contrasts, the tax collector demonstrates true humility, praying that God might be merciful to him. The tax collector is far from squeaky clean, and he knows that.

But we should be wary of moving too quickly towards a simplistic interpretation of this parable. Don’t you think there’s a problem with these contrasts? Could this parable be more than just a study in contrasts? For starters, pitting Pharisee against an erstwhile sinner who repents makes the Pharisee seem disingenuous. At worst, the Pharisee becomes a reason for anti-Jewish sentiment and a scorn for dutifully keeping the law. Christians have gotten much cheap mileage out of lambasting the law in order to argue for sole reliance on God’s grace. This has been harmful and destructive.

So, let’s avoid that route of interpretation. Let’s move deeper into what only appears to be a study of contrasts. It’s clear that any one of us could be just like the Pharisee, or the tax collector, for that matter. Which of us hasn’t given thanks that we weren’t like the reprobate sinner? How many of us have participated in virtue signaling, such as touting our self-righteous viewpoints, whether progressive or conservative? Isn’t it easy to be confident that our version of Christianity is superior to others? We have discerned the real truth of Scripture, and we’re so sorry for those who haven’t.

This is the world we inhabit. It seems that we can only make meaning out of contrasts, which means that everyone must be put into a category. You’re either a Republican or Democrat. You’re either black or white. You’re either rich or poor, moral or immoral. You’re either a faithful churchgoer or a backslider. There’s either a right answer or a wrong answer.

And so, if we use the contrasts of Jesus’s parable to make some meaning, it appears that one character must be justified while the other is condemned. One character gets it right, and the other gets it wrong. Indeed, to understand what it means to be right with God, there must be examples of people who are never right with God.

But there is a deficit to viewing the world as merely a study in contrasts. However beautiful contrasts and diversity may be, mercifully, our own justification with God is not based on contrasts. We’ve been strongly conditioned in our world to operate within a system of competition. If someone has something we don’t have, then we are losers. If someone else is beautiful, then I must be ugly. If my friend is praised for her intelligence, then I must be less intelligent. If a repentant sinner is forgiven by God, then someone else must experience a fall from grace. It’s as if God is holding a massive scale. When one side has more weight on it, the other side moves up, and vice versa. Somehow, it’s so very difficult for us to accept that God can still love and forgive us even when horrible sinners are forgiven, too.

It’s not a failing or weakness that the Pharisee keeps the law or is observant, because both are admirable. Our own weaknesses as we attempt to be faithful Christians are not our dutifulness and willingness to show up to church even when we don’t feel like it. Our own weakness lies in thinking we need to measure our favor with God against someone else’s sins or negative qualities. Our weakness lies in interpreting God’s mercy and compassion as a study in contrasts.

There’s even a risk for the tax collector himself, even though his humility is exemplary. Perhaps, having embraced God’s great forgiveness, he could veer into a complacent acceptance of cheap grace or even spiritual pride. None of us, whether saint or sinner, is ever immune from becoming one of the stock characters in this parable.

Contrary to what we might have been taught, God doesn’t keep a checklist or tally sheet. God doesn’t write our name on the board when we’ve been bad and add check marks for repeat offenses. God is not a study in contrasts. God in his infinite goodness does not require us to be evil to exhibit his own goodness. We don’t need a fall from grace for God to prove how wonderful he is. Despite the vast gap between our mortal weakness and God’s infinite goodness, God always seeks to close the gap, to move towards us, longing for us to accept his forgiveness and be freed.

God’s justice does not try to exacerbate contrasts so that some people come out on top and others get cast to the bottom. God’s justice takes the beautiful, diverse, and contrasting colors of this world’s painting and tempers them so that the picture of God’s kingdom becomes a cohesive work of art.

It’s not entirely our fault that we find it so difficult to accept this part of God’s nature. We are indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the meaning of our lives can only be found by pitting ourselves against others. And God knows this, which is why God invites us into a new way of thinking. God has sent his Son into this world not as a hyperbolic foil to our wickedness in order to prove his majesty. God has sent Jesus to show us similarities where we see only contrasts. God has given us the great gift of knowing that in the economy of his kingdom, more than contrasts are needed. And here’s the best news of all: in that glorious kingdom, there is enough of everything to be shared.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 23, 2022

How Many Does It Take?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the rather tired jokes about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb. There are versions for every profession and type of person. How many CEOs does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one because the CEO holds the lightbulb, and the universe revolves around him.[1] How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. One to change the lightbulb, and two to debate whether they should change the bulb, and if so, whether it follows that they can.[2] How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? Eight. One to call the electrician, and seven to talk about how they preferred the old lightbulb.

But, in all seriousness, how many characters does it take for Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, to be healed? It may seem like a simple answer, but just see if you can keep track of all the characters in this well-known story from the Second Book of the Kings. Is it one character, that is, the prophet Elisha, who appears to be responsible for Naaman’s healing? Or is it actually eight characters?

First, there’s Naaman himself, because to be healed, he must take some responsibility for his own healing. Second, there’s the servant girl of Naaman’s wife, who first proposes a way for Naaman’s skin disease to be cured. Then, there’s Naaman’s lord, the king of Aram. We don’t hear this part of the story in today’s assigned passage, but it occurs in verses four through six. The king of Aram sends a letter with Naaman to the king of Israel, asking him to cure Naaman of his skin disease. The fourth character is the king of Israel, who is miffed when he’s asked to cure Naaman, thinking that he’s being played by the king of Aram. Character number five is the prophet Elisha, who tells the king of Israel to send Naaman to him for healing. The sixth character, perhaps easily overlooked, is the messenger that Elisha sends to Naaman to tell him how to be cured, which involves washing seven times in the Jordan River. The seventh character is a collective character, the group of Naaman’s servants, who finally convince him that Elisha’s instructions are really rather easy, so stop pouting and just do what he tells you. And then, of course, there’s God. There we have it. Eight principal characters are necessary for Naaman to be healed.

We might reasonably ask whether it’s really necessary for eight characters to be involved. Couldn’t it just be two, Naaman and God? Why couldn’t God simply cure Naaman directly? And what’s more, why would the prophet Elisha not even approach Naaman directly to heal him?

We can either write all this complexity off as an interesting story, or we can ask ourselves whether the way this story unfolds is intentionally part of God’s design. And how often do we find ourselves wondering about the nature of healing? Do we really need to ask others to pray for us or request the intercession of saints for prayer to be efficacious? Can’t we go directly to God? Do we need to bother at all with prayer if we can go to a doctor? If there’s holy water in my church’s baptismal font, do I need to trek across the globe to Lourdes or the River Jordan?

These are reasonable questions. Perhaps they are familiar questions to you. They are a bit like the lightbulb jokes, which seem so tired and corny. We laugh at how many people it takes to change a lightbulb because usually it takes more than one person, and our assumption is that it should not take eight Episcopalians to change a light bulb. Only one person who has moderate intelligence can climb on a ladder, unscrew an old bulb, and screw in a new one. We are, after all, an efficient people. Why not take the most direct path to the most obvious solution? Don’t bother with others if you can do something yourself.

But I suspect that there is some unavoidable truth in the lightbulb jokes. Is efficiency and the most direct path to a solution really the best way to go? Is our life’s vocation as simple as finding a way to make the most amount of money with the least effort and investment in schooling? Is stubborn individualism always good for us?

And so, back to Naaman and his quest for healing. What would have happened had Naaman not encountered the seven other characters in this story? We might ask whether Naaman would have been healed at all. After all, it’s not Naaman himself who initially seeks healing. It’s done at the encouragement of his wife’s servant girl, who had been enslaved presumably because of Naaman’s own conquests. She is of a nation that is enemies with Naaman’s people. This servant girl laments Naaman’s condition, and then the circuitous path towards healing begins.

How then would Naaman have sought healing without all those other characters? Naaman didn’t worship the God of Israel. His people did not get along with the people of Israel. Without the servant girl, the king of Aram, the king of Israel, Elisha and his messenger, even Naaman’s own servants, and especially without God, Naaman would probably have lived out his life with a skin disease.

Apart from this odd and complicated series of events, Naaman might not have found the God of Israel. Through the relationships that form in this strange story, Naaman’s healing happens, ironically, through the intervention of those who are other to his own kin. Enemies meet and are implicitly reconciled. Those who are marginalized, enslaved, or looked down upon play an instrumental role in Naaman’s cure. Naaman himself is humbled. It’s not necessary for God to heal him through the extravagant machinations of a prophet. It’s not even necessary, so it seems, for the prophet to mention God’s name directly in the instructions for healing. But have no doubt about it: it is the one, true, living,  God—our God—who is responsible for Naaman’s restoration to health.

I suppose that all of us can find a little Naaman in ourselves. Which of us doesn’t believe that our own specific circumstances are worthy of God’s direct attention? Isn’t our individual suffering worth an obvious and extravagant miracle? Doesn’t our personal relationship with Jesus supplant the need for others to be involved in our healing? But if God chooses to work through others, shouldn’t it be done through the most loyal of Christians or through our parish priest? Can God possibly work through those we think have no faith or religion at all? And besides, why are all those other people needed anyway? Can’t God just do it alone?

The story of Naaman has much to teach us, but perhaps most of all, it has something profound to teach us about how God performs wonders among us. Most of us would prefer for God to wave his hands over the wounds of our world—over the wars, natural disasters, unceasing violence, illnesses, pandemic, societal divisions—and work magic. If God wanted, couldn’t all of it be cured instantly? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler?

But we find, as did Naaman, that God doesn’t choose to do it alone. In the beginning, God brought creation into being because community was always at the heart of God’s vision for existence. And this is how God works wonders and miracles. Strange relationships form. Enemies become friends. Direct paths are twisted into bizarre detours. More than one person is needed to change a lightbulb.

God’s healing is so much more than waving hands to cause direct cures. God’s healing is far more than physical well-being. When Naaman is cured, divisions are healed, animosities are smoothed over, and social inequities are leveled out. The humble are exalted and the proud brought low. God’s healing is physical, emotional, and spiritual. Wholeness is achieved, and this cannot be done narrowly through magic tricks.

The part we don’t hear in today’s story is that when Naaman set out for the king of Israel to be cured, he brought a ridiculous amount of money with him, as if his healing could be bought. But he soon learned otherwise. It is so with us. We cannot buy God’s precious gift of healing.

Each of us is constantly healed by God, even if we’re not aware of it. But this healing is not about just you and God, or me and God. When each of us is healed, a whole host of people, those living and those who have gone before us, are brought along. One person’s healing is another person’s healing. It affects all of creation.

God’s gift of healing is a miracle not because of its visible extravagance but because of how it binds each of us to one another. This healing is so wondrous that it can’t be restricted to our individual relationships with God or private concerns over salvation. When God waves his hands over your wound or my wound, so much more is affected. God’s hands always cover the entire world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 9, 2022        

[1] https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/smart-light-bulb-jokes/

[2] https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/how-many-philosophers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb.html

Always Enough

Several years ago, when I was still in seminary, I was having dinner with some friends at their house. Over the course of the evening, the topic shifted to religion, and being the official theological student at the gathering, I became the dart board for some theological darts.

Two of my friends had become disenchanted with religion, and I secretly suspected that they wanted to find a measure of vindication for their own doubts and skepticism. A death in the family had precipitated a crisis of faith for one of my friends, which resulted in the person giving up on church and, presumably to some extent, on God.

How do you harmonize the presence of grievous sickness with God’s love? How can God be who we say God is and still allow suffering to exist? These were some of the questions lobbed my way, and they were good ones. But my friends’ rational and logical minds couldn’t tolerate any ambiguity in answers.

They were, in turn, surprised at my response to their queries. I had done enough clinical pastoral education to know that the least helpful response is to demean the very real anguish of others by attempting to justify or rationalize it. In the end, it can make those who are suffering feel like worthless people of little faith, and it often makes God seem cold and brutish, none of which is true.

So, I decided to respond with an honest answer. Yes, I could have quoted from the Book of Job or waxed eloquently about God’s love expressed through the bestowal of free will. But I opted for a simple and truthful answer. I don’t know, is what I said.

It's true. As much as I could find theological explanations for the existence of evil and suffering, when sitting at the bedside of someone with an incurable disease, those explanations will do little good. The godly response, I hope, is simply to respect their pain by staying with them and remaining silent.

To my surprise, and with a bit of proud vindication on my part, my friends stopped throwing darts at me in the form of theological questions to challenge God’s existence. I think they were humbled by the fact that I admitted my own limitations. I also admitted that I couldn’t adequately explain the mysteries of God. And this was different from their own quest to prove God’s non-existence or validate their own skepticism.

My friends’ vehement theological questions were tantamount to demanding something of me, as a representative of God in their eyes. Make us understand! Or perhaps, in reverse, prove our belief that God does not exist!

My friends’ demand of me was like the apostles’ demand of Jesus: increase our faith! This request for our Lord to add something to their existing faith, or lack thereof, is bossy at best and deceptive at worst. Based on Jesus’s response, it doesn’t seem that the apostles even have faith the size of a mustard seed, so it may very well be that the apostles were defensively covering for what they knew to be lacking on their part.

Unfortunately, the lectionary doesn’t give us the first four verses of chapter seventeen in Luke’s Gospel. In these verses, we see the reason for the apostles’ impertinent demand of Jesus. Jesus has laid out the rigorous expectations of discipleship. Beware, he says, of being the cause for someone else’s stumbling in the faith. It would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea than to be someone else’s spiritual obstacle. And while you’re at it, you must forgive another person who sins against you seven times a day and asks for repentance as many times.

The apostles are clearly intimidated by these stipulations of discipleship, and so they make their own demand of Jesus: increase our faith! The problem with their request is that faith isn’t a commodity to be doled out. One doesn’t recharge one’s faith battery when it weakens, and God is not the charger. The apostles really don’t seem to understand the nature of faith at all.

It’s easy to mirror the apostles’ response when we feel the weight of discipleship. As we become more aware of our human frailty, and as we feel less equipped for the task of following Jesus, we might be sorely tempted to make demands of God. Increase our faith! The intention is good: we want to follow God. But the response isn’t so good: we want God to do all the work. God has now become the dispenser of favors. We are now in the position of trying to control God. When there’s something we lack, we ask God to give it to us.

The litany of demands we can make is long. If we only had more money, we could do the ministry we are called to do. If we only had more members, more people would want to join our church. If we didn’t have so many other obligations, we could give more time to God. If we weren’t so tired all the time, we could be nicer and more magnanimous to others. If only the Church could give us clearer doctrine, we’d be able to follow Jesus more closely. These are all explicit or implicit demands for God to give us something we don’t think we have. But are all these just excuses for eschewing the responsibilities of being faithful?

The easiest response when things get tough is to give up on God. It’s easier to write God off than it is to admit that we don’t know how to explain some things about God. It’s easier to cling to our anger with God when we’re going through a difficult time than it is to release the anger by searching for where God is in all of it. It’s more comforting to find a religion that will give us all the answers we want rather than assuming personal responsibility for navigating ethical quandaries with grace. It’s easier to blame God for our misfortunes than to trust that even if we can’t see it, God will heal us and help us, somehow, in some way, and especially when we can’t explain it.

But there’s one more problem with treating God as a giant problem solver. Yes, it leads us to manipulate God, and yes, it leads us to manipulate other people to make things easier for us. But it also ignores perhaps the most important thing of all. To demand that God increase our faith assumes that we don’t have enough of what we need to be faithful disciples.

To cry out for God to increase our faith rests on the assumption that there is a dearth of resources, whatever they may be, as we walk the way with Jesus. This was the erroneous assumption of the apostles. Intimidated by the rigorous demands of following Jesus, they incorrectly assumed that he was asking something of them that they couldn’t achieve without needing something more. Jesus, work your magic. Wave your magic wand and give us more faith.

But the truth is that in the kingdom of God, we always have precisely what we need to do what God is asking us to do. The church that cries out to God for more resources to enable ministry can’t see that they might be focusing on the wrong ministry. In God’s kingdom, ministry is shaped and built around the gifts and resources also present. Vision forms from the planted seeds of these gifts from God. The person struggling after a crisis who simply asks for more faith might have unrealistic expectations of herself. Perhaps her faith is witnessed not in overcoming grief but in trusting God in the midst of personal anguish.

Having faith means, above all, truly believing and trusting that God has given us everything we need to complete the work to which he is calling us. Rather than looking around and seeing a scarcity of necessary resources, could we look around and see that something as small as a mustard seed is crucial to life-changing ministry and service? Having faith does not mean we have all the answers. It means that we are willing to be responsible for what God has already bestowed upon us. It means not taking the easy way out.

If I could go back in time to that dinner with friends years ago, I would have added something to my response to their theological questions. I would have told my friends that instead of expecting a foolproof theorem for theological quandaries, they had everything they needed to follow Jesus. God could hold their initial anger and questions, which might be an impetus to deeper relationship with him. Perhaps their questions could be turned into the gift of helping others struggling with doubt. Maybe they weren’t as faithless as they wanted to seem. Because  no matter how many questions we may have, no matter how bleak the picture may look, and no matter what we seem to lack, one thing is sure: God has always given us enough.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 2, 2022