Away from the Page

While on retreat this past week, I made my way through Madeleine L’Engle’s lovely book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. L’Engle suggests that artists instinctively understand faith at a deep level because of the creative process of making art. True art isn’t perfunctory. It isn’t produced by formulas. It isn’t rendered solely for commissions or to gain approval. Real art is birthed when the artist responds to a creative gift from God.

Artists, we might say, are completely reliant on the grace of God. That’s what grace is: a gift from God, “unearned and undeserved,” as our prayer book catechism says.[1] Grace, like any true gift, can’t be controlled. Grace isn’t predictable. Grace is freely given, and hopefully, it’s freely received. Madeleine L’Engle believed that true artists, whether they purport to be Christian or not, whether they believe in God or not, and whether they know it or not, are responding to God’s grace. To create art, then, is an act of faith. The creative process requires faith that the work of art is worth creating, and it demands faith in a creative power greater than we are that allows us to create. For those of us who profess belief in God, we can clearly name the source of that power as God.

Now, journey with me for a minute to the organ console, where Matthew Glandorf sits for his penultimate Sunday here at Good Shepherd. You’ve already heard him improvise during this Mass, and there’s more to come. If creating art or music is an act of faith, then in Matt’s incredible gift for improvisation, we have a glimpse into what faith looks like on the ground. Improvisation, while it may or may not be explicitly Christian, helps us understand the relationship between law and grace. And this, I promise, has nothing to do with Matt taking a Lutheran church position in Germany.

Matt will be the first to tell you that while his knack for improvisation is a gift from God, to improvise well necessitates discipline. No one can improvise well without practicing scales, understanding harmony, and studying musical form. But no one can improvise well by attending only to scales, harmony, and form. And this is where grace comes in. This is also what Madeleine L’Engle would call the paradox of making art. True artists don’t wait for creative gifts to plop into their laps. True artists labor in the field of technique and daily practice so that they can eventually submit to God’s freeing gift of inspiration. This is how grace works. Grace happens in the moment where discipline, musical rules, and musical reasoning give way to inspiration.

Any novice improviser will tell you that venturing away from the written musical page is the most difficult aspect of improvising. Initially, it’s frightening to think of creating music that is not written out. It requires a leap of faith. It requires an ability to trust oneself in a vista that has opened out from beyond rules, technique, and form. It requires courage, risk, and an ability to let go of control. In theological terms, it’s so much like yielding to God’s grace.

And this brings us to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In chapter six, where we find ourselves today, Paul makes an astonishing claim. All who have been baptized have been transferred from one jurisdiction to another. The baptized are moved from the realm of sin and death to the realm of grace and freedom because they now live in Christ. And this is where faith comes in. To have faith means to accept that at some point in the game, laws and rules must open into something unpredictable and uncontrollable, which is the surprising freedom of God’s grace.

For Paul, the Jewish law is certainly not bad, and it’s most definitely not to be equated with sin, as much as some have mistakenly made this claim. The law provides a framework for right relationship with God. It contains an essential discipline that allows for the reception of God’s grace. But ultimately, any religious law, whether Jewish or Christian, must allow for God’s gift of grace to break in and take over. If we are to truly yield ourselves to God, we need the courage to be part of a musical improvisation. We must move from a land of certainty to a land of uncertainty. We must travel from a place of security to a dangerous land. We must leave all our worldly idols behind and put our whole trust in God, the only One who can give us true freedom.

In Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle quotes the late Anglican theologian H.A. Williams who said that “the opposite of sin can only be faith, and never virtue.”[2] Why? Because faith means relinquishing control to receive God’s gift of grace. Sin doesn’t know how to let go; it only knows how to enslave. Sin knows nothing of trust. It only breeds doubt and fear. At the end of the day, faith means having enough trust in God to give ourselves completely to him, with nothing held back. And as L’Engle would offer, all true artists understand something of this. And like such artists, we must all learn to improvise and allow God to help us paint outside the lines. We must learn to make music away from the written page.

But Paul isn’t naïve either. On the one hand, he says that all the baptized have already been transferred into the realm of God’s grace. But we, like Paul, also find ourselves struggling with sin. The safety of doctrine and ethical rules can easily become an idol. We find ourselves wanting to play it safe to ensure our salvation. And at some point, we are tempted to believe that just because we practice our scales every day, we are entitled to a burst of inspiration. We try to earn what can only be a gift from God.

Here we see sin at its wiliest. It’s sin that tells us we can’t trust the grace of God. It’s sin that empowers the religious voices that promise to give you God’s truth in a neat little package. It’s sin that perpetuates legalism in the Church. It’s sin that forces us to stay away from God’s grace because we aren’t worthy enough to receive it. It’s sin that urges us to seek the immediate satisfaction of knowing exactly what God wants us to do at any given moment. It’s sin that scares us into thinking that no matter how much we love God, we can’t take the bold step of yielding our complete selves over to him. It’s sin that won’t allow us to let go because sin won’t let go of us.

This is why we still cling to our reputations, to our fear of God’s wrath, to our money, and to our tidy theology. It's sin that exhorts us never to give up control. It’s sin that still enslaves us and forces us to stick to music on the page, in terror of making any mistakes. All this when God wants us to improvise with him.

But the worst trick that sin plays with our minds is when it would have us believe that we need to earn God’s love and favor. Play it safe, color between the lines, and seek clear answers, sin says, because only then will you be privy to God’s love.

But though we live with one foot being yanked back into the realm of sin and fear, and while we try with all our might to stand firmly in the realm where there is true freedom and imagination, if we can trust God enough, just maybe we can stand with both feet in the land of freedom and grace. Maybe we can learn to improvise.

I, for one, am grateful for Matt and all artists who can help us understand something of what it means to yield to God’s grace, to improvise through life. Talk to any artist or musician, and they will tell you about a moment when they are “in the zone,” or perhaps even outside their bodies. They are so completely caught up in the creative act of making art or music, that they are utterly free.

Can you imagine, then, a spiritual life like that? Can you imagine trusting God so completely and utterly that you would give up your worst fears and worries just to make music with God? Can you imagine yielding your whole body, everything you have, and your entire soul to the One who created you in love? Such yielding isn’t only for artists and musicians. It isn’t only for saints. It’s for you and me. For to yield to God in such a way is to have faith. And faith is the opposite of sin. Faith is what it means to be absolutely free because we are living, breathing, and moving in a new kingdom. And in this kingdom, sin has no authority and no power. This kingdom can’t be bought or earned. All it takes to get there is a leap of faith.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
July 2, 2023

[1] p. 858.

[2] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1980), 148.

What Fear Can Never Kill

If you turn on your television or open a news app, I’d bet some good money that you’ll probably find your spirits sinking. I was reminded of this recently when I was visiting my parents and sitting in front of their television. Since I haven’t had cable at home in over a decade, it’s rare that I’m sitting in front of live television news.

But last week, I became painfully aware that if you want 24-7 justification to destroy your faith in humankind, just watch the news. It’s one dramatically bad story after another, and TV anchors do their part to play this up. If it’s not one more shooting making the headlines, it’s yet one more medical scare or a political system in shambles.

With perpetual news coverage, every story, no matter how big or small, is elevated to crisis level, with a basso continuo of throbbing anxiety. And the recipients of such news coverage are in a constant position of high alert. In fact, just Google “high alert,” and see how many recent news stories pop up. You’ll be convinced that the world is spiraling out of control.

While pondering the fearful, anxiety-ridden nature of modern news, I also stumbled across an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times authored by an experimental psychologist. The title was “Your Brain Has Tricked You into Thinking Everything Is Worse.”[1] The author of this piece asserts that at least since 1949, there’s been a general tendency to assume that humankind is morally worse than it was in the past. But as the article claims, this simply isn’t true. The assumption that people in the past were more altruistic or more morally upright is the result of two juxtaposed psychological phenomena: biased exposure and biased memory. Biased exposure means that we tend to pay the most attention to negative news. And biased memory means that positive memories tend to have more power in our memory than negative memories, even if those negative memories seemed awful at the time. Combine the two and there’s a mistaken view that the past was an unvarnished golden age, and the present is infinitely worse.

This unfortunate juxtaposition of psychological phenomena has infiltrated our perception of Christianity, too. If you believe the new headlines or what comes at you from some pulpits or what many churches are saying, Christian discipleship was unquestionably stronger and less complicated in the past. Fifty years ago, church attendance was better. A hundred years ago, our culture was generally more supportive of the Church. In the past, being a Christian was not as countercultural as it is today, and it was more acceptable to be a Christian. There weren’t so many secular forces working against us. Today’s nonstop news headline about the Church is that the plane is getting closer to the ground, and the pearl of great price is circling the drain.

For this very reason, it’s imperative that we sit patiently, if uncomfortably, with Jesus’s most challenging words in the gospels. At the top of that list are several of Jesus’s sayings that we’ve just heard from St. Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus hasn’t come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. The cost of discipleship is division and possibly even estrangement within families. There’s no following Jesus without the cross.

But these difficult words seem to have faded into biased memory. Most Christians tend to remember the positive memories of Jesus’s life. We love to recall the healing stories of Jesus. We love the stories about Jesus’s love and acceptance. We relish the moments when Jesus smacks down his opponents. We rest easily with crowds being fed or Jesus walking on water or the victory of an empty tomb. And the difficulties of Jesus’s passion and crucifixion can get lumped in with the resurrection in terms of our biased memories.

And so, when we stumble across Jesus’s more perplexing words, it’s difficult to know what to do. Could he possibly have meant what he said about bringing a sword instead of peace or in creating family divisions? Or are these words just the fodder of an angry evangelist? But consider for a moment the possibility that Jesus really did say what is recorded in the Gospels. Such troubling words will come back to haunt us as long as we come to Mass and our ears are open to God’s word. We can’t run from Jesus’s hard teachings.

The biased memory of the Church’s past is of a golden age with a Jesus of positive memories and glorious salvation on offer. And the biased exposure of the present day is this: a Church in perpetual decline that’s constantly at odds with the surrounding culture. Combine biased memory and biased exposure and you will wonder if there’s ever been a more difficult time than the present day to be a Christian.

But if the myth of a lost golden age of the Church is really just the confluence of two psychological phenomena, the truth is much more complex. It has always been difficult to be a Christian, and the great sin of the Church is that she has forgotten how difficult it’s supposed to be. She has failed to preach it. She has failed to live it.

It should therefore be no great surprise that amid today’s Gospel passage there’s a big, stinking elephant in the room. And this elephant has emblazoned on its side the word “fear.” Yes, Jesus names this elephant multiple times in just sixteen verses of Scripture. Have no fear of them. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. Here’s the sober truth of discipleship that’s masked when biased memory and biased exposure combine to have us imagine a nonexistent golden age of following Jesus. The sober truth is that fear has been around ever since Jesus’s disciples first began to follow him.

And Jesus doesn’t dance around this fear. He doesn’t sugarcoat the cost of discipleship. He doesn’t promise a life without struggle or illness or even death. Instead, he offers a Gospel far more powerful than fear but which rarely makes the news headlines.

In his lifetime, Jesus said much about fear. Fear is the enemy of love. Fear is living in darkness. Fear is the 24-7 news headline that won’t shut up and will scream louder and louder until you believe its lies. Do you hear the voices? Things are worse now than they ever have been. Everyone is actively working against the Church. You don’t have enough time for God and your job. People are after your money and your possessions, so cling to them as tightly as you can. If you speak up in the face of injustice, you will lose your friends. If you’re honest about who you are, your family will forsake you and God will reject you.

And while these incessant voices scream about fear, the soundless captions below on the TV screen scroll by with more news of fear. If you choose to worship God, do it quietly, or others will think you are foolish. Don’t be too vocal about your faith lest some think you are like those reactionary Christians. Why don’t you give up on a Church that has hurt too many people in the past? In fact, how can you even trust the Church at all?

By this point, it should be clear, shouldn’t it? Fear has always been with Christians. It raged in the mouths of lions devouring early Christian martyrs. It stoked the flames of the Inquisition. It unleashed dogs on those marching for civil rights. And it’s still doing what it’s always done: it’s trying to make us think that things are so much worse than they’ve ever been. Fear has always done what it could to silence the Gospel’s voice by wielding its weapon of biased exposure.

But the reason we shouldn’t ignore Jesus’s difficult words is because the best news of all is hidden within them. Amid the hyped-up anxiety of divided families, lost friends, and the specter of death, is the pearl of Gospel wisdom, which is not circling the drain after all. The past was never better than the present. Fear always haunted the followers of Jesus. And above all, the future is infinitely capable of beauty, promise, and goodness. There’s always hope, and God is always with us. And no matter what you’ve done, God will never leave you.

Although around us, there are many things to fear, Jesus tells us to fear only one thing: fear God. Fear God not with anxiety over hell but with reverence and gratitude because of God’s love for you and the love it asks from you in return. Fear God because the truth is this: even in the present moment, there’s never been a better time to find your life. And if we’re willing to lose our lives for Jesus’s sake, we’ll find the life that fear can never touch.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 25, 2023

[1] By Adam Mastroianni, June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/psychology-brain-biased-memory.html

Tell Me What You Eat

If you call yourself a gastronome, you might be familiar with Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a nineteenth century French lawyer, politician, and gastronome himself. In his 1826 book that roughly translates into English as The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin suggested that food was an art, something much more than a practical matter. What we eat, in some sense, defines who we are.

It’s no surprise that the slow food movement across the world has picked up on Brillat-Savarin’s philosophy. The slow food movement has three basic tenets: eat good food, eat clean food, eat fair food.[1] In other words, good food will be tasteful and enjoyable. Clean food is food that doesn’t come from processes of production that are detrimental to the environment. And fair food is food that can be available to all people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, and whose producers receive fair wages.

Slow food, by its very nature, isn’t fast food. According to slow food principles, good, clean, and fair food can’t be produced quickly. Fast food treats food as less than an art. It prefers quantity over quality. It’s utilitarian and practical. Fast food is concerned only about squeezing a meal in during the shortest amount of time and for the least amount of money. It’s not primarily concerned with being good, clean, or fair.

Slow food, on the other hand, is the art of long meals in fellowship with others. One can’t partake of slow food without being somehow connected to creation. Eating slow food is living close to the ground. Eating slow food involves a willingness to sacrifice speed and financial savings to ensure that those producing the food are treated fairly and that the environment is respected.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” said Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. If you ask me, that sounds rather theological. It sounds like St. Augustine of Hippo, who famously said in a sermon on the Eucharist: “If you, therefore, are Christ’s body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are saying “Amen” to what you are: your response is a personal signature, affirming your faith.”[2] Behold, who you are. Become what you receive. Indeed. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

When looking at Scripture, it becomes clear that God doesn’t readily offer fast food. Have you ever wondered why when God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he didn’t bring them out the most direct way? He brought them out the long way. We hear today in Deuteronomy that the Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness, being tested and humbled. Between grumblings and disobedience, though, God fed them. There was always enough, if just enough.

And the food of which Jesus speaks in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel is not food on demand. It’s not fast food. It’s slow food. Consuming his flesh should never stop. Consuming his blood should never stop. But those who hear Jesus’s words, from his disciples to those who oppose him, don’t yet understand. Their eyes don’t yet see. Their ears don’t yet hear. Their hearts are still somewhat hardened. They want fast food: miracles, signs, and immediate satisfaction.

But only slow food is on offer. When Jesus feeds the five thousand from five barley loaves and two fish earlier in John’s Gospel, it’s not fast-food service. When Jesus later says that he is the bread of life, and that eating his flesh and drinking his blood is the means of finding eternal life, the disciples and crowd still don’t get it. Where’s the fast food, they seem to say? This is what the Israelites said in the wilderness. Hunger is immediately associated with God’s abandonment. They have no concept of what slow food is because it’s about more than just the food. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

And so, it begs the question to us: what are we eating? What we’re eating says everything about who we are. On this Feast of Corpus Christi, we celebrate who we are by virtue of what we eat. We celebrate that in the Church, we are part of a slow food movement, because what we eat and how we eat it says everything about who we are and how we are more truly becoming who we are called to be.

“The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves,” Brillat-Savarin also said. We can likewise say that the destiny of the Church depends on how she nourishes herself. If the Church feeds on the wrong things, she will wither. If she hungers after quick fixes and gimmicks, she will fail to thrive. If she feeds on power, she will oppress. If she feeds on status, she can’t be Christ-like. If she tries to control or weaponize the gift of the Eucharist, she will cause others to starve. If she’s only concerned about the meal, she will never serve the poor. If she only wants her heavenly food quickly, she will never be patient with God’s time. If she stops eating, she will have no strength to thrive and spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. If her members refuse the gift offered to them, they will fail to find their lives tied up with others, and the Church will wither and die. Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

But we know what we eat, and we know who we are by virtue of the heavenly food promised to us by Christ. While beyond the doors of this church, we may consume power, status, money, and quick fixes, here, in this place, we slow down. Here we learn the art of eating well. Here we feast together, not alone. Here the TVs are turned off and the phones are put away while we feast together. Here all people share a meal, because those baptized into Christ have put off all other identity markers in order to be clothed in the goodness of Christ.

Here the supreme gift of heavenly food is available to all those baptized into Christ so that they can truly become what they eat. Here the food will sustain us not for a few hours but for eternal life. Here the food that we eat is truly the Body and Blood of Christ. And what we eat is who we are.

We have no choice but to be the Body of Christ in the world. We have no choice but to be a part of a broken world being put back together again. We have no choice but to feed those who have no food, to love those who have no one to love them, to bind the wounds of those who have been ripped apart by cruelty and injustice. We have no choice but to be the lifeblood of peace, love, and mercy that will course through the clogged and poisoned veins of a fast-food culture that’s slowly dying. We are a slow food movement whose mission is nothing less than the life of the world.

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. If others look at us, they should be able to trace us back to our roots. They should be able to find this place where we feast together and the food of which we partake. Because we are what we eat. And our destiny depends on how we nourish ourselves. And if we truly become what we eat, maybe others will find themselves longing for that heavenly food which never ends and by which we will live forever.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of Corpus Christi (transferred)
June 11, 2023

[1] https://www.slowfood.com/about-us/our-philosophy/

[2] https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/augustine_sermon_272_eucharist.htm

The Music that Always Plays On

Imagine that we’re standing before an abstract painting. If we didn’t already have some knowledge about the painting, it would look like a swirl of colors, with three amorphous shapes emerging from the texture of the canvas. But because we’ve been educated about this painting, we already know that the three splotches are supposed to be musicians. Without this knowledge, we would only see three blobs, but now we see that they do resemble musicians.

And we also see that what appeared to be an extra limb on one of the musicians is actually a cello. Oh, and there’s a violin on another oval-shaped blob, and that funny looking shape in the far left is a viola attached to the third blob. And the way the three amorphous shapes are oriented on the canvas makes it clear that a string trio is being performed. We can almost hear the music being played. It all makes sense because we have some knowledge of this painting.

Trying to pull the doctrine of the Trinity out of Scripture feels a bit like making sense of an abstract painting while already knowing something about it. Of course, the doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t properly formulated and expressed in its fullest form when the Gospels or epistles were authored. But living on this side of the Nicene Creed a few hundred years after the last Gospel was written, we can look back on the New Testament corpus, and even on the Old Testament, and say, yes, of course it makes sense now. Yes, we can see the presence of God the Father. We can see the work of God the Son. We can see the movement of the Holy Spirit. Yes, we know that while they are three distinct Persons, they are one God, an undivided Unity, sharing one substance. We know that because the Church has told us so. And knowing what we now know, it’s clear that when we read Scripture, we can discern glimpses of the Persons of the Trinity at work. And then words fail us, and if we try to say too much, we’re teetering on heresy. We’re once again looking at an abstract painting, three blobs on the canvas, and the story that is told is much more complex, creative, and dynamic than we can fathom.

This seems to be where the eleven disciples are at the very end of St. Matthew’s Gospel. They’re on a mountain, in a liminal space, having heard from the women at the tomb that Jesus was now alive, but some are also stewing in their doubts. In short, they’re confused, and can you blame them? And so, they settle on the only proper response to mystery; they worship. I suspect that the disciples are rather uncertain about their future and that they doubt whether they even have a future. And most certainly, they have no concept of a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are still trying to figure out who Jesus is.

And then in their place of transcendence, removed from the valley below, balancing their giddiness and their uncertainty, the risen Christ comes to them. The disciples are looking at an abstract painting and trying to figure out what’s next. And blessedly, the risen Christ appears to them and begins to interpret.

He doesn’t explain the doctrine of the Trinity, but he tells them something very important. He doesn’t retell Scripture to point out the presence of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t formulate a creed for them. He simply gives them a clear command that ends up saying everything we need to know about the doctrine of the Trinity.

Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Forget that this Trinitarian formula was placed in Scripture after decades of reflection on the nature of God and after the earthly ministry of Jesus and the visible gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Rather, take it for what it is: a specific command that puts flesh on what it means to worship one God in three Persons, sharing one substance.

As the disciples stare at the abstract painting and then hear Jesus’s words, they begin to understand what they need to do. Without expressing it in tidy doctrine or creeds, the disciples can start to comprehend what’s happening in the painting. They can see the musicians. And most importantly, they can hear the music.

But they’re still on the mountain. No matter how much knowledge and insight they have, they’re only looking at the painting with a clearer perspective. It reminds me of an experience I had some years ago when I had gone home from college to a family reunion. I was studying music at the time, preparing to be a church musician. And one of my uncles asked me what I was studying in college. I explained that I was studying music. He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand what this might look like or how studying organ could have any concrete application in the world, and then he said to me, “But what are you going to do with it?”

How could I explain that my study wasn’t limited to a practice room? How could I explain that my vocation at the time was to try to talk about God through the language of music? How could I begin to articulate the power of music to draw others to God in worship? On the other hand, did I really know what my study would look like on the ground?

And so, too, with the disciples on that mountaintop. They’re looking at the abstract painting that Jesus is interpreting for them. They’re lost in wonder, love, and praise, despite their doubts. But the real question that Jesus poses to them is this: what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with this knowledge you now have? What are you going to do with the mission I’ve just given you?

It’s the same with us. Here we are on Trinity Sunday, with our doubts and confusion about life, worshipping the Unity of a God we know as Triune. We’re part of a worldwide Church that’s fumbling to articulate her mission, even though that mission has been clearly stated by Christ himself. We have the advantage of creeds, Church councils, and Church teaching to help us make sense of the abstract painting before us. We are, in that sense, much better off than the eleven disciples so many years ago. But steeped in all this knowledge and perspective, what are we going to do with it?

Indeed, that’s the million-dollar question. Because at its heart, what we’re going to do is what the doctrine of the Trinity means for us. It means that what we know and experience on the mountain, here in our worship and always in our prayer, spills over into the rest of our life. We’re called to move from the dizziness of the mountain height into the valleys below, where many know nothing of the glory we have experienced. And they need to know it.

But there’s something more. As we let Jesus interpret the abstract painting for us, we hear his reassuring words that we have a future. The Church has a future. For too long, Christians have been worshipping a God whom they envision as no more than a clock winder, a static, aloof entity who sets things in motion and then steps back for a nap. And if we believe ourselves to be made in the image of such a God, then we have become just as static in our inaction and just as vulnerable to randomness. We’re stuck on the mountain while millions are starving below.

But through the Church’s tradition, we’ve also been told that there’s more to this painting. Through God’s grace, we can begin to see the blobs form into persons. We see that the persons are musicians holding instruments. And we see that they’re playing together. And then we hear the music, and the most astonishing thing happens. It suddenly dawns on us that we are in that musical trio, too. We’ve been invited into the piece that has been playing eternally among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’ve been invited to listen with heart and soul and mind and to know with utter conviction that we’re also being asked to do something with the musical piece that is sounding in our ears.

So, we do something. We pick up our bows, and we play. Before long, we’ve moved down the mountain, and soon, millions down in the valley are picking up their bows, too. They’re playing. And with time, this glorious, heavenly music has reached to the ends of the earth. And it plays on and on, forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Trinity Sunday
June 4, 2023

The Right Place at the Right Time

All three groups appear to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first group is just two men named Eldad and Medad, and they’re not where they’re supposed to be. They’re still hanging out in the camp, rather than outside the camp where the seventy elders have gone according to Moses’ instructions.

Eldad and Medad are part of that crowd who began grumbling as soon as they’d they left Egypt by God’s hand. Back in Egypt, the dishes were so much more delicious. Oh, the garlic and the cucumbers. You’ve heard it before. The way the liturgy was before was so much better. At least back in Egypt there were succulent dishes to eat. Now, there’s only oatmeal. Well, manna, actually. There is enough to eat—just enough—but the people are too stuck in their frustrations. They’ve forgotten how bad life in Egypt really was, with the slavery and unceasing production of bricks. As we all are so wont to do, they’ve forgotten how to be grateful.

Even Moses, their leader, is fed up. God tells Moses he will provide for the large crowd of people, but Moses is skeptical. Moses is sick and tired of this irascible, recalcitrant group who are moaning and questioning why they ever left Egypt. And Moses is blunt with God. How in the world will you feed six hundred thousand people? Moses has caught the scarcity bug from the people he’s leading.

And that’s when God goes into visible action. All right, you asked for it, God seems to say. God knows that these people need the possibility of abundance drilled into their heads. God knows that Moses can’t bear the burden of leading this complaining people all by himself. And so, some of Moses’s spirit is shared with those in the group.

The seventy elders receive some of this spirit, and then they prophesy. But they only prophesy once, which seems odd to us, who always want more. It still seems like God is limiting what he’s giving, just like the manna in the wilderness was just enough for that moment in time. No more, no less. Nothing is to be wasted.

But back in the camp, Eldad and Medad, who aren’t where they’re supposed to be, begin to prophesy. Now the people turn from complaining about their situation to jealous controlling. Stop Eldad and Medad from prophesying, Moses! They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shush, Moses says. There’s no need for jealousy. The spirit is meant to be shared. Medad and Eldad are in the right place at the right time. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!

Now, the second group of people is a bit larger. This group also appears to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’ve just watched Jesus ascend into heaven. They’ve just been told by two men in white to stop looking up into heaven and, essentially, to get to work. Look down and around and do something, the men suggest. Jesus’s departure is your summons to get to work.

But instead of getting to work, they return to Jerusalem, to that same familiar upper room where they always go to be safe. When they’re scared, they hunker down and lock the doors. They’re not where they’re supposed to be, which is out in the streets sharing the good news.

Like God’s people in the wilderness, these early disciples of Jesus can’t see that the present has enough for them to survive and thrive. They long for the days when they followed Jesus and watched him heal, teach, and preach. Now, Jesus is gone. They wonder if he was a fraud. They wonder if they have a future. And despite two men in white telling them to get to work, they’re convinced that they don’t have what it takes to work—whether stamina, purpose, vision, or resources.

They have no self-confidence until the Holy Spirit bursts into their cloistered gathering and falls on each of them. They begin to do wild things and speak in unfamiliar languages. We don’t know how long they spoke in those languages, but at some point, the linguistic ecstasy stopped. It was just enough for that time and place. The possibility of having enough to thrive and survive doesn’t become obvious until the Spirit is shared with everyone.

The disciples’ gift of the Spirit makes no sense and is of no earthly good until those out in the streets hear them speaking in tongues and understand what they’re saying. And then the mission begins. It becomes clear that the disciples, just like Eldad and Medad, were in the right place at the right time. There’s no question that they do have enough to do what Christ has called them to do. There’s exactly enough, if what’s given is shared by all.

And the third group is right here in this church. It’s you and me. It might seem as if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, it’s Memorial Day weekend. We should be at the beach celebrating or having brunch with friends rather than gathering in this modern-day upper room. If we’re troubled by what we see on six of the seven days of the week when we’re not here, perhaps where we should be is out there, doing something about what troubles us, trying to make a difference.

Maybe you’re sympathizing with the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. Maybe like the disciples gathered in the upper room in the aftermath of Jesus’s death, you’re feeling aimless about the future. Are you wondering whether we’ve been given enough to do what we’re called to do? The mission seems daunting, but the resources are few. And yet, do you really want to go back to Egypt? Was life really better then, even if more people were around and there was more money? And is it entirely possible that right now, we’re not in the wrong place at the wrong time but exactly where we’re supposed to be?

If that’s the case, then maybe the answer lies in today’s feast. On Pentecost, we celebrate not only that God calls us to mission and that the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts. We rejoice that through the Holy Spirit’s power, we do have enough.

The limits that God seems to impose on his gifts aren’t really limits at all but invitations into recognizing just how God’s abundance works. When God took some of the spirit that was on Moses and put it on the seventy elders, they only prophesied once. Then Eldad and Medad prophesied in the wrong place. Do you get it now? The seventy elders couldn’t do it alone. Moses couldn’t do it alone. The Spirit doesn’t operate with boundaries. The gift of prophecy was shared both inside and outside the camp. God had provided just enough for their circumstances.

And, too, with the disciples in that upper room. They were given the utterance of tongues amid their doubts about their future, but nothing could happen until those outside the upper room could hear them. There were enough people to spread the Gospel. Thousands were brought to Christ. And person by person, the good news spread to the ends of the earth.

And here we are, probably wishing that there were more among us. We need more hands and more money, and that’s true. But could it be that God has given us exactly what we need for this time and this place? Could it be that the helping hands are here among us and perhaps underutilized? Could it be that spiritual gifts are here and yet undiscerned or used? Could it be that the hands and gifts we need are still outside the camp but will soon be sent here? Could it be that the money is here but not tapped into yet? And even more astounding than all that, could it be that in each stage of our journey ahead, when we find ourselves doubting the future, God will pour the Spirit among us anew? Could it be that God comes among us to show us that we have just what we need right now? Can we trust that at every future stage in the journey, God will continue to provide as he has always done?

I’m like you, I want to reach the Promised Land, where the milk and the honey flow freely and the water no longer flows in through the damaged stained-glass windows when it rains. I want to be preaching to a full church, teaching a full Sunday School, and seeing our work touch people all over the world. It can happen. Anything is possible with God. I don’t yet know how it will happen, but I believe it will.

But what I do know now is this: we are in the right place at the right time. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. So am I. God has brought us here not just to be in the pews to worship, but to move from that worship into service in the ministry God is building here. God wants all of us here. Each of us is indispensable.

And I also know that because of God’s promise to us in Christ, we can trust that there is enough, even right now when our mouths water for garlic and cucumbers. There’s enough here in you and me. Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets. Yes, indeed. And that’s every single one of us, because we’re in the right place at the right time.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Pentecost
May 28, 2023

A Breath and a Prayer

Over the last week, on this campus, the sound of singing filled the air during a multi-day retreat called “Praying Twice,” hosted by our retreat house. The intention of the retreat was to provide instruction in chanting the liturgy, as well as to cultivate a practice of chanting in one’s own prayer life. Participants sang some of the Church’s most ancient melodies and devoted special attention to shaping music that was originally intended for the Latin language, trying to make it sound a bit suaver in English.

My friend Ruth Cunningham, formerly of the famed women’s vocal ensemble Anonymous 4, was one of the retreat presenters, and as she led retreatants in chanting, she invited them to think about how to use their breath. In plainchant, many of the musical lines are long and spun out and require volumes of air to support them. So, Ruth said, take a breath, but treat it as a going-on breath, using a visual image from her Anonymous 4 days.

A going-on breath pauses for a quick intake of air, but it doesn’t leave the building for a shopping expedition or go outside for a chat with friends. A going-on breath serves as a practical necessity, as well as a musical pause, but it’s a pause with intention. It’s a pause that intuitively understands that there’s still music to come. The going-on breath must be oriented towards the music that lies ahead, to give it direction and focus. A going-on breath is not the end of a musical line, because there’s still a future ahead of it.

With this helpful image of a going-on breath, the singing of the retreatants changed. Musical lines had more direction and were less stagnant. The music itself gained more energy, shape, and purpose. The chant became vibrant, alive, and energized.

Maybe the Church needs that image of a going-on breath right now. Sometimes, it just feels like she’s stuck with no hope or definable purpose. We live in a peculiar time. I’m not certain that it’s scarier or more fraught with potential doom than other eras in human history, but the Church often fumbles to respond to a rapidly changing world. One thing is certain: with technological advances, the pace of life is speeding up exponentially. It seems that the Church is standing still, and the world is speeding by. Often, it appears as if more and more people increasingly see religion and faith as vestigial remnants of a tired past.

Now, add a pandemic to the mix, and things get very confusing. It’s as if for nearly three years we have paused to catch our breath because we’ve had to. We haven’t been able to do certain things for a while. We’ve been forced to slow down. But now things are accelerating again, although in many places, it doesn’t feel like the Church is. The Church is wondering where her people have gone. She is confused about how to be a viable source of meaning in a chaotic age. The Church is still pausing for a breath, but the future seems uncertain. At the end of a musical line, some have chosen to take their lunch break and have never come back.

Without the appropriate context, it’s difficult to see that in John chapter 17, Jesus is offering direction for an incipient Church that is pausing to catch her breath. Jesus himself, on the eve of his passion and death, is pausing to catch his breath, but it’s not an ordinary breath or one of exhaustion or one lacking purpose. It’s a going-on breath.

Jesus’s prayer to his Father is meant to be heard by his disciples and us. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is going on to his passion, death, and resurrection, and then ultimately to the right hand of his Father in heaven. This is what we celebrated on Ascension Day this past Thursday. Jesus has completed his earthly ministry, but the story is not yet finished. Jesus’s breath of a prayer to his Father on the eve of his death is radiating with hope. It’s the defining moment for a Church that will soon be formed and empowered to move forward. The disciples will be left forlorn, depressed, and aimless in the wake of their Lord’s death. They will surely doubt if a future lies ahead of them. But Jesus has anticipated this confusion. Before the worst occurs, he prepares them. Take a going-on breath, Jesus seems to say. There is a future ahead of you.

And if we recall the Scriptures, we know where this going-on breath is headed. This breath gives shape, purpose, direction, intention, and stamina for a group of disciples that are about to be set on fire. When in a few days the Holy Spirit alights on them, their future will be revealed, and they will be thrust forward in mission to the ends of the earth.

With a little help from Jesus’s prayer to his Father, can you visualize the Church’s future? In the brief span of time in which we take a going-on breath, can you dream about what lies ahead? Eternal life waits for us to receive it, not only ahead in the future but even in glimpses here and now. The Church will do even greater works than Jesus did. The Church can share in the remarkable unity of Father and Son. All that seems so impossible to us is possible. Jesus’s prayer to his Father is a prayer of confidence in what we as his Body can do.

Jesus’s prayer was a going-on breath, but we, in our own time, can easily forget that. And in this peculiar time, we are suspended in midair, trying to fathom our purpose, our intention, and our future. Do we even have a future, some say? Isn’t our future doomed, and aren’t we just here to manage decline? That’s what some are saying. How can our paltry numbers compete with numbers that actively work against us? How can hope compete with despair? How can justice compete with injustice? How can prayerful response compete with malaise? How can a mindset of abundance compete with one of scarcity? How can the voice of Jesus compete with the accusing voices of our culture, which tell us that our vision is an antiquated figment of our imagination?

The Church has paused to catch her breath. We are waiting to exhale and move on, but we are stuck. At the very least we are beset by doubts. We feel wholly inadequate for the task at hand. Until we remember where to focus our gaze. In the Acts of the Apostles, we heard two men in white say to the disciples, “why do you stand looking into heaven?” And, accordingly, we look down after Jesus goes into heaven, ready for action, but we see inaction. We look down ready for peace to reign, but we see fearful people, with ploughshares turned into swords. We look down to find unity amid our differences, but we see walls being built. So, can’t we just gaze up into heaven after all? It’s better up there.

Our gaze lingers on the sky above us. Can we be blamed for that? Perhaps in his prayer to the Father, Jesus has given us the counter image to the Ascension Day call to look down. Sometimes, we need to look up as well to be reminded that there is a future ahead. So, beloved in Christ, let’s try it. Lift your eyes to heaven for a time. Catch your breath, but don’t stop breathing. Lift your eyes, inhale, and find the breath you need to survive and thrive. This breath is not a stagnant pause. It’s not your last breath. It’s a going-on breath.

Jesus has told us this. When we lift our eyes to heaven, we remember that our future isn’t controlled by us; it’s controlled by God. And if we remember this, maybe we can remember that everything will be okay. All shall be well because our future is not in our own hands; it’s in God’s.

Take a breath, but with intention. Attend to the musical line that needs to be spun ahead. There’s a future ready to be shaped and directed by hope. Its jagged lines are ready to be smoothed, and its clashing dissonance can find pleasing harmony if not unison chanting.

Don’t let anyone tell you that your singing is over. Don’t let anyone tell you that your future is lost. The Good Shepherd of the sheep will allow no one to be lost, and especially not the Church. So, pause, take your breath, not just any breath, not too long of a breath, but a breath with intention. It’s a going-on breath. Breathe in all that is possible with a God who makes all things possible by the glorious resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ. Take your breath with an eye to that wondrous future, and then sing.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day
May 21, 2023

The Benefit of the Doubt

If you will, join me on a walk through the neighborhood. When we get to Lancaster Avenue, we’ll turn right. Walk a few blocks east, and you will see them. On the right, there’s the tanning salon, where disdained personal images are transfigured into more acceptable hues. On the left, there’s the bar where crowds drink away their fears and try to fill the gaping holes in their lives with fleeting glimpses of fellowship. Further ahead, on the right, is the spa, where after a long day’s work, for a small fortune, the bodily tensions of your punishing commute can be massaged into relaxation.

Just a few doors down is the overpriced ice cream shop that will undo everything you accomplished in the weight loss center nearby. Purchasing ten-dollar ice cream with bizarre toppings will elevate you to the cool crowd.

Keep looking, though, because there’s more. On the south side of the street, you will find the upscale clothing stores that offer you myriad choices of apparel to demonstrate that you are well off, respectable, and earning a decent living, just in case you need to cover up your insecurity. There’s a smoke shop and a place to relax the back that will ease your tense nerves and hopefully calm some of your anxiety, because these days, everyone is anxious. For a monthly fee, the fitness center will enable you to firm up your abs and work off your anger at your boss. And we’ve only gone a few blocks east on Lancaster Avenue.

Venture off into side streets and a bit further afield and you will see the parks filled with joggers and sports players, yes, especially on Sunday mornings. You might see a cycling club race by, yes, again on a Sunday morning. Baseball and soccer teams perfect their plays, on Saturday, and yes, on Sunday mornings, too. There’s the school full of overachievers who are stressed to the max, with inflated GPAs and ballooning hopes of getting into that Ivy League school. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

On my worst days, I tend towards despair when I see the crowds in these human-made shrines but vacant pews in churches. I lament the fact that church can no longer compete with extracurricular activities, and marathons scheduled on Sunday mornings give people one more excuse to sleep in rather than go to church. I look hungrily at all the people in the barre studio and fitness center and wonder if they have a church home or know the love of God.

But on my best days, when I’m less cynical and more generous in spirit, I remember the apostle Paul in chapter seventeen of the Acts of the Apostles. He has just walked through Athens, a major cultural center, teeming with erudite philosophers debating the most novel ideas, spinning complex theories like a spider weaving a web to catch those who just can’t cut it in the highest intellectual echelons. Paul has seen the human-made shrines everywhere, and he’s taken the time to read the inscriptions. He has paid great attention to the objects of worship zealously manufactured by the Athenians.

But he was distressed to see so many idols. And so, he preached about Jesus, and people were intrigued. They found his teachings strange; they’d never heard them before. Some wanted to know more, so they brought him to the Areopagus, and this is where today’s speech begins.

But Paul in Athens is having a good day, unlike me on my worst days walking my dog through the streets of our neighborhood and seeing the shrines made with human hands that so easily become idols. These places are not bad or evil; they’ve simply fostered an unholy obsession from those who are seeking meaning in their lives. But Paul doesn’t chastise the Athenians. It’s not us versus them. He stands in the midst of a city proliferating with idols, unafraid of them, and he says something remarkable.

Paul doesn’t point the finger at the Athenians. He points a finger towards Christ. Paul doesn’t scold the Athenians, he gives them the benefit of the doubt. He has found his inspiration in one peculiar statue with a peculiar inscription, “To an unknown god.” This is a gift to Paul. It’s the hinge point for a conversation starter. It’s a window into the Gospel. And Paul goes for it. He preaches the good news, and he offers his Gospel gift to the Athenians.

The great hunger he sees among the Athenians and their real proclivity towards religiosity are simply directed towards the wrong things. Or perhaps—again, giving them the benefit of the doubt—they are inadvertently grasping towards the God we know as the living God, the One who made the heavens and the earth and who gives life to all and sustains all things. The Athenians are after something, they just don’t know what. Contrary to the Stoics, some of the Athenians aren’t apathetic. They aren’t mired in malaise or ossified by the status quo. Some of them have great aspirations to know something beyond their understanding. They’re so very hungry.

They’re famished, just like so many among us, too. I suspect that many of us here today are hungry. Unless you were forced here by a parent, you have come to this church because you were drawn by something. You must want to be found.

And so, on my better days, when I’m less cynical and try to be more like Paul in the Areopagus, I walk through our neighborhood. It’s not us versus them, I recall. And so I see not just idols to wealth, power, self-image, children’s successes, or worldly affirmation but I see a deep desire. People are full of longing. And I’m moved to pity.

So many people have put their hope in things that are not intrinsically harmful; they just implicitly promise something that will never satisfy. And then I look inside myself. What about you? Are our inner worlds so cluttered, confused, and unhappy that an idol is required to worship, whether our jobs or success? What about investments in purchases that will tell a superficial story of our lives while the secrets of our lives fester into open wounds?

More than we might imagine, you and I have much in common with the patrons of the businesses and crowds on the sports fields, even though we may be here on Sunday morning and they are elsewhere. We all share a longing for something that will fill the giant hole in our lives. But what makes our gathering here today so different is that we have some inkling that the only one who will fill that hole is God.

Doesn’t it make you want to run out into the streets and to share this good news? Don’t you want to announce to others that you know the temptation to fill the gap in your life with human creations, but that you’ve come to see that the only true fulfillment is God? Evangelism isn’t knocking on doors or thumping Bibles in people’s faces. It’s announcing the unshakeable truth that has been revealed in Christ, the One who has made God known in a particular time and place.

And before Paul stood in the Areopagus, Jesus came to earth and stood in our midst to tell us that we have no need to fill the emptiness of our lives with status or power or wealth. The God who gives us far more than we can ask or imagine is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Jesus tells us that our broken self images which are consistently destroyed by human cruelty are made in God’s image. God loves us unconditionally, with no strings attached. Jesus comes to tell us that rather than building up our person security through affirmation and worldly success, we are better off putting our trust in God, who will never let us go. Jesus comes to tell us that in our loneliest moments when we grope after fellowship with others in all the wrong places, we will find our greatest companionship in his presence and in the fellowship of the Body of Christ. Jesus comes to tell us that everything we long for is already in front of our eyes. We have been feeding unknown gods when the God known in Christ is closer to us than we can comprehend.

On the day we come to understand this, nothing else will matter—not our self image, not our kids’ college portfolios, not the affirmation of shallow people, and not even the financial security that has us in its grip of total fear. All that matters is that we are loved and cared for by a God who is indeed known to us. This God requires not statues or shrines. This God does not need fancy inscriptions or money in order to give us what we need. This God is simply always present, always on the scene before we get there in the most unexpected of places. And most of all, this God is so compassionate and merciful that we are always given the benefit of the doubt. God loves our desire and our hunger and hopes it will draw us to him. And the moment we turn to him is our moment of repentance. And it’s so extraordinary and beautiful, that we can never turn away again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 14, 2023  

Words that Can Light Up the World

As a child, I was intrigued with black and white films. Why, I asked my parents, were some films in black and white while others were in color? My uninformed, childlike assumption was that black and white films were simply color films that had grown old. They had once been in color, and then they just deteriorated in quality over time. In my mind’s eye, I imagined film rolls sitting around in a dark storage area, collecting dust, until one day, they lost their polychromatism and devolved into monochromatic grayscale productions.

While this naïve theory was incorrect, maybe there was a bit of truth in it after all. The black and white films I was analyzing were never filmed in color, but behind the limited chromatic fields of the final productions there were living worlds of vibrant hues. Jimmy Stewart’s eye color was not an unidentifiable shade of gray but light blue. Donna Reed’s hair color was not an unfathomable variation on black but deep brown.

When you read Scripture, what’s the color palette that you see? Is it polychromatic or monochromatic? If the current malaise of the Church and the confused comfort of many Christians is any indication, Scripture is only a black and white film. That’s not to say that everyone finds it uninteresting or irrelevant, but rather that over the centuries, something has been lost. It’s a bit like my childhood image of black and white films. I thought those films had simply lost their color over time.

So, where has the color gone in the stories of Jesus and of the early Church? In 2023, can we find any ounce of the fervor described in the Acts of the Apostles, when thousands were converted in a day? Today, where’s the palpable presence of the Holy Spirit, alighting on person after person and strengthening them to do wild and unexpected things in the name of Christ? Where are the miracles, the healings, the missionary journeys to exotic lands, and the inclusion of heretofore ostracized groups of people?

Over the years, Scripture has become a monochromatic palette. We hear the same stories repeatedly. Unspoken, key details are left to our imaginations, but if we fail to employ our imaginations to supply the color, the stories are simply visualized in grayscale. Chilling moments lose their electricity. Scripture is read as if it were the phone book.  

Maybe Scripture has taken on something of the monochromatic reality around us, which seems like it will never blossom into color again: an unending conflict in Ukraine, one more mass shooting, racism coded into law, lawmakers establishing policy that excludes yet one more vulnerable group. Some things never seem to change. We’re left with a grayscale universe and no real ideas of how to add color to it, because we feel helpless. Do you wonder if the color has completely gone from our world?

And then, we hear Jesus say something remarkable, if we’re listening. On a first hearing, Jesus’s words channeled through John the Evangelist may have a monochromatic ring to them. We hear him repeat a common refrain many times in John’s Gospel: I am in the Father and the Father in me. John spins a circular logic that can lose its zest when rendered into English. Everything sounds colorless until Jesus drops a zinger of flashing light.

He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Wow. Did you see the world just light up with color? Or when you heard it just a few minutes ago, did your attention gloss right over it? Can you believe what Jesus said to his disciples and what he’s saying to us? Listen again: He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father.

This is nothing short of astonishing. We’ve been given a charge that’s either so true we can’t believe it or just one more hyperbole in Scripture. But I’m here to tell you that what Jesus says is true. It’s simply that we’ve failed to believe it.

Why then have we become content with a monochromatic world? Why has the story that upended the world been reduced to silent film in grayscale? Why does the fervor of the early Church or even the vibrancy of the Church fifty years ago seem like mere idealism? There’s only one solution to this predicament, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s not my own. It’s the one Jesus gives us.

Did you catch those other words of Jesus, or did they fail to light up for you, too? Hear them again: Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it. Never underestimate the power of prayer. I’m talking about real prayer, the kind of prayer infused with the love of God the Father, revealed in his Son Jesus Christ, whose living presence continues to be made known to us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is prayer that takes place no matter how we’re feeling. This is prayer that’s unceasing and permeates every moment of our day, whether in words or through movements of the heart. This is prayer expressed both in song and in silence. This is prayer that turns every aspect of our lives over to God so that God can do what’s best for us when we don’t know what we need. This is prayer that takes place at home, at work, in the public sphere, and unfailingly here at church.

This is prayer that envisages a God who is more than a mere dispenser of favors or worker of magic tricks. This is prayer that can only come about from aligning our lives with Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life. When our wills are so bound up with Christ’s, then we will know exactly what we need to ask for, and God will give it to us. If we believe what Jesus says, then we can do far more than we can imagine, and impossibilities become real possibilities, because the Holy Spirit has been given to us as our companion and guide.

It's a tragedy that thoughts and prayers have come to stand for inaction in the face of injustice. But perhaps that’s because we’ve put the cart before the horse. Action can only follow prayer. And right action can only stem from being hitched to the one who is the way into eternal life.

Right now, it’s probably difficult for many of us to imagine doing greater works than Jesus because our world has been so dulled by the monochromatism of sin and despair. But we are custodians of the great treasure of Jesus’s words. His words of hope have been entrusted to us so that we will believe them and then live from out of their power.

So, now is the time for the Church to light up the world with color. Politicians have failed. Government officials promise and don’t deliver. Lawmakers write injustice into law. Friends betray us. Institutions take our money and give us nothing in return. Every person and thing in which we’ve put our misguided trust will disappoint. But the Church is different. She should be different. She can upend the world once again. She will do things so astonishing that they can only be from the hand of God.

The most exciting and magnificent film you’ve ever seen and ever will see is before your eyes. You are in it. For some time now, it has lain dormant in a closet, shut up in the dark. It has collected dust. It has lost its color, little by little, decade by decade. Tired narratives tell us this: the Church can only manage her decline, the Church must be scaled back to manageable size, thoughts and prayers are useless, and the only hope in the world is what you alone can do, because God won’t help you.

But these are lies, because the risen Christ is alive in our midst, and he gives us a different message. The Holy Spirit is setting the world on fire. Grays can become blue, and shades of black will morph into brown. There’s no color too alluring for the palette of the film that God is producing among us. We are actors in it. The dull gray of your despair is now a luminous hope.

All you must do is believe. Believe that Jesus’s words are true. Believe that behind the grayscale film you see is a world of dazzling color, radiant with hope. Believe that through the Holy Spirit’s power, our wills can be united with God’s desires for us. And above all, believe Christ’s promise: if you ask for anything in his name, God will do it.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 7, 2023

Sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I want to begin by thanking Fr Kyle your Rector for inviting me to be with you on Good Shepherd Sunday. I served as Rector here for seven years from 1978 to 1985, and years of blessing those were for me and my family and, I hope for the congregation. I have held this church in my loving prayers ever since: May the good Lord bless, protect and prosper you now and always. May you flourish in every way it is possible to flourish!

After 41 years of full time parish ministry, I retired – I should say my wife Nancy and I retired – in 2014. We live where we met, in Narragansett, RI, and we worship where we were married there over a half century ago, at Saint Peter’s-by-the-Sea. I have a story from St Peter’s that I believe well illustrates the work of our Lord Jesus as our Good Shepherd.

Several years ago, a man about my age, we’ll call him Tom, befriended us and invited us to join him and his wife in a play-reading group. It’s good fun, and a certain social life rotates with it. One day, however, Tom wanted to see me and talk personally and seriously, so I drove over to his house for a conversation with him and his wife. He revealed that he had been battling with cancer for over a decade, which few had known, and that the cancer had gained too much ground for him to continue his battle with it: he was starting at-home hospice care.

Tom’s wife was an attender at St Peter’s, but I didn’t recall seeing Tom with her. Nonetheless, Tom had been educated in Episcopal schools, was familiar with their chapel services, with the old Book of Common Prayer, the hymns, and other time-honored customs; but he had long since ceased regular church attendance.

I didn’t ask Tom why he had stopped with church, but he did say he hadn’t liked the changes in the Prayer Book, or some political sermons, or whatever. Very likely. The truth is, if you’re looking for a reason not to go to church, there are plenty available, and so I let this all pass. The further, deeper truth was, Tom wanted to receive the sacrament, to use what little time he had left to get in touch again with Jesus and his church. That was the heart of the matter.

While I demurred from acting as anything but a retired priest and friend, I did volunteer to contact our rector. But Tom said I needn’t do that; he would email him directly. To paraphrase him, he said this “poor old lamb needs to come back to the sheepfold…”  That, I thought, was impressive. It was a simple statement of faith and fact spoken in a genuine crisis.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says several of the things that describe him as The Good Shepherd, and today they involve him as the good shepherd who opens the gate of the sheepfold. The sheep, he says, know the true shepherd’s voice, and they do not heed the voice of strangers. Elsewhere, Jesus says “I AM the Good Shepherd,” meaning that he is the Lord God, I AM, who is the Shepherd of all Israel, and that there is one flock and one shepherd.

On the day before he died, Jesus said that as the Good Shepherd acting in perfect unity with his Father, he had power to lay down his life and power to take it up again. This is of course a reference to Jesus’s death and resurrection, his ultimate act on behalf of his sheep, for whom he lays down his life. There are images around this church of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. These images reflect the earliest Christian art and iconography. Clearly the image of The Good Shepherd spoke to the hearts of the early disciples and the church that grew up after them. Some of the images here show Jesus as a beardless Roman shepherd, with a sheep on his shoulders. I have always found these powerful and moving. When Tom in Narragansett referred to himself as a poor old lamb wanting to return to the fold, that was the very image that rose up in my mind’s eye. I thought of the risen Lord with Saint Peter by the lake, healing Peter’s triple betrayal by asking him three times if Peter loved him; and each time commanding him to feed, to tend, and again to feed his lambs and sheep, young and old, high and low, rich and poor.

The rector responded quickly and well to Tom’s email. He visited Tom within a few days, and they spoke and had Holy Communion in Tom’s home. Tom was not able to go out any more. He and the rector had significant pastoral conversation, and more than once. Tom’s wife was happy at what she witnessed. Would I, she asked, take some part in Tom’s funeral service when the time came for it? I would be honored, of course, the rector assigning me my place.

As it happened the time came quickly, not months but weeks, much quicker than Tom had first told me. The rector saw that Tom’s reaching out to the church was not a moment too soon, actually just in the nick of time. The night Tom died in his sleep, he told his wife he felt he was now all done, was right at the shore. And he did not linger. 

St Peter’s, even in this strange time of Covid worries, was full of people for Tom’s funeral. The rector provided a most grace-filled service from the Book of Common Prayer and spoke of Jesus the Good Shepherd, of how there is joy over our desire to come home to him.

It was good to hear some of those Prayer Book phrases: “Acknowledge, we humbly beseech, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.” And I thought of a prayer for the departed that wasn’t read but is always pertinent: “wash him in the blood of that immaculate Lamb who was slain to take away the sins of the world…that whatsoever defilements he may have contracted in the midst of this earthly life being purged and done away, he may be presented pure and without spot before thee…”

This story is one of many that show us what the church is for, whether St Peter’s in Narragansett or The Good Shepherd in Rosemont. May we always do what we can to assist in the care of our beloved Jesus, the Lamb of God who is our Good Shepherd. And, good brother Father Kyle, dearly beloved members and parishioners of The Good Shepherd, may many lambs find safety and pasture here in this venerable and lovely sheepfold.

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Illogical Hope

I remember many things from my visit to the Holy Land in 2016. I remember with fondness the beautiful rolling hills of the Judean wilderness and Ein Karem, where the visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth is commemorated. I remember kissing the stone in Bethlehem marking the spot where it’s believed that Jesus was born. I remember wading into the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized, nervously staring at armed Jordanian soldiers across the river, because we had been told that there could still be some landmines hidden on the bed of the river. I remember the incredible Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which houses the site of Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, as well as the place where his tomb was.

But I also remember that holiest church in Christendom divided into pieces, some portions allocated to Orthodox Christians, some to Armenian Christians, others to Roman Catholics. Anglicans weren’t allowed to celebrate Mass at any of the altars there. I remember feeling the palpable tension between denominations in that holy place, vying for power and control. I remember being hastened from my posture of adoration at Jesus’s burial place by abrupt and rude guards of the tomb, so that other tourists could have their seven or eight seconds there.

The Holy Land is a confusing place. It has an illogic that masquerades as logic. Even though it should be the place of truest peace on earth, it’s one of the most volatile. Where love should reign, hate predominates. Where swords should be beaten into ploughshares, soldiers who look like they’re still teenagers roam the streets of Old City with machine guns.

But in that beautiful land, there is also a place called Abu Ghosh. It’s the place believed to be Emmaus. On my pilgrimage some years ago, as we journeyed there, we were told that it was not a safe place. We were told that the Roman Catholic monastery we would be visiting, which housed both men and women, was infrequently visited. Many people were afraid to visit this unstable region of Israel.

So, when we pulled into the drive of the monastery, I remember this. I remember monks and nuns coming out to greet us. I remember a welcome so warm that it surpassed the welcome we received or didn’t receive at any other site in the Holy Land. I remember a profound gratitude radiating from the monks and nuns because we had chosen to visit them.

We moved into the ancient church for Mass. And there, a group of Roman Catholic monks and nuns allowed an Anglican priest to celebrate Mass at the altar. I was astounded. On our trip were men and women priests, and they were all graciously welcomed. The monks and nuns even joined in the Mass with us. In this quiet, remote place, in the place where two early disciples finally recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, I saw a fleeting glimpse of Christian charity, unity, hospitality, peace, and love. I saw the illogic of that goodness trump the world’s unholy quests for logic.

And then it was over. The bread was broken, the wine was poured. We were dismissed and sent into the world to love and serve the Lord in peace. We climbed back onto our buses, and we road back to Jerusalem. We road back to a city seething with hatred and violence. We road back to a city arbitrarily and defiantly partitioned, where altars were controlled by the religious hierarchy and denominations fought over their last square footage of space in a holy site. At Emmaus, the Risen Christ had been clearly known to us in the opening of Scripture and in the breaking of bread, in divisions momentarily put aside, and in true hospitality. And then it was as if Jesus had vanished from our sight.

In Luke’s Gospel, when Cleopas and the other unnamed disciple encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus, it’s three days after they had seen humanity at its worst. Walking from Jerusalem, they left the ugliness of human betrayal, fear, denial, mocking, hatred, and crucifixion. They walked along that road to Emmaus stewing over everything that had happened. Talking and discussing, trying to find logic in the empty tomb that was discovered, the absence of a body, the seemingly preposterous claims of the women at the tomb who said they saw angels.

Here’s what I imagine Cleopas and the other disciple thinking inside, although they don’t give voice to it. The friend we thought was the hope of Israel may have just been a fraud. Where in all this is the God we worship and adore? Was God not powerful enough to save the one who preached and taught about love? When all our hope was centered around someone who is now dead, is there any future for us? And if so, what is it?

And although those disciples are wrestling with many emotions in their hearts, for most of their journey on that road to Emmaus, they appear to be lost in their heads. They are hashing it out in conversation, trying to rationalize. They are looking for logic where there is none.

But something happens on that road to Emmaus. The logic they had sought is disassembled by Jesus. When they think that suffering and death can have no part in the world’s redemption, the Risen Christ reinterprets Scripture for them. When they think that they need to articulate a cohesive argument in their minds, as if they could philosophize the resurrection, Jesus spends the evening with them, takes a loaf of bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with them.

And this is the moment in which their eyes are opened by God. Until now, their eyes have been closed. Until now, they have been in their heads. Now, they have moved from head to heart. Now, it all makes sense. There is no logic to this mystery, and in the illogic of it all, they find their hope.

This hope was made known to me in Emmaus on that pilgrimage back in 2016. Before that Eucharistic encounter, I was seeking Christ’s presence in the holy sites where he walked, preached, taught, and healed. I was looking for him, and of course, he was there. But somehow, my eyes were still closed to his real presence, because I was in my head. Mere remembering was not enough to summon Jesus’s presence, because in the present, I still saw the illogic of human sin, strife, discord, contention, and harbingers of violence. I saw petty denominational differences manifested in territory grabbing. I saw lots of Christians trying to control the uncontrollable.

But at Emmaus, my eyes were opened. And the only one who could open my eyes was God. Christ was truly present among a diverse group of Christians assembled in an ancient church, hearing Scripture read and interpreted, and breaking bread together. No sinful bickering could keep him out. No manipulative schemes could pin him down. No jaded human logic could quench his beautiful illogic.

And suddenly, his presence vanished from our midst. He was present, and then absent once again. We pilgrims went on our way, but now it made sense. Usually, we are trying to force our eyes to open by ourselves. We are living in our heads, trying to rationalize our way to peace or understanding. But Christ is inviting us to let him interpret the Scriptures for us and let him give us his Body and Blood. He longs to be made known to us in the present by Holy Spirit’s power, not simply in our memories or intellectual schemes.

And here we have come today. We are perhaps lonely and confused, perhaps sad and bereft, perhaps feeling abandoned, perhaps wondering if the world has gone off the rails. Maybe you’re trying to rationalize your way to faith and understanding. Some of you may even think being here is just a waste of time, when you could be out there, doing something good in the name of Christ.

But you and I are exactly where we should and need to be. There’s no other place on earth in which the Risen Christ will make himself known more clearly. He has already told us that. There’s no other place where you will be changed more deeply. He has told us that, too. There’s nothing better that we can do for the sake of the world and our lives than to heed our Lord’s command to come here on the Lord’s Day, week after week after week. Come together as much as you can. Allow Christ to open Scripture for you. Come to the Lord’s altar, and let Christ feed you. You can never get enough of this.

And then, your eyes will be opened, not by the books you read, the teachers you admire, or your own effort. Your eyes will be opened by God, who is the only one who can bring the illogic of hope into an illogical world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 23, 2023

Of What Are You Afraid?

It’s Sunday. They are huddled together in a room, where they usually gather. That event which seemed like ages ago is still in their memories. But something is wrong. This motley assortment of disciples should be glad. They should be gathering out of thanks, for a life so generously sacrificed for their salvation, for a startling new truth that they still struggle to grasp, for the eternal promise that has been made to them.

But they don’t look glad. They all seem drawn into themselves. There’s a nervous energy in the room. They are forlorn. They are lonely. They are beginning to wonder if God has abandoned them, even though they have shown up to be together with one another, as is their custom. The doors are not only shut; they are locked. The tension and anxiety are so thick in the room that you can cut through the resulting cloud with a knife. Above all, these disciples are afraid. They are scared out of their minds.

A handful of disciples in need of one another’s company, gathering according to their custom, shut behind doors, so very afraid. Is the year 30 A.D. or 2023? Is this gathering comprised of Jesus’s disciples, who were still in shock in the evening of the Day of Resurrection, or is it the modern Church gathering to break bread and share a cup on a Sunday so many years later? Is the man nervously pacing across the room impetuous Peter who is still feeling guilty for his three denials, or is it the parishioner who’s worried about the heating bill and the recent liturgical change?

Right now, on the first day of the week, countless other Christians—although undoubtedly fewer than in ages past—are gathering across the world, just as we are. Usually, the doors are shut and hopefully not locked, although in some corners of the world, perhaps they are. Prayers are said. Bread and wine are present. Thanks is given to God for them. The bread is broken, and the wine is poured. They are shared.

In many places, as in this place, people seem glad to be here. The peace is exchanged. Worries and troubles are brought with the contemporary disciples who come, even though most of these remain hidden inside our hearts. All that we bring is placed on the altar, with ourselves and the bread and the wine. Sins are forgiven. Fellowship is shared. Christ’s Body and Blood are received.

But do you detect any tension? Do you sense any anxiety? Are you afraid, and if so, of what are you afraid? Is it what’s on the other side of the doors of this church? Is it the safety of your family when you’re not with them? Is it the health of a parent who is struggling with a sobering new diagnosis? Is it the mental health of your child? Is it about paying the bills?

Or are you afraid of a world full of shifting mores and values? Or of the judgment of your friends who want nothing to do with church and think you’re out of your mind for being here? Or of the people who look and think differently from you? Are you afraid of any of these things?

Let’s face it. The fear that Jesus’s disciples had in that upper room over two thousand years ago manifests itself in similar ways in our own day. The fear that St. John describes in his Gospel was used to scapegoat others: one group of Jewish people who followed Jesus demonized another group who didn’t.

But the Church still recapitulates such fear in other ways. She fears “the world” outside our doors, even if they aren’t locked. She fears a culture that has decreasing respect for the Church and that schedules ballgames and dance practice on Sunday. She fears a pandemic that has thinned out the pews. She fears even the fear of those outside the Church who have been wounded by reckless spiritual leaders. She fears those within the Church who weaponize Scripture and the sacraments. She fears talking about sin too much lest she offend, or in some corners, she fears talking about love lest she become too generous. Her members even fear their fellow Christians because they can be so unforgiving. There is so much to fear, it seems.

At least, that’s what the prevailing narratives suggest. One narrative, which many in the Church have bought hook, line, and sinker, is that the Church is in perpetual decline. The Church will need to reinvent herself completely, or she will simply die out. The clock is ticking. Haven’t you heard this? Are you afraid of it? And if so, what are you going to do about it?

And in walks Thomas. If there’s anyone in Scripture we should feel sorry for, it’s Thomas. But we shouldn’t feel sorry for him because he doubts. The Greek text never says he doubts. Jesus tells him to be believing, not unbelieving. And the last thing we should fear is our doubts. We should feel sorry for Thomas because he is often so misunderstood. Thomas should be our role model. Thomas demands something that we all need to see. Thomas wants to see Jesus’s wounds.

Thomas is going for something deep. Perhaps it’s not so much that he wants proof before he can believe. Perhaps he wants to make sure that the person the disciples have claimed to see is truly the Risen Christ. When Satan is known to masquerade as an angel of light, Thomas is sensible to ask for proof. And the Risen Christ who never deceives isn’t someone who mysteriously appears and offers facile peace with oppression or with the status quo. The Risen Christ, whom we worship and adore, is the One who appears with the scars still in his hands and his side, because this Savior has been to darker places than we can imagine. He offers the peace that passes all understanding and a new creation that transforms the old. This Risen Christ still comes to us in our valleys of despair. So, put your hands into his side and see the print of the nails in his hands, and what do you see?

In those scars is a Church that gathered week after week on the first day of the week, even when it was a crime. In those scars is a Church that produced martyrs whose blood became the seed for a growing crop of disciples. In those scars is a Church that grew and grew even when others mocked it and when authorities persecuted it. In those scars is a body of disciples who stayed together despite heresy and schism, and corrupt bishops. In those scars are the internal divisions that threatened to destroy the Church forever, but which didn’t. In those scars, are the sins of the Crusades and anti-Jewish pogroms and oppressive colonization. In those scars are the wounds of those abused by Church leaders and those who were excluded by the Church.

It’s all there, and Thomas wants to see it. Ask to see the wounds, he says, because only a Savior who is risen from the dead and still bears such wounds is our true Savior. His wounds are proof that the worst crimes and heinous acts and even death itself cannot destroy what God has built. The Risen Christ, who offers his peace and Holy Spirit to us, will not erase our wounds. He heals them.

And here is the Risen Christ with us today, in our midst. He has come to us, despite the closed doors. He has come to us despite our fear. He has an invitation and a message for us.

As he did with Thomas, he invites us to see the wounds in his hands and to touch his side. He asks us to be not unbelieving but believing. He encourages us not to believe a message of despair about our own future and the Church’s future. His wounds remind us that although we may think the world has never been so bad, it has been in trouble before, and it survived. The Church survived. And Jesus says, you and the Church will survive. For he doesn’t forsake his own, and his message is no lie.

That is his invitation to believe. And then he does one final thing: he gives us a charge. Go and unlock the doors, he says. Your fear has already been unable to keep him out. Unlock the doors to all. Do not fear what is outside. Do not fear the unknown. Believe that what you haven’t yet seen will be good news. Believe that no matter what anyone else tells you, this isn’t the end. There is a future prepared for you, and that’s the best part yet.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Easter
April 16, 2023

Gathered at the Tomb

We don’t really know how long all the events took, but maybe we can hazard a guess. Like any book or movie, the real-life action always takes longer than it takes to read or watch. So, imagine that before us on the screen is a video of just over an hour’s length. If we start at the beginning and click the play button, it’s difficult to make out what’s happening. It’s dark, and the camera is focused on a tomb whose stone has been rolled away from its entrance.

A woman walks in from stage right. She’s not walking fast. She’s leaning forward a bit, as if the weight of the world is resting on her shoulders. At ten seconds, we see her pause, bring her hands to her face, and then suddenly, she darts off the screen in the direction from which she came. For thirty minutes, the camera remains focused on the empty tomb. There is no other movement. All is silent. All is still.

And then, just after thirty minutes into this video, we can hear the rustle of movement from stage right. One individual darts into the picture view. Shortly afterwards, a second figure appears, running as well. And then we see a third figure, which we recognize as the woman whom we first saw.

The first running figure bends down at the tomb entrance but doesn’t go in. But his competitor in the race to the tomb does go into the tomb. We hear something, although we can’t make out what he’s saying. He clearly sees something significant. Now, his running companion also goes into the tomb. We hear muffled voices, but they are distorted by the cavernous reverberation of the tomb. After they emerge from the tomb, these two individuals depart. It’s about thirty-two minutes into the video.

All we see now is the woman, her back to us. She is standing outside the tomb. We see her shoulders moving up and down. She is crying. We can hear the muffled sobbing. Occasionally, she brings a hand to her face, presumably to wipe away tears. It’s painful to watch. There’s no other action except this woman, staring at the entrance to the tomb, wiping away tears, shoulders trembling.

We watch and hear her crying, and it’s a long time. Not until the video has been playing for an hour do we see a different kind of movement. The woman seems to have a thought. We can read it in her body language. She stoops down and freezes. Then we hear two voices echoing in unison from inside the cave of the tomb. Woman, why are you weeping? The woman responds, through her tears, They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.

Then, it happens. Someone else, whose back is also to us, appears. We don’t even notice how he appears. We’re just suddenly aware that he’s there. Of course, we know who he is. We’ve watched this video before. At this moment, we see the woman, as if she were instinctively aware of another presence behind her, abruptly turning. He says to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?

We’ve heard the story before, so we know how she answers. We know what happens now. But this climactic moment of the story we rewatch every year is at one hour and three minutes. It’s at this moment that we finally learn her name. It’s Mary. The man has called her by name. And the rest is history. We and the world have never been the same since.

And here we are this Easter Day, rewatching that video. Or at least that’s what we say we’re doing. In truth, the events we think we’re rewatching are taking place in human time. They are being truly re-presented to us in the salvation of liturgical time because God’s time knows no bounds. We are participating in those saving events. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine we are rewatching this video for the sixth, thirty-first, or eightieth time. What are we rewatching? And what moments of this rather long video are we focusing on?

What has brought you here today? What moment in the video have you come for? Is it the moment when Mary first appears on the scene, sees the stone rolled away, and runs off? Or is it thirty minutes in when the three figures come racing onto the scene to make their further discoveries at the tomb? Or is it an hour into the video, when Mary peers into the tomb, sees the angels, and finally meets the Risen Christ. Which moment is it?

If I had to guess, I would surmise that you, I, and countless Christians across the world in this very moment are watching one of those moments and holding onto it for dear life. Maybe it’s why you got up early today and put on your Sunday best. Maybe it was inspiration enough to get your kids up, too, for an Easter egg hunt and then to stay for church.

But what about those other moments of the video, the ones we like to forget or ignore. As we’re imagining this story, there’s nearly an hour’s worth of footage that we rarely talk about. It’s probably not the footage you would choose to watch and rewatch. It’s probably not the footage that brought you here today. Why wouldn’t you watch and rewatch it? Is it because it's boring or because it’s too painful to watch? But let’s do something different this Easter. Let’s rewatch those long, difficult moments. No, let’s do something more. Let’s participate in them.

First, there’s the thirty minutes of silence and suspense, staring at the empty tomb, after Mary leaves the scene to find Peter and the Beloved Disciple. Think it’s not important to you or to me? Think again. Look again.

Ah, do you see them now? There are characters in this part of the video, but we must go deep into our hearts to find them. When we look at the footage again, we see the long, painful confusion of a former Christian who lost his faith. He once was convinced he knew it all. Jesus was his Lord and Savior, and he was stirred up inside every time he thought of Jesus. But one day, after he was betrayed by his own church, he lost the faith he thought he had. And now, here he stands, in an awkward, disturbing silence of waiting between knowing Jesus and feeling like Jesus is gone from his life.

We also see the woman, across the world in Ukraine, whose son went to fight in the war. He left six months ago, and she hasn’t heard from him. She’s still waiting. The silence is long and hard, but she’s grasping for something in the emptiness and hoping that the story isn’t quite over yet. Maybe one day he will appear from stage right, too.

Or should we fast forward to thirty-two minutes into the video? Yes, we see Mary weeping, shoulders shaking, and we hear her gentle sobbing. But there are others, too. Do you see them now? I see the woman weeping by the bed of her spouse who is daily losing strength. I see the youth crying in her room because she is bullied at school and ignored when she tries to speak up to school officials. Whom do you see? Do you see the family gathered on the street block now cordoned off with police tape? Do you see the hardworking father that can’t afford to feed his children? Do you see the elderly woman who has no family or friends and is eating alone? Which others do you see?

What has brought us here today, I suspect, are not these moments. We have come for the dramatic moments of finding the empty tomb and Jesus calling Mary’s name. But the best news of all this day lies in the moments of the video that we’d prefer not to watch. And yet, God is showing us something in them. We can’t have resurrection glory without that hour of the video that is so hard to watch. Resurrection glory has its meaning in them. And it’s the best news we could possibly imagine because not one of us will ever be removed from that hour of the video. We will be there one day. We have been there. Maybe we are there now. And here’s the meaning of today: despite all that, we have hope.

We have hope because the tomb was empty. The body was gone. And only because of that historical reality can we fully trust that God has done something that will always be so unbelievable that we must believe. This story is hope for anyone who struggles, who doubts, who weeps, or is confused. The resurrection in its full glory and truth is not a neatly packaged event to be tidily consumed by those without blemish or doubt. It’s a truth that finds its full meaning especially when we are wandering in the dark, when we are deep in the tomb and can’t find our way out, and when we are weeping for sorrow. It greets us not to affirm our righteousness or pat us on the back. It greets us with the incredible news that truth and love come to find us when we don’t know where to look. The Risen Christ is here to give us eternal life because his love is stronger than death.

I don’t know where you are in the video this day, but wherever you are, rejoice. Whether you are weeping, whether you are confused, whether you have lost your faith, whether you don’t understand anything at all, rejoice that the one whom God raised from the dead is right behind you, always. Turn around like Mary. Look. The Good Shepherd, the innocent Lamb slain for the other sheep, is calling your name. You are his beloved child. You are his lost sheep. You have been looking for love, and love has found you.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Resurrection
April 9, 2023

An Unbelievable World

On Good Friday, we are usually looking up. Jesus hangs on the cross, arms stretched out in love as if to embrace the whole world. Jesus and his agony, it seems, is the focus of our attention this day. But what if we looked down? What would we see?

When those who were near the cross on that solemn day finally looked down after Jesus gave up his spirit, there were many surprises. All around, they had come. Some, like the Blessed Mother, Mary the wife of Cleophas, Mary Magdalene, and the Beloved Disciple are named. But there were others who were not named. Something had drawn them here.

There were plenty who were here for the sport of a public execution. There were those who did the dastardly deed with nails and hammers. There were the soldiers who would pierce his side. But I’m not talking about these. I’m talking about the ones who came for a different reason. They came for love.

The ones who came for love weren’t drawn by the words Pilate hastily wrote and placed above Jesus’s head on the cross. They certainly weren’t there for the spectacle or for curiosity. They weren’t there to jeer or mock Jesus. The ones who came for love came for one reason only: they knew his voice.

It was a motley collection of people there near the foot of the cross. They surprised one another. But that’s what love does: it surprises us. Of course, the poor were there. The ones who hardly had two denaari to rub together came because they were hungry. They knew the one on the cross could not give them bread right now, but they knew he would feed them. They had heard him say so: I am the bread of life. Even on the verge of death, he would satisfy their hunger.

The lonely were there, too. Some of the outcasts and the social pariahs came as well. Some had committed crimes that they hoped no one would ever discover. The only place they knew to come was here, the foot of the cross. Because they heard him say before: I am the good shepherd. They knew that where the deepest loneliness was, he would most certainly be there, too.

There were other women besides the Marys, women, unfortunates treated as less than human in their marriages. And there were the people regarded as notorious sinners, shunned by society, and vulnerable to abuse. They came because they heard him say it: I am the gate for the sheep. They knew that this was the safest place on earth, and that when they came close to him, he would protect them, even if it seemed like the most dangerous place on earth.

There were the blind, who knew that they could find their deepest sight in this man hanging from a tree. And those who needed others to carry them were brought. The sick and the suffering made the journey here, too. They came for healing, because they heard him say it before: I am the light of the world. This one on the cross would give light to the darkness of their lives.

Among those near the cross were some of the most aimless and directionless. Some had been led astray by false prophets before. Some thought they had faith until a tragedy struck. Others didn’t know God until they heard this one say it: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. In the chaos of their lives, something about this man compelled them to come, trusting that they would find abundant life.

Those who were mourning recent deaths stood expectantly waiting at the foot of the cross. Their bowels groaned with the emptiness of their losses, but they came because they heard him say it before: I am the resurrection and the life. They had heard about Lazarus. They knew that the who had wept for his friend would give them hope.

They all went to the foot of the cross because they had heard his voice. Even above the fracas of the angry crowd, even above the pounding of the nails into the hard wood of a cross, even above the tone of cynicism, they still heard his voice. They recognized it, because the one who was now the spotless victim had called them by name. The Good Shepherd of the sheep was now the innocent lamb led to the slaughter. He was true to his word. He would indeed give his life for his precious sheep. They knew it now. They knew his voice. So, to the cross they came. They came for love.

And here we are. We are at the foot of the cross. We are a no less surprising group of people than those who gathered at the cross for love oh so many years ago. We have heard him say it, too, which is why we came. We have come with all that seems unlovable about us. We have come with our deepest secrets and most painful sins that have isolated us for years. We have come with our aching hunger. We have come with recent deaths weighing on our hearts. We have come with the numbing confusion of grasping for the rudder in a rudderless world. We have come to find truth when everything else is lies. When we have given up on loving ourselves and others, we have come with a desperate last hope that here we will find love. We came for love.

The shepherd has become the sheep who sacrifices himself for the rest of the flock. The king reigns from a tree. The one who is I AM has accomplished the perfect salvation of the world. It is finished. It is complete. The Savior of the world has stretched out his arms to draw all people to himself. This Shepherd has become a slain sheep so that everyone can be found.

We look up at him on the cross. Then we look down in awe at all who have come here, many of whom we would never have imagined could be in this place. We are surprised by love. Here, at the cross, is the place where deepest loneliness becomes the place of deepest communion. Here, at the cross, is the place where death becomes life. Here, at the cross, is the place where all that is unloved is loved for all eternity.

We heard him say it. We still hear him say it. I am, he says. The blazing bush is before us. We take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We have come for love, and love speaks. And we fall backward to the ground. And we worship and adore.   

Sermon by Father Kyle
The Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter
April 8, 2023  

For Love

On Good Friday, we are usually looking up. Jesus hangs on the cross, arms stretched out in love as if to embrace the whole world. Jesus and his agony, it seems, is the focus of our attention this day. But what if we looked down? What would we see?

When those who were near the cross on that solemn day finally looked down after Jesus gave up his spirit, there were many surprises. All around, they had come. Some, like the Blessed Mother, Mary the wife of Cleophas, Mary Magdalene, and the Beloved Disciple are named. But there were others who were not named. Something had drawn them here.

There were plenty who were here for the sport of a public execution. There were those who did the dastardly deed with nails and hammers. There were the soldiers who would pierce his side. But I’m not talking about these. I’m talking about the ones who came for a different reason. They came for love.

The ones who came for love weren’t drawn by the words Pilate hastily wrote and placed above Jesus’s head on the cross. They certainly weren’t there for the spectacle or for curiosity. They weren’t there to jeer or mock Jesus. The ones who came for love came for one reason only: they knew his voice.

It was a motley collection of people there near the foot of the cross. They surprised one another. But that’s what love does: it surprises us. Of course, the poor were there. The ones who hardly had two denaari to rub together came because they were hungry. They knew the one on the cross could not give them bread right now, but they knew he would feed them. They had heard him say so: I am the bread of life. Even on the verge of death, he would satisfy their hunger.

The lonely were there, too. Some of the outcasts and the social pariahs came as well. Some had committed crimes that they hoped no one would ever discover. The only place they knew to come was here, the foot of the cross. Because they heard him say before: I am the good shepherd. They knew that where the deepest loneliness was, he would most certainly be there, too.

There were other women besides the Marys, women, unfortunates treated as less than human in their marriages. And there were the people regarded as notorious sinners, shunned by society, and vulnerable to abuse. They came because they heard him say it: I am the gate for the sheep. They knew that this was the safest place on earth, and that when they came close to him, he would protect them, even if it seemed like the most dangerous place on earth.

There were the blind, who knew that they could find their deepest sight in this man hanging from a tree. And those who needed others to carry them were brought. The sick and the suffering made the journey here, too. They came for healing, because they heard him say it before: I am the light of the world. This one on the cross would give light to the darkness of their lives.

Among those near the cross were some of the most aimless and directionless. Some had been led astray by false prophets before. Some thought they had faith until a tragedy struck. Others didn’t know God until they heard this one say it: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. In the chaos of their lives, something about this man compelled them to come, trusting that they would find abundant life.

Those who were mourning recent deaths stood expectantly waiting at the foot of the cross. Their bowels groaned with the emptiness of their losses, but they came because they heard him say it before: I am the resurrection and the life. They had heard about Lazarus. They knew that the who had wept for his friend would give them hope.

They all went to the foot of the cross because they had heard his voice. Even above the fracas of the angry crowd, even above the pounding of the nails into the hard wood of a cross, even above the tone of cynicism, they still heard his voice. They recognized it, because the one who was now the spotless victim had called them by name. The Good Shepherd of the sheep was now the innocent lamb led to the slaughter. He was true to his word. He would indeed give his life for his precious sheep. They knew it now. They knew his voice. So, to the cross they came. They came for love.

And here we are. We are at the foot of the cross. We are a no less surprising group of people than those who gathered at the cross for love oh so many years ago. We have heard him say it, too, which is why we came. We have come with all that seems unlovable about us. We have come with our deepest secrets and most painful sins that have isolated us for years. We have come with our aching hunger. We have come with recent deaths weighing on our hearts. We have come with the numbing confusion of grasping for the rudder in a rudderless world. We have come to find truth when everything else is lies. When we have given up on loving ourselves and others, we have come with a desperate last hope that here we will find love. We came for love.

The shepherd has become the sheep who sacrifices himself for the rest of the flock. The king reigns from a tree. The one who is I AM has accomplished the perfect salvation of the world. It is finished. It is complete. The Savior of the world has stretched out his arms to draw all people to himself. This Shepherd has become a slain sheep so that everyone can be found.

We look up at him on the cross. Then we look down in awe at all who have come here, many of whom we would never have imagined could be in this place. We are surprised by love. Here, at the cross, is the place where deepest loneliness becomes the place of deepest communion. Here, at the cross, is the place where death becomes life. Here, at the cross, is the place where all that is unloved is loved for all eternity.

We heard him say it. We still hear him say it. I am, he says. The blazing bush is before us. We take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We have come for love, and love speaks. And we fall backward to the ground. And we worship and adore.     

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 7, 2023

Tending to the Feet

I wonder where his eyes were as he washed their feet. He must have looked each disciple in the eye before pouring water over their feet and bathing them. How painful was the gaze into Judas’s eyes? How comprehending was his glance at Peter, knowing his pending denial? How affectionate was his look at the Beloved Disciple?

But I suppose that most of his time was spent looking not at their eyes but at their feet. He could tell so much about them just from their feet. It was their feet that needed tending. He wasn’t a charlatan reading a palm. He had a genuinely intimate knowledge of their lives. Their feet told him everything, more than perhaps they wanted him to know.

As he bathed their feet with water and caressed them, he saw so much about their pasts. He saw the calluses from standing on the rocky seashores waiting all day for a catch. He saw the strain of overwork in trying to earn a living. He saw the countless miles trod behind him throughout Galilee. He saw the scars from accidents and the first signs of poor health. He felt the tension in the muscles of the feet that didn’t want to be handled. He felt the instinctive pull away as he took a foot to wash it.

In washing their feet, he could read their lives. This evening, he knows too much. He knows which feet will continue to follow in his footsteps long after his body has been taken down off the cross. He knows exactly which pair of feet will go out into the night to betray him into the hands of his murderers. He knows which pair of feet will be at the top of the cross instead of the bottom when he is crucified. He knows which feet will traverse distant continents for the sake of his good news. He knows which feet will be buried in distant lands, far from home, all because of him.

The disciples don’t yet know about their future. They don’t yet know exactly where their feet will take them. They don’t yet know what other feet they will have to wash. But this evening, for a sacred meal, they have come to holy ground, whether they know it or not. Like Moses, they have taken off their sandals because now, in this hour, they are standing at the gate of heaven, even though they don’t quite understand it.

We, too, are on holy ground. We are standing at the gate of heaven, even though it may be hard to see. We will shortly be invited to take off our sandals to approach this holy ground. It’s the first step to walk through the gate of heaven. With bare feet, we will come before Christ, who knows everything about our lives just by looking at our feet. He knows the one who stands all day working a thankless job and whose feet are so very tired. He knows the one whose left foot is permanently scarred from childhood. He knows the one whose feet have never known the strain of hard labor. He knows the one whose feet haven’t had a real home in years. He knows all our stories just by looking at our feet.

Whether we show them to him or not, he knows it all. But the invitation to take off our sandals on this holy ground is a sign of respect both for this sacred place and moment and for the one who is calling us to heaven. Tonight, it’s not about the head or the hands. It’s not about trying to rationalize the mystery before us. Tonight, we are asked to let Christ do something for us that puts us utterly beyond the temptation to control his gift.

Week after week, we stretch out our hands to receive his precious gift in the Eucharist. Tonight, we will do the same. We will celebrate the very institution of that gift. But although it’s pure gift, we find so many ways to try to control it. We weaponize it or add it to our tally of things we need to do to get into heaven. We receive it because it will do something for us.

But not tonight. This evening, Christ invites us to receive a different kind of gift. It’s a strange and uncomfortable one. He asks us to let him wash our feet, to read our lives. He anoints our feet for mission and service. In order to serve and love as he loves us, we can’t simply summon the will to do so. We must take off our shoes here on holy ground. We must lay bare everything before the one who knew us in our mother’s womb.

We must let go of our desire to control this uncomfortable moment by refusing his offer. We must let go of our pride to expose our battered and ugly feet to the light before our friends. We must forfeit every instinct that will serve everyone else but not let ourselves be served.

Tonight is not about the head or the hands. It’s not even so much about the heart. It’s about the feet. We must receive without condition the uncontrollable gift being offered to us before we can dare to serve others and love them to the end.

Only after we have let him wash our feet are we prepared to feast with Jesus. We feast on him with urgency, loins girded for service, sandals once again on our feet, staff in our hand, ready to lead others. Only now, having been served, can we run out into the world, into the freedom of perfect service and undying love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Maundy Thursday
April 6, 2023

The Voice that Is Never Silent

There are places that mark time in relation to natural disasters. In Galveston, Texas, everyone remembers the 1900 hurricane. Tohoku, Japan is still reeling from the devastating tsunami of 2011. New Orleans, Louisiana, is not the same after Hurricane Katrina. Things were better before the catastrophes; things will always be worse afterwards.

But this natural disaster is remembered in a different way. It was both a natural disaster and a supernatural event. While one person died, everyone lived after it.

If you go to the Holy Land today, you can see the scar left in the earth by this cataclysmic event. You can put your hand on the spot. It’s as if the earth opened its mouth in death and was frozen in time. When no one else cried out for justice, the earth did.

It’s one of the eerie details of St. Mat thew’s account of Jesus’s passion. Jesus is ominously silent as he approaches the cross. How can he be anything else? He’s said what he needed to say. He’s done what he needed to do. What can he say now that will change the world’s mind? Even his disciples have lost their nerve. Whatever he says will be used against him. Better to remain silent. Until his dying words on the cross, he has nothing left to say. Or at least, that’s what we think.

But after Jesus’s final cry and last breath, there are more words that will be spoken. First, there is a moment of stillness. It seems to those standing by that death has the concluding word. Hanging in the air are the lies used to nail Jesus to the cross. Hanging in the air is the suicidal despair of Judas, who couldn’t forgive himself. Hanging in the air are doubt and skepticism about the claims of Jesus. Hanging in the air is the unspoken question: where is God?

And then, it happens. It’s the natural disaster that will leave the world changed forever. For centuries to come, people will measure their lives by this event. We still do. From out of the silence, there’s the ripping of the curtain in the Temple from top to bottom, from heaven to earth. There’s the rumble as the tectonic plate of human sin rubs up against the tectonic plate of eternal life. There’s a crack as rocks are split. And the earth heaves and opens up. Jesus approaches his death with silence, but out of that silence, creation itself groans. These are the birth pangs of a new creation.

And the tragedy is that an earthquake is what it takes for the centurion and his companions to confess Jesus as God’s Son. Peter may already have proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, but his cowardly denial has belied his confession. Now, when sentient beings have failed to tell and receive the truth, it’s the earth that must speak.

It groans, and it cracks open. It’s a visible sign that God’s good creation has been marred and broken. The tangible reminder that can still be seen today is a cleft in the earth where the tectonic plate of sin has ground against the tectonic plate of eternal life. In this cleft is the silence of Jesus’s final moments before he breathed his last. In this cleft is the silence before evil. In this cleft is the silent complicity in the face of yet more children killed at school. In this cleft are the insidious lies that protect our own comfort and the inner resentments and prejudices that have become our idols. In this cleft are the false accusations of death.

But in this gap in the natural earth, we also have a hint that the story is far from finished. Now, there are aftershocks. We begin to hear movement below the surface of the earth as tombs open. Those who have been dead are no longer so, but they have not yet come out.

This is too much. Inanimate creation itself has spoken when animate beings remain silent, and so animate beings must do their best to seal up the truth. Roll a stone over the truth. Seal it up with lies.

But the final words of this story will not be silenced. They are yet to be spoken. Although the earth has spoken, another voice will speak. This is only the beginning. People will measure the rest of their lives by this event, but unlike other disasters, what rises from this cleft in the earth is a creation that has been entirely remade.

Now, on both sides of a gaping hole in the earth, despair is turned into hope. Peter’s denial is forgiven. Our struggle to pray, which echoes the inability of Jesus’s disciples to pray with him, gives way to the Holy Spirit praying within us. Lies are not erased, but the truth speaks, if quieter, with a stronger voice. Because of the cleft in the earth, things will always have the potential to be better.

We’ve heard it foreshadowed before. The stones themselves will cry out when human beings are silent. And, indeed, the stones have groaned and heaved. The earth has been opened. And in just a few days, a stone rolled across the opening of a tomb will not be able to prevent this voice from speaking the final word. Because this voice is never silent.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
April 2, 2023

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.