Come and See

Do you remember the first time you saw someone cry? Was it a parent who was grieving? Was it a sister who fell and scraped her knee on the playground? Was it you, looking in the mirror as tears rolled down your face because you were scolded?

I don’t remember the first time I saw someone cry. But I remember all kinds of occasions when I saw others cry: myself in school when a teacher was harsh with me, one of my parents at a funeral, a school librarian after receiving a call that her father had died.

And I remember being mystified by tears. Tears are a funny thing indeed. Sometimes, when a person is crying, it’s impossible to tell whether they’re sad or happy. People cry when they’ve suffered a loss. They cry when they’re in physical pain. They cry when they laugh at a joke. They cry when they’ve received good news. Tears are a mystery, aren’t they?

When Jesus cries after the death of his friend Lazarus, it may be one of the most touching moments in holy Scripture. Here we see Jesus’s full humanity. Jesus wept. But it’s so easy to romanticize Jesus’s tears. There’s no doubt in my mind that Jesus was sad at the death of his friend, but it's also true that Jesus didn’t cry when he first learned of Lazarus’s death. Did he eventually cry because he wished he’d gone to Lazarus sooner? Maybe, even though Jesus did everything according to his Father’s time. Did he cry because he saw Mary weeping, as well as her friends? Perhaps. Sometimes, it’s the tears of others that open the floodgates on our own tear ducts.

We don’t really know why Jesus cried. But could his tears have been prompted by what is said to him when he asks where Lazarus has been laid? It’s a familiar line in John’s Gospel. We first hear it way back in chapter one, right after Jesus is baptized. He’s walking by John and two of his disciples. They begin to follow Jesus. They ask him where he’s staying. And Jesus utters the words that seem to elicit his own tears in chapter eleven. Come and see.

Maybe it’s just such an ordinary line that John can’t help but use it when Jesus asks where Lazarus has been laid to rest. Maybe it’s nothing more than that. But I can’t shake the fact that this invitation, Come and see, is no ordinary line in the hands of St. John. It’s the invitation by which all come to Christ and begin walking the road of discipleship.

And it’s what precedes Jesus’s tears. Come and see. It’s a haunting memory of the call of the first disciples, before all the troubles that Jesus would soon encounter. It’s a poignant recollection of the most important call of the Messiah. Come and see. Come follow me, and you will be changed forever.

But what are Jesus’s tears? Are they merely tears of sadness? Are they tears of deep hurt? Are they tears of anger? Are they, mysteriously enough, tears of joy? What kind of tears does Jesus cry? Because in those tears, we find a hinge point in the story of Jesus’s mission.

Jesus’s tears are at the emotionally laden moment where the sober reality of death meets the promise of eternal life. There’s no question that Lazarus was dead. Jesus says as much. Lazarus didn’t simply fall asleep. He died. His friends, family, and Jesus himself wept salty tears at this hard reality.

But death has met more than its match in the promise of eternal life. It’s not a mere whiff of eternal life that will only come at some point in the future. Jesus himself is the incarnated presence of eternal life. Eternal life is walking on the earth.

And eternal life incarnated is weeping. He is deeply moved in spirit and troubled. He is, as the Greek verb tells us, even indignant. And in his emotional turmoil, three haunting words prompt Jesus’s tears because something is terribly, terribly wrong. His precious invitation has been inverted. Come and see are supposed to be the words that are used to invite others into discipleship, into life, not death. Come and see this man who has changed our lives forever! Come and see the one who heals the sick, makes the blind to see, and shows such compassion! Come and see the one for whom we have been waiting for so long!

Come and see is an invitation into freedom. It’s the call to see in visible form God remaking a world rent apart by sin and evil. It’s the call to let go of the guilt, shame, and trauma of our past and walk out into a redeemed future. It’s the call to leave behind the shackles of a world captive to sin and death and to cross the Red Sea into glorious liberty. It’s the call to leave behind everything to follow the one who will transform our selves, souls, and bodies.

And now, Jesus’s beautiful words of invitation are being used to invite us to look only at death and not at life on the other side of it. This is what’s terribly wrong. Come and see where Lazarus has been laid. Come and see that we will never hear Lazarus’s voice again. Come and see his cold, lifeless body in the dark tomb. Come and see the wound that has been punctured in our hearts. Come and see that death has won this fight.

And Jesus, indignant and deeply moved inside, is groaning with righteous anger at the cowardly shrewdness of death. And then he weeps. Surely they are tears of sorrow. Surely they are tears of hurt.

Jesus weeps at the hideous brashness of death, which thinks it always has the last word. Jesus weeps at the travesty of the accusing voice of the evil one who would invite us to stare death in the face as if it were all there is. As Jesus wept, he still weeps as we stand at the crossroads, where death and eternal life face off. We stand there all the time. Perhaps even now you are hearing the voice of death call to you.

Come and see, it says, that you never were much, and you never will be much. Come and see, it says, that you will always be measured by your worst offenses. Come and see, it says, that your illness is proof that God can do nothing for you. Come and see, it says, that you will never be able to forgive the one who hurt you thirty years ago. Come and see, it says, that war and violence are the only ways to safety. Come and see, it says, that the Church’s decline will be her sure demise. Come and see, it says, that the damage inflicted on this good earth is too far gone to rehabilitate. Come and see, come and see, come and see that death has won.

And Jesus weeps. He still weeps with us. He weeps because the precious invitation to discipleship has been coopted by death’s lies that still speak softly in our ears. He weeps because we have bought these lies and still do when we are told that this world’s vicious terms are what we must accept. But he weeps, too, with joy that this is, indeed, not the end of the story. He weeps because he is standing at the entrance to the tomb and calling to us.

Surely Jesus’s tears are also tears of joy. They are the only visible expression of a joy so deep that others don’t yet understand it. Jesus weeps because what everyone else thinks is the end of the story is only the beginning.

As he summoned Lazarus to life, the Good Shepherd still stands outside the tomb and calls each of us, by name. Come out, he cries! Come out from your bondage, and I will loosen all that is binding you to sin and death. Come out and see that, although death is undoubtedly real, it’s not the end. Come out and see that even in this life, resurrection glory is casting its glow upon us. Come out and see that there’s always room for forgiveness. Come out and see that we never need to accept the lie that death is the final word. Come out and see that if you believe in me, you will live forever.

And when we emerge from the tomb, we squint because our eyes are so used to the dark. But we have done it. We have stood at the crossroads where death confronts more than its match. One voice rises above the tensive fray. We have recognized the voice of the one who is our true Shepherd, whose voice we will always know. He’s calling our name. And we turn away from the cowardly voice of death because we know it’s the voice of the hireling.

And like Jesus, we weep. We weep that for so long we have believed the voices of death that have tried to pull us down. But we also weep because we have experienced the deepest joy imaginable. We now know, like we’ve never known before, that in this battle, one voice always wins. Come and see, and you will be changed. Come and see that things can be so different. Come and see, and you will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 26, 2023

One Thing I Know

It’s what you say when a man in his thirties dies of a gunshot wound on the trauma room table, when the doctors have left the room and you’re alone with the family and they ask why it happened. It’s what you say when the person who can’t afford to stay in her home because of rent increases ask you what she can do to find a new one in an economy that doesn’t care for the poor. It’s what you say when someone who doesn’t go to church asks you how those who do go to church still be so unforgiving. It’s what you say when an antagonist of religion asks you to explain where God was in the Holocaust or 9/11 or the tsunami in Japan. I don’t know.

It’s the answer that’s either evasive or the most truthful thing one can say. Oddly, this simple statement, I don’t know, is sometimes the most appropriate response to the most complicated and vexing questions of life. I don’t know is what we’d rather not say, because it requires humility and shows the limits of our humanity. I don’t know flies in the face of our modern propensity to find easy answers to complex problems. I don’t know seems to suggest we are ignorant, lazy, or letting ourselves off the hook from trying to figure things out. I don’t know is what the man born blind is not afraid to say.

Did you catch that? When everyone presses him to give them the answers they want to hear, he just says I don’t know. If it isn’t enough that this man has never had the gift of physical sight until Jesus lays hands on him and that he has had to beg for much of his life, he is bandied about from person to person to justify their contentions with Jesus.

Most people in this story want to be able to explain things satisfactorily. It begins with Jesus’s own disciples, who assume that the man’s blindness must be the result of either his sin or his parents’ sin. We’ve all heard it before, haven’t we? The hurricane ravaged New Orleans because its people were immoral. AIDS is a punishment for those who are sexually aberrant. The fall of Jerusalem was because of the disobedience of God’s people.

But thankfully, Jesus doesn’t answer the question put to him by his disciples. He categorically dismisses an easy casual connection between sin and illness. His response is one more confounding statement with no clear explanation. Even God’s works can be wrought through the blindness of a man begging on the street.

When they recognize that this man is now able to see, and upon learning that the healing is because the man obeyed Jesus’s command, they want to know where Jesus is. I don’t know is what the man born blind says. It doesn’t seem to bother him. He doesn’t really know why Jesus wanted to heal him, or why Jesus then disappeared, or even how in the world his blindness was taken away. He doesn’t know any of that, but what he does know is that once he was blind, but now he can see. For him, that’s enough.

And how different this is from the others in the story whose I don’t knows lack any real integrity. The parents of the man who now sees rightly admit that they don’t know how he now sees, nor do they know who healed him, but they say I don’t know because they’re afraid. They’re afraid that if they connect the healing of their son to the Christ, they will be social pariahs. Their I don’t know is spineless and evasive.

And the I don’t know of Jesus’s opponents is made into an accusation against him. We don’t know where he comes from, and therefore, how do we know he’s not some troublemaking imposter? How do we know that God is really with him?

  But ironically, the man who once was physically blind has the clearest spiritual sight. He can say in the same sentence I don’t know whether the man who healed me is a sinner or not, but what I do know is that once I was blind and now I see. It matters not to him that the man could be a sinner or that he can’t explain how he was healed. It only matters that he was healed. He was healed when he didn’t even ask for it. He must have known that there was some truth in what he didn’t know.

It’s said that the more we know, the more we understand what we don’t know. This may be true, but it also seems that the more we know, the less we are satisfied with what we don’t know, especially when it comes to God. These days, people seem more inclined to religion that will tell them everything, even when the teachers don’t really know all the answers. If we don’t know the answer, we make it up, telling ourselves that some answer is better than none. And even when someone is willing to admit that they don’t know something about God, they expect someone else to give them the answer. At various points in her history, the Church has tried to say too much about God, and at times, it has gone horribly wrong. Saying I don’t know has led people to the stake or caused them to be cast out or condemned as heretics. Intolerance for I don’t know has divided denominations and destroyed parishes, and it still does.

Where we see division among us, whether in the Church or in the world, it often occurs where a question meets a definitive answer. A question about whether something new can be done is met with a defensive response that it has and will always be done this way. A question about whether previously ostracized individuals can be welcomed as authentic members of a community of faith is greeted with the charge that God doesn’t listen to sinners. You see how it goes.

It doesn’t matter how many times we point to what God is doing among us, especially when it’s fresh, new, and surprising; there will always be others who don’t want to hear that truth. There will always be some who say, “don’t confuse me with the facts” because the facts don’t support their worldview.

The man who once was blind but now sees is proof that an honest I don’t know leads one to a lonely place, but it can also lead to the place of deepest truth. Perhaps this is part of what it means to bear our cross in Christian discipleship. Sometimes, we are only left holding a mystery that we can’t explain but which is truth itself. It’s the mystery that the wonders of God’s healing power can be seen in a man blind from birth and relegated to begging on the side of the street. It’s the mystery that even we who were formed from clay but have been misshapen by sin are loved enough to have our eyes anointed by Christ’s healing hand. It’s the mystery that God’s healing isn’t always as complicated as we imagine, and sometimes it’s as simple as heeding his command to go and wash and come back seeing. It’s the mystery that belief is not articulating tomes of doctrine or dogma but as simple as pointing to where the Holy Spirit is active in our lives, spectacular or unspectacular. It’s the mystery that when we think we see clearly, we might actually be blind, and when we are wandering in the darkness and are confused, perhaps we see most clearly. It’s the mystery that even in those we have always thought were sinners, perhaps God is manifesting himself. It’s the mystery that the light of truth often hurts because our eyes have gotten so used to the dark.

It takes the man born blind a while to know exactly who Jesus is. There’s so much he doesn’t know about Jesus, even after he confesses his belief. But what he doesn’t know doesn’t impede his belief, because the man who now sees is proof that the mark of a true believer is receiving truth, rather than creating or defending it.

It's a terribly lonely place, to sit and hold the mystery of God when we are assailed with requests to explain it. It’s a lonely place to point to what God has done in our lives when others think we’re foolish for wasting our time. It’s a lonely place to hold the mystery that God is doing remarkable things in a parish that is seeking to rebuild after so much trouble, even when others just see your challenges and problems. It’s a lonely place to say that you’ll never be 100% certain that God loves you for who you are when others call you a sinner and cast you out. It’s a lonely place to point to the ordinary evidence of God’s hand when others only see God’s absence.

But it’s to this lonely place that Jesus, the Good Shepherd always comes, just as he found the man born blind. The Good Shepherd will always find us when we have been cast out by others. In the face of mystery, to say I don’t know is the only thing we can say, and it’s the most honest. It’s the key that unlocks the door and lets the light and the truth in. And then we can say, Lord, I believe. There’s so much I don’t know, but I believe because you found me in my loneliness. This I do know, that when I was lost, you sought me out. When I was hurting, you comforted me. When I was confused, you guided me. Once I was blind to all this, but thank God, now I see.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 19, 2023

At the Well

Did you notice it in the scene at the well? The Samaritan woman left it as if it were completely forgotten. Seemingly innocuous but speaking volumes, it’s the water jar. The jar rests on the ground, as if carelessly thrown there in haste. It’s abandoned, untended and unfilled. The woman never bothered to fill it. She never even gave Jesus the drink of water for which he asked. It’s a poignant symbol as well as a utilitarian thing. It represents dashed hopes, haunted memories, things done and left undone. It represents the gut-wrenching hunger pains and thirsty aching for fulfillment, even though it’s never satisfied.

And yet, this water jar says everything about what has just transpired at the well in this village. The water jar testifies silently to the hollow pains of haunted, even traumatic memories. It tells part of the story of the present, of this Samaritan woman’s surprising encounter with Jesus. It also tells something of the future. The water jar’s forlorn status, left unused by a deep well and by a thirsty Jesus, represents a woman who has been changed forever.

I wish we knew her name, but we don’t. Perhaps that says something about why her transformation at the well was so significant. She appeared at the well in the middle of the day. I imagine the sun was blazing down upon the village square. She came for one thing only; she came to quench her thirst.

It was wearying to keep returning to the well, day after day, to fill and refill the water jar. But she did it anyway. And when she brings her water jar, she brings so much more, too, even if unspoken. She brings her many marriages and her feelings of being passed around from husband to husband as if she were an object to be used and then put aside. We honestly don’t know whether those marriages were ended due to divorce or whether the woman had married five brothers from the same family, each of whom successively died. After all, in her day, the custom of levirate marriage was intended to provide for a woman’s safety. A man had a duty to marry his brother’s widow and provide for her, even if she were not truly loved. We have no reason to assume the Samaritan woman committed any sexual sin, and frankly, it’s not the point of this story.[1] When she brings her water jar to the well, she brings all the sad endings to her marriages. That’s all that matters.

She brings her loneliness in a culture that treated women as objects to be traded and used. She brings all in her past of which she is ashamed, even if she’s not to blame for some of it. She brings, too, her indelible status as a Samaritan now in close company with this man, a Jew, to whom she shouldn’t even speak.

This woman is looking for water because she’s thirsty, very thirsty. But she’s looking for something else, too. She’s longing for that emptiness inside to be filled, but with what, she knows not. And when she leaves that water jar to run and find others to bring back to the well, she has found only one of the things for which she thirsted, and, ultimately, it’s all that matters.

It's there at the well that Jesus invites her into conversation. He asks her to serve him, and then he serves her. He tells her to bring all that she desires to hide from him and others. He coaxes her into telling the full truth. He tells her everything about herself, and then some. And then, he tells her who he is, and everything changes after that.

After that, the well is no longer a place for Samaritans to keep apart from Jews. After that, the brokenness of the past and all its haunted moments are forgiven and forgotten. After that, many more people with their own empty water jars come to Jesus to be filled. After that, the well becomes not a place for thirst to be quenched but a place where eternal life is given.

And here, this day, we have come with our water jars and, oh, so much emptiness. To this deep well, to this Mass, we have brought our loneliness in an age where we’re more connected than we’ve ever been but perhaps the loneliest we’ve ever been. Three years after a pandemic toppled all our Tower of Babels, we bring humbling silence in the face of life’s mysteries. To this deep well, we bring, week after week, empty water jars that resound with the unanswered prayers of our lives. And each week, we pray that we will leave this well with overflowing jars, sloshing water on our way out. To this deep well, we bring the malaise of our lives, which we try so desperately to assuage on social media, or with academic status, job promotions, or our children’s successes. To this deep well, we bring the aching thirst of anxiety and of worries about ailing parents. We bring our desire to be loved for who we are instead of who we should be. To this well, even if secretly, we bring all the hard knots of emotions inside us that we desperately long for God to unloose.

But each week, it seems, we leave with empty jars. Perhaps we have a bit of water in them, but the thirst is still aching inside us. And this is the main reason why we keep returning week after week. We so badly want our water jars to be filled to the top.

Until one day—only God knows when—something changes. One day, as on the day with that woman at the well, we meet for the first time—and I mean, really meet—a man named Jesus who has been sitting at the well all along. Before, we just never saw him. He has been there all along, weary, and tired by the sins of humankind. He has been there all along, sitting in the heat of the day, thirsty himself, and carrying the wounds of his tragic death still on his hands and his feet. He has been asking us for a drink, but we have not seen him.

But on this one day, for whatever reason, we notice him. At first, we don’t understand how he can be talking to us. He’s Jesus. We are sinners. Jesus and sinners don’t share things in common, we say. But he’s offering us something else, something far more substantial than water from a well. He asks us to bring everything from our past that we have tried to hide from him and others. He tells us all about ourselves, those things done and left horribly undone. He shows us the humiliations, the shame, and the haunted losses of our past. He reveals the emptiness of our present.

We suddenly realize that this vulnerable man, sitting by the side of a deep well, is showing us all things, about ourselves and about our salvation. He knows everything about our past, and yet, he’s still here, waiting for us to receive his gift, the only gift that will quench our thirst.

And we finally understand that our reasons for coming here to the well week after week, even day after day, were the wrong ones. We came trying to show only certain things about ourselves when Jesus wanted it all. We came hoping only for that new job or for the cancer to be taken away. We came so that God might heal our painful past and give us a new direction. But now we know that the only reason worth coming here to this deep well is to be with Jesus.

He has been here all along wanting to draw us into conversation. He has been waiting week after week to tell us all about ourselves and to help us tell him all about ourselves. We realize, as we never have before, that this well may be the only place on earth where the most unlikely candidates do share things in common. Here white people and people of color sup together. Here all things are shared by rich and poor, male and female, housed and unhoused, liberal and conservative. Here at the well, we are known in a way that we are known nowhere else. And so, there is only one response we can make.

We drop with haste the water jars we have brought. We care not that they look empty, because we are no longer empty inside. We cast aside those jars, and we run from the well—from this place—and we find everyone we can to tell them about whom we have met. We don’t promise them easy answers or quickly answered prayers. We don’t tell them they’ll never be thirsty or hungry again. We just tell them the truth. We tell them that here at the well, we have encountered someone who knows everything about us. And even so, he abides at the well, weary and tired though he may be, to talk with us, because this man is Love itself.

And when we return to the well again with friends and strangers, we see for the first time that we have come for a different reason. We haven’t come to fill our water jars or to quench our thirst. We have come only to talk and be with the Risen Christ, the one who has never given up on us and who will never give up on us. We have come finally to accept his invitation and to abide with him forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2023

[1] See “John” by Gail O’Day in Women’s Bible Commentary, eds. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 384.

On the Other Side of Judgment

A 2017 online article by the Religion News Service noted the significant rise in attendance at services of Choral Evensong in the United Kingdom, despite the sobering decrease in Sunday morning church attendance. The editor of a website devoted to Choral Evensong noted that many people don’t want to engage directly with the Church anymore. They are looking for what he called a “side entrance,” and in his estimation, Choral Evensong provided such a side entrance. As he put it, those who engage indirectly with the Church “are attracted by artistic expression and then by osmosis they find it spiritually appealing.”[1]

The article quoted several tourists from across the globe who attended Evensong at Westminster Abbey, most of whom observed that they were either not religious, or only “spiritual but not religious.” One woman from Colorado said, “I used to go to church more when I was young but the rules, the judging of people put me off. But the church here, with a service like this, brings people together.”[2]

The sublime beauty of Evensong, its low demand on active participation, and its focus on the transcendence of God are quite appealing to many who would otherwise never step foot inside a church. For whatever reason, people are deeply hungry for the beauty of holiness, even if experienced from the fringes of the Church. It reminds me of the story that during the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, who was known to struggle with traditional Christian dogma, would wander across Lafayette Square from the White House to sit quietly in a back pew at St. John’s Church for Evensong, and then he would leave just as quietly as he came.

If those on the fringes of religious life could call anyone their patron, perhaps it would be Nicodemus. He has long been considered a prototype of the classic seeker. On one level this is true. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night because he’s been intrigued by something in the signs that Jesus has performed. We don’t know exactly why he makes his visit at night, but it could be that his tentativeness in coming to Jesus was due to his fear of being seen too closely associated with this mysterious teacher, who also had a reputation for being a troublemaker.

Based on a surface reading of the text, Nicodemus misses a whole layer of meaning in Jesus’s speech. Nicodemus confusedly interprets Jesus’s words on a literal level, while Jesus is wallowing in double entendre, which is even more apparent in the original Greek text. In short, Jesus and Nicodemus talk past one another.

But I wonder if there’s more to Nicodemus than we have historically given him credit for. True, he may be a kind of seeker, but in many ways he’s quite different from the modern seeker. Nicodemus, after all, is very religious. He’s not on the fringes of religion, he’s deep into it. But Jesus is urging him to be more spiritual. Nicodemus is the inverse of the person who is spiritual but not religious.

And yet, for all his literalism and incomprehension of what following Jesus really means, could it also be that Nicodemus sees something that others around him don’t see? Does he see more in Jesus than we think he sees? Yes, he may make a nocturnal visit to Jesus, and he may leave that visit with more questions than answers. But maybe there’s more to Nicodemus than meets the eye.

I suspect that Nicodemus instinctively knows what he can’t yet clearly articulate or confidently live. He’s already made a confession of sorts in approaching Jesus. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” Something tantalizing has drawn Nicodemus to Jesus, even if at night. Jesus is more than a teacher. God is with him, as Nicodemus recognizes. He can see hints of a striking truth revealed in Jesus. And although Nicodemus might not know how to put it into words, could that something be that a glorious gift lies on the other side of judgment?

One thing is clear in John’s Gospel: judgment is present in who Jesus is. When we are in the presence of Risen Christ, our lives are automatically judged. The ways of our lives are pitted against the one who is truth itself, and the ensuing judgment reveals the tension between our ways and God’s ways. This judgment sheds light on the dark corners of our lives that we would rather hide away. The judgment of Christ brings everything into the light.

But so often, we can only see the judgment as punitive, which is not the end of the story. And I have a sneaking suspicion that for all his hesitance, Nicodemus has caught a glimpse of something on the other side of judgment. He has seen hints of this in the visible signs performed by Jesus. There’s something so alluring in what Nicodemus has seen that he must approach Jesus to find out more. Could the allure of Jesus’s signs be visible evidence of the freedom of eternal life? Nicodemus must have seen these encouraging hints in the healing of those with physical ailments, in the grace Jesus extended to those shunned by society, and in the extraordinary ways in which natural laws were defied by the simple presence of this rabbi. Indeed, Jesus tells us that he’s pure gift from God, not for the world’s condemnation but for the world’s life. Our judgment in Christ is not a castigation but a healing grace, so that we can truly embrace the gift of eternal life, be healed, and ultimately be saved.

If Nicodemus shares something in common with the modern-day seeker on the fringes of the Church, is it too scandalous to think that, ironically, those seekers might see something that we in the heart of the Church don’t readily see? Even if they can’t articulate the mystery that they espy, might those seekers help us who are comfortably religious become more spiritual, too?

Do you remember what the random tourist from Colorado said after Evensong at Westminster Abbey? “I used to go to church more when I was young but the rules, the judging of people put me off. But the church here, with a service like this, brings people together.” This person could appreciate something in the transcendent worship of the Church that pointed past the critical and hypocritical judgment that is sometimes wielded by her members. Human judgment is meant to exclude and ostracize rather than to reconcile. But the beauty of holiness, perhaps found in a service of Evensong, was a lens through which a spiritual but not religious person could see the true heart of the Church. Maybe this seeker could see that, despite her flaws, the Church couldn’t do such extraordinary works apart from the presence of God. Despite her weaknesses, God was still with the Church.

Do we need reminding of this? Have we become so complacent with our place in the Church that we’ve forgotten what lies on the other side of judgment? Have we forgotten what incredible works we can do when we are called to live as if we really believe that God is with us rather than implicitly against us? Can seekers, whether religious or not, draw our attention to that special something that is the real meaning of life in Christ, which is nothing short of the freedom given through the forgiveness, love, and mercy of God?

This, I think, is the meaning of being born anew, being born from above, or being born again, however you say it. Nicodemus sees the hints of potential, but Jesus encourages him to grow into spiritual maturity to realize the fruits of his incipient vision. And like Nicodemus, we and all the seekers on the fringes of the Church, are called not just to glimpse the other side of judgment, but to live on that side. We are called to be born anew.

To be born anew is to live as if what’s on the other side of judgment is really true. It’s to live as if God wants to forgive and not condemn us. It’s to live with the light of Christ shining on all the areas of our lives we would rather hide. It’s to live like beauty matters because it points us to the mystery of God that we can never control, as we try to do with everything else. To be born anew is to go where the Holy Spirit will blow us, no matter how frightening it is when we let go of our navigational powers. To be born anew, repeatedly, is to remember that on the other side of judgment we will encounter God’s greatest gift of all.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday in Lent
March 5, 2023

[1] [1] “Evensong sees a surge even as British church attendance declines,” b Catherine Pepinster, in Religion News Service, August 30, 2017, (https://religionnews.com/2017/08/30/evensong-sees-a-surge-even-as-british-church-attendance-declines/)

[2] Ibid.

Visible and Invisible

One of my seminary professors said that to understand the sacraments, we must hold onto two things for dear life: with one hand, we must hold onto what is visible to us, and with the other, we must hold onto what is invisible.[1] If we let go of one, we lose the mystery of the sacraments. The bread on the altar is really bread but after it has been prayed over, it is also far more than just bread. The water in the font is water from the tap, but it is much, much more after it has been blessed. After all, in just a few minutes, we will profess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. The world in which we live consists of far more than is evident to our eyes.

This holding of the visible and invisible protects us from what may be the greatest temptation of all in life. Jesus’s three temptations in the wilderness can be distilled down to one foundational temptation: to hold only to what is most obvious and visible to us. Tempted in this way, we constantly assess how visible objects can serve our own needs and ours only. We exist with a transactional view of life that contains little notion of invisible potential or sacred value.

The loaf of bread is simply something that satisfies our hunger to alleviate the stomach pangs. The chronic pain is further proof that God has abandoned us. The so-called friend is someone who can help us make the necessary connections to secure the promotion for which we’ve been longing. The sacrament of the Altar is weaponized to establishing conformity to religious teaching. The increasing numbers in the parish register are no more than numbers with dollar signs attached to their foreheads.

In a world comprised only of the visible, what we see is what we get. And what we get usually benefits us alone. But the most dangerous part of a world without the invisible is that God exists for our own use. A God reduced to a visible world is no more than something we can manipulate, whether to enter heaven or to make our lives on this planet as pleasant as possible.

A world comprised only of visible things is, in short, a world ruled by the devil. It’s a world whose mystery is reduced to if-then mathematical statements. It’s transactional. If you do this, then you will achieve that. If you give me that, I’ll give you this. If you’re as talented as you say you are, then prove it to me in visible form. There’s no mystery here. There’s only a script, and there’s no option to deviate from it.

As I said, this is the world of the devil. The devil is no fool, but the devil also has no imagination. The devil focuses on what’s obvious and visible, the things that are superficially tantalizing, because the devil knows that this is where our weakness lies. In the desert when the devil meets Jesus, he can only fixate on the hunger pains that Jesus must be experiencing. The devil can’t see that this hunger leads to spiritual purification.

The devil sees holy Scripture as something to take literally or weaponize. Of course, if you’re reckless enough to throw yourself off a cliff, God would nevertheless send his angels to rescue you. God is just a dispenser of favors. Scripture is a battle ax for winning arguments. When you’re threatened, use a surface reading of Scripture to defend off your enemies. When you’re in a bind, call on God, and God will save you. When you’re uncomfortable, ask God to make you feel better. God is used for our own ease.

For the devil, who only sees what is visible, being worshipped is a way of gaining power. It can be reduced to a business sale. If you worship me, I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world, which of course only consists of the things you can see.

And Jesus’s responses to the wiles of the devil is to call on the invisible. Things are more than they seem. The world is made of things visible and invisible. Hunger and thirst are not occasions for immediate satisfaction in every instance. Times of danger and insecurity do not always demand rescue. God’s favor can’t be bought, traded, and sold.

The devil’s world, the world of the visible only, seems like the world we live in much of the time. Religion is to be used to give us secure, comfortable lives. We go to church when we need it and feel like it. We use the sacraments as rites of passage. Church doctrine is used so that we don’t have to struggle through ethical quandaries. Relationships are used to garner status or promotions. Our spouses are used only to comfort us when we’re in need. One job is used as a stepping stone for a better one. Prayer is used to magically fulfill our wish list.  

The devil temps us with the glamor of a visible world because he knows that it’s usually the only thing we see. The devil would have us believe that the way of the world is a competition. He would have us believe that life is merely survival of the fittest, so we need to use what’s visible to protect ourselves. The devil would have us believe that the most charismatic leader is the one we should follow. He would have us believe that we should take the advice of everyone who tells us what we want to hear. The devil suggests that we need clear answers to everything to have a steadfast faith.

And although it seems impossible, the devil takes temptation to the vilest level when he would have us believe that God himself only uses us. After all, the devil’s version of God is one who only operates in the visible world. Perhaps in our quest to use whatever and whomever we could for our own favor—including God—we might never have articulated our fear that perhaps God uses us. And maybe this is why we are always trying so hard to make ourselves visible to God, competing with others, overstuffing our egos, and becoming slaves to perfectionism and overwork. The greatest temptation of all is to believe that we are only being used by God, because in such a horrible, twisted world, we are always jockeying to be the one God uses.

If there is any story in Scripture that puts such a wicked notion to rest, it’s the story of Jesus’s temptations. And if we can discern the invisible in this story, we learn in this confounding episode of Jesus’s life that a God who only uses people and things would never have countenanced his Son’s temptations, because salvation could have been achieved far more expediently. And the world of the visible is a world of expediency. But God is a God of patient love, not of expediency.

We’re not mere automatons to be used for God’s purposes in the world. The mere presence of temptation in our lives is proof that God doesn’t try to protect us from harm at the expense of our freedom. God turns us loose in love, and then God meets us in the intricacies, complexities, misfortunes, and tragedies of a world distorted by sin.

The creative power of the living God defies if-then propositions or transactional exchanges. God lives and moves in the visible and invisible worlds we inhabit. God doesn’t use the Church to trick us into behaving. God doesn’t use his gifts of the sacraments to attach strings to his love. God doesn’t heal us so we will worship him. God doesn’t test us so that we will love him more. We never need to vie for God’s attention. It’s always present there in the invisible world we so often eschew.

No, the story of Scripture and the story of God’s interactions with humankind have shown that God has never withheld his love and gifts from us despite our tendency to live only in a visible world. No matter how many times we have used God as a candy machine, used the Church to serve our own lust for power, and no matter how much we have used his good creation to its detriment, God has continued to feed, protect, and love us.

So, beware of the false promises of those who would sell you transactional Christianity. Beware of those who would use God to manipulate your lives. Beware of the lies that equate misfortune with God’s absence. Beware of a world that is only visible.

Cling with all your might to the visible and invisible. Cling to the glory of God’s visible creation and to God’s invisible presence in the slums. Cling to a God who gives and takes away. Cling to a God who loves us and gives us freedom. Cling to a God who invites us to participate in his work in the world but who will never, ever use us. Cling to a God whose love is always ours in the world of the invisible. And then, you will see that beyond the visible demons in the world, there are plenty of angels.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
February 26, 2023

[1] Thanks to the Rev. Dr. James Farwell for this image.

To Love You Shall Return

This evening, I want to ask you a question. It may seem like a silly question, but for a moment, please bear with me. Ask yourself whether you can really answer this question truthfully. Think before you answer. Look deep within your heart and discern what’s there before you respond. And the question is this: do you believe that you are loved by God? Before you laugh at my question, ponder it in your hearts like Mary. And ask yourself, in all truthfulness, whether you believe that you are loved by God.

It’s a fitting question to ask on Ash Wednesday, if not the most obvious one. On this day of fasting and penitence, we’re prepared to acknowledge what we think is wrong with us. We appropriately recall our sinfulness. We aspire to amendment of life, to go deep within ourselves over forty days, and to seek reconciliation with God and neighbor. The prophet Joel’s words call us to repentance. The apostle Paul asks us to be reconciled to God, no matter the cost. The evangelist Matthew challenges us to live authentically, not hypocritically, and to ensure that our pious actions are about a sincere change of heart and not mere public affirmation of piety.

But ensconced between those readings in today’s Mass, is a little pearl of wisdom about God, found in Psalm 103. It asks us, if indirectly, another surprising question, the question that I just posed to you. Do you really believe that you are loved by God?

I can’t speak for you, but I have a hunch. And my hunch is that many people don’t truly believe they are loved by God. Of course, they would never tell you this. And yet, I think that even some of the most faithful churchgoers don’t imagine they are worthy of God’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. And this is why they’re always trying to prove something. They try to earn their way into heaven. They criticize others for being sinners. They entrench themselves in fighting the culture to defend God from it. And many of these same people are precisely the ones who roll their eyes when we speak of God’s love. It sounds wish-washy and flabby, they say. Give us a muscular Christianity, they cry. Let’s talk about God’s wrath. Let’s talk about God’s condemnation. Let’s talk about all those who are destined for hell.

Here’s another hunch of mine: it’s that most people don’t need to be reminded of their sinfulness. They need to be reminded that they are unconditionally loved by God. I would guess that many people are all too aware of their sinfulness. They instinctively know their own proclivities to curse others, hold grudges, refuse to forgive themselves, and stew in envy of others’ gifts. But it stops there. They can’t move on to see that recognition of sinfulness is only the first step towards spiritual maturity. The next, most difficult step is to believe that God will forgive us, indeed that God wants to forgive us. Do you believe this?

Forgiveness comes with a price, and for many, it’s a price too expensive to pay. The price is that we try to live into freedom, rather than clinging to our own judgment, anger, and resentment. The price is that we commit ourselves to amendment of life. But most of us want to stay in Egypt when God is trying to bring us into the Promised Land.

Psalm 103 offers us some of the most beloved words in Scripture. They are repeated countless times throughout its pages, as if the various authors of Scripture knew that these words would be difficult to digest. Most people choke on them or spit them out, without realizing it. God is full of compassion and mercy. God is long-suffering, and of great goodness. God is not perpetually angry with us. God doesn’t deal with us solely on the terms of our sinfulness. The difference between God’s ways and our ways is as vast as the distance between the heavens and the earth, and between the east and the west. And above all, God knows whereof we are made. God remembers that we are but dust.

And thank God that he does remember we are but dust. That’s the sober reminder we hear this evening as ashes are imposed on our foreheads. We are dust, and to dust we shall return. But could we take a cue from the psalms and say the same thing in another way? The psalms, after all, frequently make a statement, and then repeat the same statement in different words to emphasize a point. So, could we say the same thing about who we are but in a different way? Could we say it from God’s perspective? How about this? Remember that you are loved, and to Love you shall return.

Yes, that’s really what we need to hear. To say that we are loved brings us back to the beginning of creation, on that sixth day when God was still not satisfied after creating night and day, earth and sky, plants, and animals. God created humankind because God desired to be in relationship with us. God created us, stepped back, and smiled, and said, it is very good. There it is. We are loved, created in that gorgeous image of God.

Of course, it didn’t take long for humans to go astray, as we still do, but not always in the ways we think. To say we are dust is to admit that we are frail, sinful creatures. It’s to say that our hubris will come crashing down like the Tower of Babel. It’s to say that our programs and well-laid plans can always be changed on a dime by God. But to say we are dust is also to say that we are loved. We are shaped and molded in God’s beautiful image.

And to say that we shall return to dust is to acknowledge that we will all die one day. Could this be the most stubborn obstacle to accepting that we are loved by God? Are we willing to embrace the reality of our own impending death, which oddly enough opens into the clearest disclosure of God’s love for us? Yes, our bodies will be reduced to dust. But also because of the hope we have in Christ, one day, that dust will be raised again and transformed into glorified bodies that will never die. We shall return to Love himself, the One who formed us from dust and breathed his Spirit into us.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Remember that you are loved, and to Love you shall return. Why would we resist saying the latter? I have a hunch about that, too. I suspect that to disparage too much talk of God’s love is an excuse to avoid accepting it because of the cost it requires.

We gain the satisfaction of power when we try to control who God is, when, in fact, we make God in our own image. Yes, we anthropomorphize God in many ways, but in the most dangerous way of all, God takes on our human mindset. God is the one who’s always angry and ready to smite the offender. God is the one who delights in consigning some to hell, because apparently they are not lovable enough to return to Love one day. God is the one who needs us to be offended for his sake when we think someone doesn’t have their theology right. God is the one who needs us to protect him by labeling others as heretics or demonizing all those we don’t think have it right. We usually want to make God much smaller than he is.[1] The temptation to reduce God to human dust is the proclivity of all of us who really can’t believe that God loves us and that we are worthy of God’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

God is our judge. That’s true. But God is a merciful judge. God’s judgment is a gift that calls us to return to Love. Remember that you are loved, and to Love you shall return.

Today is not a day to become intoxicated with vengeance towards those we think deserve it. It’s not a day to bestow on God the jealousy, wrath, and anger that infect our own hearts. It’s not a day to be proud of our own orthodoxy. Today is the day to remember that God can take care of himself. God knows we are dust and that we shall return to dust one day. But this day of all days, God also desires that we recognize that, created from dust, we are loved, and although we shall return to dust one day, God will raise that dust up again. Because, in the end, we are more than dust. And if we can truly see ourselves through God’s eyes, one day we shall return to Love again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
February 22, 2023

[1] To quote the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey.

Seeing with the Eyes of Jesus

Greg sees everyone with the eyes of Christ. That’s what Greg’s mother told me. That was obvious to me. Greg was probably the happiest member of the church choir that I directed some years ago. I don’t think that Greg could see negative qualities in anyone or anything. Frankly, he put the rest of us to shame. The smallest things would bring him unspeakable joy. An adventurous modulation in an improvisation between verses of a hymn would move him to ecstasy. Although he was well into his twenties, each year around St. Nicholas’s Day, he would march down from the choir loft with the children of the parish to greet St. Nicholas upon his arrival. He was beaming and not the least bit self-conscious. Greg was at home with children and adults alike. It was true. He saw everyone with the eyes of Jesus, including himself.

I would often observe Greg and then look at others in the parish. I wondered how he could feel such indiscriminate love towards people, when others, whom we might label as more fortunate by the standards of our world, could be so bitter and mean. With Greg, you only had to be yourself. There was no reason to pretend because no matter how you acted or who you were, he saw you as Christ would see you. He looked upon you with love. He held no grudges. He wasn’t resentful. How could you be resentful or mean if you always saw others with the eyes of Jesus?

Try it. Can you picture the person you find most despicable? Can you gaze upon the image of the person who has broken your heart or wounded you? Can you hold before your eyes the face of the one towards whom you hold deep resentment? And can you see all those persons with the eyes of Jesus? It’s an interesting and challenging exercise. I tried it earlier this week. In a dreamy state, as I lay in bed in the early morning hours, I allowed the faces of those who have hurt and offended me to roll across my mental screen. I tried to see through them, through the tarnished façade, to the original goodness[1] within. I saw them through their best qualities, even if those qualities were difficult to summon at times. I imagined that, for a moment, my perception changed. If you try it, maybe for a moment your heart will soften.

But with time, that sense of peace probably fades away, too. There are some wounds too deep to be cured by our imaginations. There are some resentments that offer us such a delectable taste of power in clinging to them that it’s painful to let them go. There are plenty of people who make it easy for us to dislike or even hate them. Which is why we need a Savior, someone who can help us to see the world through his eyes.

The story of Jesus’s transfiguration is all about vision, but vision on two levels. It requires that we hold two things in tandem. On the one hand, we need to accept that something miraculous and mysterious, beyond our understanding, happened on that holy mountain. The actual transfiguration of Jesus is more than a mere metaphor. It is something that happened to Jesus, and above all, it affirms who Jesus is, the Son of God, fully human and yet fully divine, the Savior of the world, not simply another guru, teacher, or moral exemplar. Jesus is God’s beloved Son.

But there is a purpose to this theophany on the mountain. It’s more than a theological statement. Jesus was transfigured to teach us something. He was transfigured to change us, too, in some way, not in mere appearance but in form, in body and soul. Soon enough, the mountaintop experience of bliss would fade away, Moses and Elijah would disappear, God’s voice would no longer be heard, and the disciples would be left alone with nothing but Jesus, and no less than a Jesus who will be tortured on a cross leaving them bereft, confused, and fearful.

The bewildering episode on the mountain only makes sense if we recall what’s on the other side of the mountain. Down the mountainside there is a deep valley. It’s the valley of suffering and death that will soon be Jesus’s fate. It’s the valley of the disciples’ fear as they betray their friend as he faces the cross. It’s the valley of some of those disciples’ own deaths long after Jesus died, deaths that were the result of following him. It’s the valley of countless martyrs who submitted to a gory end rather than abandon their faith. It’s the valley of our own lives, the broken marriages, the estrangement from family members, the lost jobs, the cancer, the trauma from something in our past that imprisons us.

The transfiguration is about two things. It’s about who Jesus is and who Jesus is calling us to be. And who Jesus is calling us to be is a people who see everything as he would see it. And to do this, we need a Savior. We need Jesus to touch us, heal us, and help us see as he sees. We need Christ to give us his vision.

On the mountaintop, strangely and before death occurs, the resurrection is breaking through. It is illuminating all that will soon litter the road of suffering. It will mark every old and broken thing as something that will be made new again. It will designate every moment of sin as fodder for forgiveness. It will offer the key to unlock every prison door, whether physical or in our hearts.

To live in the aftermath of the transfiguration, requires the healing touch of the Transfigured One. When our newfound zeal is overflowing our cups, we need Jesus to touch us as he touched those disciples and wake us from our dreamy state. We can’t live in a perpetual state of bliss. To see with the eyes of Jesus means also seeing the treacherous road ahead as one paved with glory. We need God’s voice to interrupt our babbling, as God interrupted Peter’s attempts to domesticate the mountaintop vision. When we presume to know the state of another’s soul or the moral worth of another person, we need the Risen Christ to interrupt us with his words and help us to see everyone with his unclouded eyes.

The theological point of Jesus’s transfiguration is that the entire world, every person and thing, can be seen in the glow of the hope of glory. With the eyes of Jesus, we have X-ray vision to see what’s possible beyond marred and broken surfaces. But it’s only possible with the Savior’s touch. It’s only possible when we allow God’s voice to interrupt our cynicism and selfishness.

In transfigured glory, there is no room for cynics. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means seeing every drought as potential for rain. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means seeing every disappointment and failure as a reminder that God needs to startle our selfish boasting with his voice that calls us to our true vocation. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means seeing every single situation, no matter how dire, as capable of bearing fruit. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means envisioning the vilest sinner as worthy of God’s forgiveness. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means seeing our own possessions and money as belonging not to us but to God. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means seeing even death as a gateway into glory.

And above all, as a modern Church where martyrs are few and far between, seeing with the eyes of Jesus means that we must be capable of seeing through the malaise that often masquerades as Christianity. Seeing with the eyes of Jesus means that things are not really as they seem.

I don’t know about you, but I want Greg’s eyes. But more than that, I want to see everyone and everything with the eyes of Jesus. I want to look my deepest fears in the face and see through them to the peace on the other side. I want to look at swords and see them turned into ploughshares. I want to see the wolf lie down with the lamb. I want to see wounds bound up with the salve of Christ’s healing grace. I want to see these scarcely populated pews filled to the brim. I want to see society’s anxiety turned into joy. I want to see sickness as a way of knowing Christ more deeply. I want to see my own death as the entrance into a life far wonderful beyond my imagining.

To see a world capable of transfiguration, we need a Savior. We need more than a teacher or guru. We need the One who was transfigured so that we might be able to see a world radiating with the glory of God. We need the Transfigured One to touch us on the shoulder and help us see that everything that looks old and worn will one day be made new again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 19, 2023

[1] This is how the priest and theologian John Macquarrie rephrases original sin.

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