Right Before Our Eyes

In my first two years as a priest, I served both in a parish and as a choir director in an Episcopal school, which was situated in an under-resourced neighborhood of Philadelphia. For students who were well acquainted with trauma and poverty, the school was a haven of security. It was a place that would always be heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, where students could enjoy well-prepared and nutritious meals. The teachers would love the students and do their best to give them a quality education. The students would be taught about Jesus, even while their own religious traditions were respected.

At each chapel service in the school, the prayers of the people ended with please and thank you prayers. Students and staff would raise their hands and ask or thank God for something. When I first encountered these prayers, I was surprised and moved by how abundant they were. The average person walking into that chapel off the surrounding streets might have imagined there would be a plethora of please prayers and only a smattering, if any, of thank you prayers.

On the streets, it was obvious what wasn’t there. What wasn’t there were adequate public schools. What wasn’t there were enough garbage cans to hold the trash that littered the streets because the city traditionally ignored this part of the city and didn’t provide enough trash cans. What wasn’t there was the certainty of walking to a neighbor’s house without being caught in the crossfire of gun violence. What wasn’t there was sufficient heating in homes and money to pay the rent.

And yet, while the please prayers were in abundance, sometimes it was the thank you prayers that were even more prolific. The school chaplain didn’t have enough time to call on all the students who wanted to voice their gratitude. I learned very quickly that some of the most grateful people are those who don’t seem to have enough by the standards of the more privileged. They’re adept at discerning the blessings of their lives and giving thanks for those things that evade the awareness of those who are more sated in life. They’re skilled at seeing abundance where others only see scarcity.

The school itself was a shining example of finding abundance where most people would only see scarcity. It was housed in an abandoned Episcopal church, with buildings that were unused and deteriorating. To most people’s eyes, the property was one more example of the disastrous effects of church factionalism. But to the eyes of one Episcopal priest and a pediatric oncologist, the school’s founders, it was a gold mine of an opportunity.

The beautiful historic church would become a chapel. The church’s parish house would become the school itself. The former rectory would be turned into a community house for teachers. The neighborhood, long overlooked by many, would help provide the vision for this new school and its students. And now, little more than a decade later, the school is thriving.

But in those initial days of visioning for the school, the narrative could have been otherwise if only skeptical questions were asked. Perhaps those questions wouldn’t even have seemed skeptical but merely practical. How could that one piece of property, which was in shambles, nurture so many people? How could those aging and neglected buildings, cramped as they were, be sufficient for a school? What are they among so many problems? The need and the numbers to address the need didn’t add up. But thankfully for that school, the neighborhood, and the Church, the vision of a few, hearty, imaginative people prevailed. They shifted the narrative from scarcity to abundance, from rationalized impossibility to miraculous possibility. Through prayer, the school’s leaders began to see that everything they needed was right before their eyes.

Such a shift in vision is what Jesus reveals in the feeding of the 5,000 in John’s Gospel. When Jesus confronts a hungry crowd that has followed him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, his disciples ask all the usual questions engineered by a scarcity mentality. They’re the same questions that were undoubtedly voiced by those who were skeptical that a flourishing inner-city school could emerge from decaying, abandoned church property. They’re the same questions that most of us have surely asked at some point in our lives. But Jesus’s initial question to Philip is meant to test him. It’s also intended to teach him and the other disciples that everything they need is right before their eyes.

Philip’s first reaction is to put dollar signs on the need. Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. Andrew is no more hopeful. There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many? Philip and Andrew simply ask the typical questions of our own age. What can we do with so little money? How can we afford to maintain all these aging buildings for such a small congregation? How can we give sacrificially and also plan for our retirement? How can we be practical and hope for a miracle, too?

It’s impossible to exist in our society without constantly being told that there’s not enough. Either you’re told that you don’t have enough or that you aren’t enough. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money. There aren’t enough homes or jobs. There’s not enough peace. There’s not enough security. And it’s all because we live in a zero-sum game of competition with finite resources that must be distributed among a crowd of billions. And this inevitably means that many will lose out.

How could five barley loaves and two fish feed all those people? And Jesus shows them how by performing a miracle, but his miracle is much more than mere magic. It’s miraculous, because in it, he reveals to the crowd that everything they need is right before their eyes. It’s miraculous because Jesus teaches the crowd and the disciples that five loaves and two fish is enough because God makes it enough.

It’s not simply that people within the crowd were inspired to bring out their own hidden stores of food to share with others, as some overly rational interpreters have claimed. Such a view only reinforces the sense that we live in a zero-sum universe where there really is only a finite amount of food. But Jesus undoes this kind of thinking by manifesting a miracle wrought by the hand of God, in which infinite abundance emerges from seeming scarcity. And it all happens from the ordinary stuff that has been right before the people’s eyes the entire time.

This is what happened in north Philadelphia. A handful of decrepit, abandoned buildings turned out to be more than enough for an under-resourced neighborhood in north Philadelphia. It was enough because God showed it to be enough. It was enough because a few visionaries who believed and trusted in God’s abundance knew that with God’s help something good could come out of a rotten past on that property. They had a strong sense that everything they needed was right before their eyes, even if unseen. The money needed to resurrect that abandoned property came pouring in, as if five dollars and two cents had been multiplied infinitely. The volunteers emerged as hundreds aligned themselves with the mission of the school. The teachers and the students and the visionary neighbors all came because more than human altruism was at work. God was at work, creating a miracle with all the stuff that had been beneath their eyes the entire time. And nothing was lost or wasted.

Right now, as we are continually fed with emergency messages of scarcity, the Mass teaches us—as Jesus taught that crowd of people on the mountain—that there is enough, that a little bit of Bread and a tiny sip of Wine will give us eternal life. The world will always try to teach us that there’s never enough. The world, indeed, feeds us with fear because the sustenance of its competitive spirit is based on fear. But it’s God who teaches us to shift our vision from scarcity to abundance, from seeing impossibilities to seeing possibilities. And while some try to force-feed us fear, God feeds us with the gift of Christ his Son, the true bread from heaven. And in that gift, God shows us that everything we need is right before our eyes.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
July 28, 2024

Finding Our True Home

In his rule for monks living in community, St. Benedict of Nursia, the classic founder of conventional monasticism, describes four kinds of monks. The first group includes the cenobites, who are monks attached to a particular monastery where they live in obedience to a rule and the abbot. In the second group are the anchorites and hermits who have weathered time in monasteries but have moved on to the challenges of living in the desert wilderness.

But St. Benedict’s strong opinions rise to the surface in describing the third and fourth types of monks. He describes the sarabaites as “detestable,” lacking in experience, not living by a rule, and with “character as soft as lead.” “Still loyal to the world by their actions,” he says, “they clearly lie to God by their tonsure.” The fourth group, the gyrovagues, seem to be the most objectionable to Benedict, and he describes them as even worse than the sarabaites. The great fault of the gyrovagues is that “they never settle down,” as Benedict puts it. They are peripatetic and “are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.”[1]

After all, the whole point of Benedict’s rule is to shape a stable community of monks, sharing in life’s joys and sorrows together, through obedience to God, to the abbot or head monk, and to one another. In such a grounded community, monks don’t leave because they’re having a bad day. They don’t leave if the food isn’t to their liking. And they certainly don’t leave if they get bored. Life in religious community is all about stability despite the sway of fickle human emotions or personal preferences.

Such stability is often found in a physical place, such as a religious community or parish church. But underlying this stability is a deeper spiritual grounding, that can be found no matter how peripatetic one might be. It's no coincidence that St. Mark includes the story of Herod and John the Baptist within the larger story of Jesus sending his disciples out two by two into the mission field and their return to Jesus to report on what they’ve done. Mark’s message is clear if you look at the narrative as a whole. To be a true disciple, you can’t be a spiritual gyrovague. You need roots. It’s no use being a spiritual listener and not a spiritual doer. True disciples don’t wander around pleasing whomever they’re with at the moment. True disciples know how to settle down and find their anchor in something beyond political power, cultural fads, and shallow spiritual gurus.

And Herod is the prototypical foil to spiritual stability in St. Mark’s Gospel. Herod comes across as a mixed character. On the one hand, he has certain qualities that could very well have pulled him in the direction of goodness, that part of humanity that’s still in touch with the image of God. We’re told that he delights in listening to John the Baptist. He even knows that John is holy and righteous and therefore keeps him safe, at least for a time. And in that tragic moment when he promises more to Herodias’s daughter than he should have, we’re told that he’s “exceedingly sorry.” He really doesn’t want to put John to death. But he does it anyway.

Herod’s spiritual and emotional instability sounds a lot like the gyrovagues, whom St. Benedict accuses of never settling down. Herod can’t settle down. Herod is not his own man. He fears John the Baptist because he senses something holy about him but probably even more because he’s concerned about how John’s followers will react if John is harmed. Herod doesn’t know to whom or what he should be loyal, and that’s a very dangerous thing.

And because Herod has no spiritual grounding, he loses control at his birthday banquet, where he makes a hasty and irresponsible promise. When he promises to give Herodias’s daughter whatever she asks, he’s captive to his emotional fervor and spiritual weakness (and most likely at least a little inebriation). So, when Herodias asks for the head of John the Baptist, he can’t refuse. Here, Herod is more concerned about honoring a hasty promise than he is about preserving life. Sure, he may have once listened gladly to John the Baptist, but now, he’s willing to hand over his head on a platter. Herod doesn’t know where his heart is.

Although Herod discerns that there’s something profound about John and although he even delights in listening to him, it goes no further than that. Listening to John isn’t enough. Being moved by John isn’t enough. For Herod, the titillation of his senses and the pricking of his heart have no ultimate effect on his actions.

If Herod’s crude instability is a foil to true discipleship, such instability may also epitomize the groundlessness of our own day. It seems that we live in an age of gyrovagues, where people increasingly struggle to settle down. And this makes it incredibly difficult to settle down as disciples of Jesus. In her weakest moments, the Church is willing to promise whatever people want because she merely wants to please, and before long, religious principles have been handed over on a platter and souls have been sold to a political party or to an agenda. Give to the world anything it wants, and give to God what’s left.

But perhaps even more chilling is a propensity to be listeners of Christ and not followers. On some level, it’s rather easy to relish the stock phrases of Jesus that challenge oppressive systems and promise liberty to the captives and to delight in the inclusive love of a God who constantly forgives and to feel righteous anger at a Jesus who overturns the tables of moneychangers in the temple and stands up for the underdog and to feel a rush of adrenaline when singing the Magnificat and hearing of injustices being righted. Simply put, it's rather easy to be intrigued with Jesus—even perplexed by his teaching—and to gladly hear what he has to say to us. And yet, when it becomes inconvenient to follow him or his words challenge a way of being and living, his teaching is handed over on a silver platter, however reluctantly.

It’s increasingly less obvious that the Church is where we really learn to be spiritually grounded. It’s here, in a parish community, that we’re stabilized amid the fickle winds of a world that’s lost its moorings. It’s here in worship that we find the stability needed to ensure that we’re not spiritual gyrovagues but committed disciples of Jesus. The Mass teaches us that it’s not enough to be intrigued by the words of Jesus or by a sermon that agrees with our point of view. The Mass compels us to go forth from being fed to feed others, to be transformed from simply being delighted by Christ’s gift to being a part of the delight of all God’s beloved children.

There’s no better place to find our spiritual grounding than before the altar of God. Here, we’re invited to submit our own emotional and spiritual vagrancy to loving obedience to Christ. Here, we’re put next to people who think and vote differently from us, who chisel down our rough edges and conceit, and with whom we can receive the Eucharist with gladness and thanksgiving, even if we don’t always see eye to eye. Here, God’s eternal, abiding promise perfects our own fledgling promises, as we strive to be more than those who are simply interested in Christ and his message. Here, we learn to be transformed by that message so that we can be hearers and doers of the word. Here, God shows us that it’s not enough merely to be intrigued by Jesus. We must decide to follow him or not.

And although the cost to follow him is great, the reward is infinitely greater. The reward is that when we allow God to order our lives, we become truly free. We’re no longer pawns in sinful systems of human power. We’re no longer captive to our unstable emotions. We’re free: free to live and love and delight in God and one another. And in that love and delight, we find our true home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 14, 2024

[1] The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry (New York: Vintage, 1998), 7-8.

The Final Laugh

Laughter, like tears, is full of mystery. We don’t always know if someone is crying because they’re sad or hurt or overjoyed or think something is hilarious. Tears emerge from a variety of emotional states. Similarly, laughter could be the mockery of another person’s mistake or laughter at something truly funny or giddy laughter of goofiness or an utterly joyful happiness or the complex laughter at the tragically comedic.

A few years ago, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I was meeting with a group on Zoom. It was the earliest days of the intensified use of virtual meetings, and everyone seemed to be fascinated with other people’s Zoom locations. Conversation partners would ask each other about a picture hanging in the background, because virtual meetings only afforded a narrow view of one’s setting. In this particular meeting, one of the participants had what appeared to be an Episcopal Church welcome sign leaning against a wall in the background. I’m sure you’ve seen the signs all over the country. There’s one hanging right outside this church on Lancaster Avenue. “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,” these signs say, and each sign lists the name of a specific parish.

But the sign leaning against the wall in the background of this Zoom meeting was difficult to decipher. From my vantage point, the sign looked a bit old, rusted even, and the fact that this person had possession of the sign intimated that there must be a story behind it. At some point, another person in the meeting inquired about the sign, and so, the owner of the sign got up and grabbed the sign to bring it closer to the computer screen. And the name of the parish on the sign was. . . wait for it. . . Good Shepherd, Rosemont. And everybody laughed.

Everybody that is except me. At that point, and to no one’s knowledge in that Zoom meeting, I had been called to come to Good Shepherd as the next rector. Although my first reaction was to be offended in a protective way, upon further reflection, I realized that those who laughed weren’t really laughing at this parish. They certainly weren’t laughing at me, because no one knew I would be the next rector here. They were laughing, if implicitly and unconsciously, at what seemed to be the preposterous prospect that Good Shepherd, Rosemont, could survive. Someone, in fact, made a comment to that effect. And the rusted welcome sign, that had either fallen down or been absconded and then ended up in a yard sale was a visible symbol of a parish that was hanging on by a thread.

Laughter isn’t always the best medicine, as some like to say. Laughter is complex. It can wound. And of course, it can cheer people up. But in its most chilling form it can reveal a profound lack of hope. And this is the form of laughter that escapes from the crowds in the house of Jairus’s daughter when Jesus arrives to attend to his dying daughter. The crowds laugh because Jesus has said something that’s rather ridiculous on the surface. He’s been told that Jairus’s daughter is dead, but when he gets to the house and encounters the group of mourners, weeping and wailing, he asks them why they’re upset. The girl is not dead but sleeping, he says. And of course, they laugh. Wouldn’t you?

They laugh because Jesus seems like a silly, naïve person. They laugh because for all intents and purposes the girl has really died, and indeed, we have no reason to doubt that. They laugh because they have no clue about just who this man Jesus is, despite his previous miracles. But we, of course, know that Jesus can raise the dead and give life to what seems to have died. We know that he will be the one to defeat death by his own death. But the crowd in Jairus’s house laughs because, above all, they’ve given up on divine possibilities. They’ve lost hope, if they ever had it to begin with.

If you ask me, this is the most disquieting form of laughter imaginable. Laughter that arises from a loss of hope has a duplicitous air to it, for it outwardly purports to be funny but is twisted on the inside with cynicism, apathy, and an utter unwillingness to embrace mystery and the unknown. The crowds laugh because they’re accustomed to seeking human solutions to human problems. The problem with Jairus’s daughter is that she’s sick—deathly sick—and no one can do anything for her. There’s no human solution to the problem. It’s rather like the case of the hemorrhaging woman who interrupts Jesus’s journey to Jairus’s house. She approaches him in the crowd with the laughable prospect of touching his garments so that she may be healed.

No one laughs at her, but the disciples all but laugh at Jesus. They’re rather cynical with him when he stops and asks who touched him. Can’t you see that there’s a large crowd around you? Why in the world would you ask such a foolish question? They simply don’t get it, just as the crowds in Jairus’s house don’t get it. And because they don’t get it, they laugh.

All the scoffers in these Gospel stories are used to seeking human solutions to human problems. Even the hemorrhaging woman tried it for a while. For twelve years, she sought the wisdom of human doctors, and in her case, it seemed like she went to a fair number of charlatans who took her money but couldn’t deliver and then laughed all the way to the bank. And finally, she decides to go a different route. In Jesus, fully human but also fully divine, she seeks a divine solution to her human problems. In this God-man, who is the perfect image of God, she will find the divine solution to her problem.

And despite thousands of years of Christian witness to the one who brings us divine solutions to human problems, we still live in an age when we’re constantly looking for human solutions to human problems. Searching for divine solutions doesn’t deny our human agency, but it should prompt us to acknowledge that we too frequently lose hope in the One who can do what seems utterly laughable.

In some ways, the Church has forgotten the laughable good news of the Gospel. After all, we supposedly worship a God who gave Sarah and Abraham the gift of children in their old age, who parted the Red Sea to deliver the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, who fed them in the wilderness as they journeyed to the Promised Land, and who sent his beloved Son into the world not to condemn it—despite its profound stubbornness—but to save it and make it whole. We worship this God who did the most laughable thing of all when he raised Jesus from the dead, offering the eternal laugh to the wily lies of the evil one, who had made a living out of giving sin and death more power than they really had.

It should be no surprise that we will be, and probably are, laughed at by others. They laugh that we would take time out of our busy schedules to be here in the middle of summer to worship God. They laugh that we believe that forgiveness should be routinely offered to the worst offenders because sin doesn’t have the power it wants us to think it has. They laugh because we sacrificially give our money and time to ministry that we believe is life-changing, while those who laugh think we’re throwing money at a sinking ship. In short, they’re laughing because we’re putting our faith, trust, and hope in a God who offers divine solutions to human problems.

Those who laughed at the rusted Good Shepherd, Rosemont, welcome sign a few years back were unconsciously subscribing to the popular despair of our age. They couldn’t imagine that a parish that was then close to death could be brought back to life. It’s the same with all in the Church who can only put their hope in the largest churches with the biggest endowments. It's the same in our society, where the decline in churchgoing is automatically equated with the Church’s demise. It’s the same in an overly rational culture that equates lack of physical healing with the absence of God. It’s the same whenever we assume that the impossible is always the impossible. When we’re looking for human solutions to divine problems, a parish like Good Shepherd, Rosemont, seems laughable. But we who are here know better. We know that our story is a vivid example of a divine solution to a human problem from a God who can raise the dead and give the laugh to sin and death.

For those of us who choose not to fear but to believe and to hope, we have the last laugh. But this laugh is not at anyone’s expense. It’s not cynical or nervous. It’s not an expression of despair. It’s a laugh of profound joy that’s rooted in the hope that, no matter the odds, God will turn all our human expectations upside down.

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
June 30, 2024

Towards the Other Shore

It must have happened in the evening, a couple of days after we installed the Memorial to the Lost on our lawn in memory of victims of gun violence in this county. I noticed it the next day. First, I saw that some of the T-shirts in the memorial were askew and uprooted. Graffitied on a flyer kiosk installed as part of the monument were these words: “This religion is responsible for the destruction of people and the world.” I was taken aback.

And then as I walked my dog Beau further down Lancaster Avenue, my heart sank even further as I saw the shattered glass on our shadow box sign. That sign is intended to be a gesture of welcome to our neighbors, to those walking by for a stroll or on the way to work, and to those waiting patiently for a bus at the bus stop. The sign, with its multi-colored banner, clearly announces that this parish is a place where all are welcome and can find belonging. Above all, it’s a place where all are intended to feel safe and to know that they are loved by God, without question.

My first reaction to the act of vandalism on our property was to assume that it must have been an angry response to the installation of the Memorial to the Lost. I reported the vandalism to the police, thinking that would probably be the end of it. But a few days later, I was once again walking Beau when I saw a police officer knocking on the church’s office door, even though it was after 6:30 p.m. When I asked the officer if I could help her, she explained that a person had been apprehended in response to the vandalism on our property. Did we want to press charges? It turned out that the person in question had been triggered not by the Memorial to the Lost but by the multi-colored banner of welcome on our church sign. In a confusing but understandable mixture of emotions, a person who had once felt excluded by the Church then enacted their resulting anger on the sign of a church that announces itself as a place of inclusion. Violence begets violence, doesn’t it?

I told the police officer that I’d have to speak with our vestry about whether we would press charges. We wouldn’t gain anything from it, and I wasn’t sure how it would be helpful. Our collective response crystallized in a vestry exchange over email, when one member had a compassionate suggestion. Instead of pressing charges, what if we sent a message to the person who committed the crime? What if we explained that, in a gesture of forgiveness, we were sorry for the hurt this person had experienced by the Church in the past? What if we offered a different witness to the transactional retribution of our society? What if we offered a healing message of peace?

Peace is indeed what has been breathed upon the Church by our Lord, and it isn’t ours to control or possess. It’s Christ’s hallowed gift to us and the world. This is the peace we exchange week after week halfway through Mass, which is far more profound than a handshake or smile. It’s something to be handled delicately and with reverence, because Christ’s gift carries great power. It heals, but it also dispels our fear. It calms the storms of our lives, but it causes violence to dissipate before it.

This is the peace that Jesus speaks to the wind and the sea when he’s in the boat with the disciples during a terrifying storm. Our English translation uses exclamation marks to give emphasis to Jesus’s words, but in the Greek, there are no such tonal cues. The exclamation marks make Jesus’s words sound as if Jesus is fighting the wind and the sea or yelling at them to cease. But I wonder if his speech was firm and yet gentle. He was speaking words of peace, and I suspect his manner of speaking was peaceful, too. His peace is reverential. Just a few words, Peace, be still, and the deadly natural forces of the chaotic universe are put in their place. Or better yet, they find order and calm under the sovereignty of the one who is Lord of all creation.

And curiously, the disciples’ response to Jesus’s action is awe and reverence, but depending on how the Greek is translated, it may be that they simply ended up more afraid. As one translation has it, they were “enormously afraid.”[1] But of what were they afraid? They were, of course, in awe of one who could calm the threatening seas, but they must also have been afraid, with some measure of anxiety, of this mysterious person, whom they thought they knew but really didn’t. Were they afraid of his ability to be so supernaturally calm amid a storm while dispelling any looming devastation with just a few direct words? But even more troubling, were they afraid of what their Lord was demanding of them in discipleship?

Jesus’s calming of the storm is both a demonstration of his miraculous power and a visible sign of an invisible power far more awe-inspiring than even the subversion of natural forces. Faith in the peace of the Lord of all creation is a daring, even crazy, willingness to believe that however real the storms of life are, they have no power to destroy our lives. Our true lives and identities are found in Christ, who gives us life even beyond the grave.[2]

The disciples took Jesus with them in the boat, just as he was. And who he was is who he still is. He is the one who commands us to push away from the shore and venture to the other side. For those earliest disciples, it was a risky and frightening move from Jewish to Gentile territory. For us, going to the other shore means pushing away from our comfort zones. Crossing the sea is getting into the boat with Jesus, just as he is, and setting off into the unknown.

And we don’t know what is waiting for us on the other side. It may be hostility because we carry the Gospel on behalf of a Church that has wounded too many in the past and still wounds people, just as she wounded the person who shattered the glass on our sign. On the other shore, we’ll undoubtedly encounter a culture that might not always intend to be hostile but that constantly demands more time and energy and money from us, while pulling us away from mission. On the other shore, we find even fellow Christians who think about God differently from us, or who think we’ve lost our way, or who might not even think we’re Christians at all. On the other shore, we find the uncharted frontier of the Church’s future in an uncertain world.

To take Jesus in the boat with us, just as he is, is to push away from the shore with Jesus on his own terms, not on ours. It’s refusing to make him into an on-demand magician but to accept his answer to our prayers as his own will. It’s to embrace a Lord who doesn’t return violence for violence but offers forgiveness and unending peace. It’s to accept the presence of a Lord who doesn’t affirm our complacency and comfort but coaxes us into risky discipleship. It’s to accept the mission of a Lord who tells us that we need to cross to the other side and that we can’t stay just where we are because discipleship is about growth and sacrifice. It’s no wonder, then, that the disciples are “enormously afraid” at the end! They’re beginning to understand that to follow Jesus is to push off from the shore in faith with only his peace as protection in a hostile world.

We, too, like those early disciples are probably more than a little afraid. We’re probably afraid of the unknown, of how to be a part of the Church’s growth in an age of malaise, of how to build vibrant ministry amid financial challenges and aging buildings, of how to be a safe and viable place of welcome in a culture that is increasingly reactionary and in a Church that’s often confused. The corresponding temptation is to stay in our shells, retreat behind our stone walls, and refrain from crossing to the other shore. But to do so, is to leave Jesus outside the boat and to ignore his summons to push away into the unknown. The smashed glass of our shadow box sign is only one visible sign of the storms we might encounter as we push off from the shore to engage in ministry on the other side. It’s not without risks, hurt, pain, or some cost.

Sadly, even though we reached out to the police, we were never able to convey our message of forgiveness to the person who vandalized our sign. But I hope our implicit message to that wounded soul is one small step towards claiming the peace that Christ has breathed upon us. I pray that our refusal to inflict retribution as a means of perpetuating the cycle of violence is a visible, if human, manifestation of the peace that always calms and still the storms of our lives. Being a disciple of Jesus is more than saying we’ll follow him. It means being in the boat with Jesus, on his terms, just as he was and is and always will be. And no matter the storms we’ll face in that boat, Christ’s peace is always with us. It’s his eternal gift. And nothing can take that gift away from us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2024

[1] David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2023)

[2] See Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 146.

Waiting, Watching, and Reaping

Of all the things my Cajun grandfather cooked, it was his roux that held the greatest mystery. It was a frequent familial topic of discussion. Other family members would try to get their roux dark enough to lend the right amount of richness to the etouffee, and frequently, it would be either too light or it would burn.

Roux in Cajun dishes is the secret ingredient, and it’s the foundation of dishes like etouffee and gumbo. A little vegetable oil or butter and some flour, that’s all. But like making a risotto, you have to stir and monitor roux constantly. Walking away from it for even a minute can mean you’ve lost everything. Stir and stir and stir. Watch and watch and watch. And at some point—and this is where the mystery lies—the roux will be ready. If your roux cooks just a second too long, it will burn. It's a bit like performing a chemical titration. One drop too many can kill the experiment.

Most recipes about making a dark roux will give you descriptions of the color of the roux. It should be the color of peanut butter, some say. But there’s something more to judging the status of a roux simmering on the stovetop. The ultimate judge of its readiness can’t be a visual description in a recipe, nor can it be a defined amount of time. So many factors are involved: the type of cooktop, levels of heat, kinds of oil, types of flour. The ultimate judge is a kind of sixth sense in the cook, who can tell when the point of perfection has been reached by smell and sight. I wish I’d asked my PawPaw how he could tell when a roux was done, but I bet he wouldn’t have given a specific cooking time or a particular shade of brown. I think he would have said something like, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

There’s a mystery to making a good roux that alludes even the best of cooks. It’s annoying in its lack of specificity and so is unlike the chemistry of baking. It’s not a science; it’s an art. And this indefinable art and its accompanying air of mystery are frustrating to those of us who are generally impatient and like clearcut answers. Cooking up a delicious dark roux will vary based on your environment and ingredients and pace of stirring. It requires settling into the moment with patience and attentiveness. It necessitates giving up control to all those unpredictable factors that are operating behind the scenes. But despite these uncontrollable factors, the art of discerning when the roux is ready can be acquired only with time.

And time is the key that unlocks some of the mystery to Jesus’s parables. You must spend time with them, and even that’s not enough because parables speak of something that is timeless. I don’t know how a Biblical literalist reckons with parables because they’re meant to frustrate and challenge, not to give answers. To literalize them is to destroy them. There’s no secret code to unlocking a parable. A parable invites us into a world of mystery, a world in which we must live and breathe and spend some time. And when speaking about the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t limit himself to one shining parable. He must tell several, each of which can’t fully encapsulate the meaning of that mysterious and glorious kingdom.

Being a good agrarian man, our Lord naturally gravitated to images of planting. He compares the kingdom of God to the scattering of seed upon the ground, which would, of course, make complete sense to a farmer, whose life depends on the weather and infinite patience. It would probably even make some sense to an avid gardener who gardens as an avocation. But it may be bewildering to those of us without a green thumb and especially to those of us who live in a culture that operates at ninety miles an hour with no time to breathe and wait and watch. If you ask me, the most surprising thing of all in this image of scattered, growing seed is its uncontrollability.

This parable must frustrate the living daylights out of anyone who adores planning and wants to be in control. The man in the parable does practically nothing. He scatters the seed and then waits. And waits and waits. And watches and watches and watches. Meanwhile, the earth has a mind and agency of its own, producing first the blade, the ear, and then the full grain in the ear. Who knows how long this would take. And while there are signs that the harvest is nearing ripeness, Jesus gives no discernable length. There’s no recipe for the readiness of this roux. The laborer waits and waits and waits until the harvest is ripe.

The problem is that this may seem like a recipe for laziness or inactivity. Perhaps an irresponsible reading of this parable gives license to those in the modern Church who say they’re managing decline or who are inclined to give up on the Church’s future altogether. But nowhere does Jesus’s parable equate waiting with lack of agency. In fact, this parable demands the most vigilant form of agency. It demands that the laborer know when the harvest is ripe, at once, for the sickle. The cook can’t leave the roux for even a second on the stovetop lest it burn.

There are all kinds of reasons why this parable frustrates. There’s, above all, the mystery of time. There’s the surrendering of control to the timeline of the environment. But there’s also the knowledge that to know when the harvest is ripe we must have lived. We must have lived through some crops that we failed to harvest in time. We must have lived through disappointments of too much rain or not enough. We must have been forced to wait with excruciating patience until the time was right. We must have gone through some trial and error to hone our skills of discernment, to know just when the harvest was ready for the sickle. We must have cooked gallons of roux and seen and smelled them before we could say like my PawPaw, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

But despite some of the frustrating aspects of this parable, I find it to be one of the most encouraging for the modern Church. It’s unbelievably good news. It doesn’t give us easy answers or a definitive key to discerning the ripeness of a particular harvest. It simply assures of us something that many Christians have too easily forgotten or ignored. It comforts us with the good news that the harvest will come one day. It assures us that in God’s kingdom, there will always be growth, and the Gospel will live on and never disappear.

Sure, experiencing the fruit of God’s kingdom may take far longer than we imagined or would like. It will undoubtedly require infinite patience. Chiefly, it challenges those of us who like control to cede that control to God, who alone gives growth to the seed in God’s good time. In this, there’s hope for us when the pews seem far too empty. There’s hope when we’re confronted with the pessimism of statistics trying to predict the future of the church. The problem with all those supposedly clear signs is that they wrest control of the kingdom from God and give it to humans. And this is a grave error.

So, instead of predictions and statistics, we can opt for something less definable and more mysterious, however frustrating it may be. It’s rather like making a roux. Jesus’s parable suggests that our role in God’s kingdom is not to claim total responsibility for the growth of the Gospel or even to control it. Our job is to scatter the seeds and wait. And wait. And wait. But while we’re waiting, and through troublesome seasons and destructive weather, we learn to pray. We learn that if the bedrock of our lives is prayer, and if we are patient, we’ll learn the art of discernment. We’ll learn how to keep stirring the roux while attentively but non-anxiously watching its color and smelling its aroma. And we wait some more. And we continue to pray. And we watch, and we wait yet some more. And then in God’s good time, with plenty of living and lots of time, we’ll eventually know when the harvest is ripe. The roux will be ready. We’ll know it because we can see it. And we’ll be able to see it because we have been trusting in God and saying our prayers. And so, we’ll put in the sickle, and we’ll give thanks because, as promised, the harvest has come.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 16, 2023

What's Good for You

Because there are no Publix, Harris Teeter, or Kroger grocery stories within several hundred miles of here, I do most of my shopping at Trader Joe’s. It may be the only store where I’m routinely asked, “did you find everything you wanted in your visit today?” I almost invariably answer, “yes.” And, truth be told, the local Trader Joe’s store usually has everything I want to buy.

But there are times when I want to respond with something other than yes. “Actually, I was really looking for the pumpkin rolls that you only seem to carry in the fall. I would really love it if you carried those all-year round. Oh, and sometimes you have lasagna noodles, but sometimes you don’t. Could you look into that? And the spicy trail mix that makes such a great snack, well, I haven’t seen that in a while.”

I’m just as much a product of our consumer culture as the next person, and this consumerism has only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic. “Could you alter the camera angle on the livestream just a bit,” someone types in the Facebook comments section. “And while you’re at it, the volume is kind of low.” “I’m never going to that restaurant again because they downsized their portions during the pandemic.” “I simply can’t go to church there because they moved the service thirty minutes later, and the sound system is horrible.” Perhaps I exaggerate, but you get the picture, I’m sure.

And maybe as a reaction to our consumer culture, I’ve found myself with a greater appreciation for farm-to-table restaurants, where the menu changes according to the season, rather like Trader Joe’s. You get what’s fresh and available. Seldom will you be bored, and almost always you will be surprised. You might have really wanted the meatloaf, but it’s summer, so you’re more likely to find a lighter dish on the menu.

I enjoy being surprised at Trader Joe’s or a farm-to-table restaurant, even if I’m also disappointed when I can’t get what I want. There’s something beneficial to me in such disappointment and in the accompanying surprise of available options. I don’t really need the pumpkin rolls. I can survive quite well without them, and something else can adequately serve as a substitute. The grocery store—and more importantly, the world—doesn’t revolve around my wants, needs, and desires. Complaining does no good. It’s better for my soul to accept gratefully what is available to me. It’s good for me.

But complaining, mumbling, and grumbling is the usual response in John’s Gospel when Jesus announces what’s good for those he came to love and save. They’re unable to recognize what’s good for them, and what’s good for them is Jesus, the bread of life. Just who does he think he is by suggesting that he is God? And how grotesque it is to speak of eating his flesh! To contemplate drinking his blood would have been utterly offensive to Jews for whom blood was the locus of life in a living animal and therefore forbidden to be consumed.

We need to go back all the way to the Books of Exodus and Numbers, to discover the roots of St. John’s Bread of Life discourse, which we’ve heard today. Do you remember what happened? As soon as God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and brought them out into freedom, they began to complain and grumble. “Why have you brought us out of slavery to allow us to starve in the desert? And there’s no water to drink.” The Israelites whined about the garlic, cucumbers, leeks, melons, and onions to eat back in Egypt. “It would have been so much better if they were back there!” God’s provision in the land of freedom wasn’t good enough for them, because it wasn’t what they wanted. To them, it wasn’t enough.

When the Lord sent manna to sate the people’s hunger, we’re told that he did so because he heard their grumblings. But when the people saw the manna, they said, “What is it?” You could almost see their upper lips curl in distaste at this strange, fine, flaky substance on the ground. The amazing thing is that when they ate it, nobody had too much or too little. Everyone had just what they needed, no more, no less. They had what was good for them.

And still, God’s people couldn’t follow his instructions. “Waste nothing,” he said. But they did waste the gift, and the manna left over stank to high heaven and became riddled with maggots. God told them to store up everything they needed for the sabbath, and still some disobeyed him by searching for food on the sabbath. The people just couldn’t do things on God’s terms. They had to do things as they wanted.

It turns out that our modern consumer culture isn’t so modern. There’s something in our DNA as humans—pride, sin, selfishness—that makes it very difficult for us to do what we don’t want to do or feel like doing. And oddly enough, sometimes what we don’t want to do is precisely what’s good for us. So, when God provided manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, he quite deliberately didn’t give them what they wanted or asked for. He gave them what they needed, no more, no less. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. God gave them what was ultimately good for them.

The feast of Corpus Christi is a celebration of the supreme gift that God has given us, the gift of the Body and Blood of his Son Jesus Christ in the sacrament of the Mass. God has given us precisely what’s good for us. And as St. John reminds us, in consuming the Body and Blood of our Lord, we find eternal life, right here, right now. In doing so, we shall live forever.

In the Eucharist, God has given us not necessarily what we asked for or what we expected or even what we wanted, but it certainly is what we need. It’s what’s good for us. We should eat this gift of Jesus’s very flesh and blood always and frequently. The Eucharistic gift is no spiritual menu catered to our whims and desires. It’s a menu that is everlasting, constant, and always intended for our good. No matter what we’ve done and no matter how recalcitrant and ungrateful we may be, God’s gift of himself in the sacramental feast is always extended to us out of his infinite mercy and compassion.

But we are a complaining people, aren’t we? We live in an age where there’s never enough. Why, then, would we expect a bit of bread and wine to give us eternal life? How could that ever be enough? It’s far easier to complain and fail to be grateful. It’s far easier to see scarcity where there’s hidden abundance. It’s far easier to control a gift on demand rather than receive it according to the giver’s time. It’s far easier to grumble and favor certainty over mystery.

The Eucharist is God’s loving answer to our ingratitude. It’s God’s assurance that there’s always enough in a world that thinks there’s never enough. In the Eucharist, God gives us what we can’t control and what we can only receive. The Eucharist is exactly what’s good for us in God’s inverted world, where faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains and where every hair on our head is counted and where even the one lost sheep out of the hundred is searched for and found.

To have eternal life is to live as if what we have and who we are is enough in the eyes of God. Eternal life means living as if the impossible is possible and as if five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish can feed 5,000 people. Eternal life means that in coming here week after week and feasting on Christ we will never be hungry again.

So, eat the bread and drink the cup in good times and bad. Partake of the feast when you feel like it and especially when you don’t. Feast on it when you’re struggling with your faith and also when you’re certain about it. Share this sacred meal when you’re happy and particularly when you’re sad. Receive the gift, even if you didn’t ask for it, even if the wafer is small and tastes like cardboard. Drink the cup, even if it seems like it’s unsanitary and the wine is cheap. “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus said. Receive this gift, it's good for you. And when you do, you shall live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of Corpus Christi
June 2, 2024

Sign Me Up!

If only I could have been a fly on the wall that day. By all accounts, the Jerusalem Temple was massive. It dominated the landscape of ancient Jerusalem. The height of the walls made any average human seem as small as. . . well, a fly. And it was full of mystery, of rooms that should be approached with profound reverence. Nothing about this Temple was ordinary. It was where heaven and earth were joined.

So, a fly on the wall in the Temple on the day that Isaiah received his vision must have felt spectacularly small. With its peculiar and limited eyesight, a fly would have had to move around, I suppose, to take in the scene. First, there was a transcendent vision of the Lord on a raised throne, with gargantuan, flowing skirts filling the interior of the holy space. Seraphim with their strange qualities of six wings were flying about.

And the voices of the seraphim must have sounded alien, and I honestly have no idea what they would have sounded like to a fly’s ears. But the seraphim were calling to one another, “holy, holy, holy!” Then, the doorposts began to shake, and surely the fly would have felt or sensed the vibrations of that terrifying sound. Suddenly, there was the voice of a man lamenting his own sinfulness and frailty. Perhaps he even dropped to his knees as he confessed his unworthiness to Almighty God.

That’s when one of the seraphim appeared, with a whoosh of air as it swooped down to the humbled man. The seraphim was using its six wings to hold a pair of tongs—unwieldy, to say the least. And within those tongs was a crackling, smoking, excessively hot coal that had come from the altar in the Temple. And with a swift motion, the coal touched the lips of the man, cleansing away his sin. Then, the Lord spoke with a voice that would surely have commanded the attention of any mortal. “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And in response, a feebler, even tentative, voice says, “here am I; send me.”

Now, imagine, being a fly on the wall in this room. Surely, any fly would feel rather small in this sizeable space. A fly on the wall here on a Sunday before Mass would notice people gathering. There would be in the air a palpable, if not visual, sense that something exciting and profound was about to happen. As a friend of mine would say, “We’re about to have church!” Apart from a rustle of people finding their pews and quiet greetings to fellow parishioners, there would also be a reverent silence, a sense of awe, and a joyful expectation of something magnificent to come. By buzzing around, a fly would notice that many people drop to their knees for a time, with heads bowed.

Then, the organ strikes up, and beautiful, captivating sounds fill the air. What would that sound like to a fly? And soon a procession is forming and moving up the aisle and heading to the front. And while there’s no clear vision of God, something is special about the front of the church, a fly might notice (if it had a brain like ours). The people are bowing to something up there, and soon clouds of incense smoke are filling the air. Voices are raised in song, and I would bet that a fly could sense the power of sonic frequencies uniting in praise.

But after some time and much carrying on, a fly buzzing around in the room might notice that everyone is again going down on their knees. If a fly could understand what was going on, it would hear words of confession. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a person of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” And a sign made in the air by someone at the front is rather like a coal from the altar touching the lips of the people. And after more pageantry and ceremony, the people move to the front and kneel once again and stretch out their hands and eat and drink something with a delicacy unlike usual human feasting. And before too long, someone at the front again says something, and it could very well be, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And a crowd of people respond in unison, with vibrations in the fly’s ears, “Here am I; send me.” And the people depart.

But to what are they going? And to what did Isaiah go? If we want to be completely honest about the whole story of Isaiah’s call by God, we need to face where he went after he so eagerly said, “send me.” Sign me up! is what Isaiah said, if we quote the old Gospel hymn. Sign me up for your mission, Lord.

But little did Isaiah know for what he was signing up. Indeed, after the fact, he may very well have regretted what he signed up for, because the Lord was sending him on a terrifying mission. Isaiah was to go and speak the brutal truth to a people who had lost their way. Isaiah was to announce to God’s people that they would experience ruin and destruction, the natural consequence of their errant ways. They would suffer. It would be very bad. But. . . but, one day a remnant of that people would turn back to the Lord in repentance, and a seed of future hope would remain. All was not lost. There was still hope.

On this Trinity Sunday, there’s no better way to praise the mystery of the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, than coming to worship. It’s in worship that we acknowledge that we will never speak logically or rationally about the mystery of the Holy Trinity. And because our words and theological concepts will inevitably fail, we are reduced to worship. In worship, we can’t help but feel ourselves drawn out of ourselves and into something greater than ourselves. We can’t help but experience within our very bodies the dynamism of the God we worship, who is One God in Three Persons—one shared substance, three distinct but united persons, a God of perfect community. The robes of God’s skirts sweep from heaven to earth and fill this space, and his awesome presence elicits our praise and song and prayer.

And at some point, we drop to our knees, recognizing how small we are, like a fly on the wall in this space. We recognize how small our narrow worlds are, where we envy another’s gifts, or judge someone harshly, or refuse to share what we have, and in general, fail to be grateful. We name how messed up our world is, where someone walks into a business and shoots the place up or where certain people are still told by parts of the Church that they don’t belong, or where even the most powerful nation in the world can’t seem to muster a functional government because of spite and pride. We confess it all on our knees to God because before his staggering presence, we are humbled and awed.

But no matter how small we feel, it does no good to wallow in our sinfulness, and it’s not what God wants because he has something else in store for us. Our confession lasts only a brief time before a coal touches our lips, and we are healed. Speak the word only, Lord, and my soul shall be healed. We’re healed, and God no longer lets us have an excuse to stay away from him. God doesn’t insist that we stay away from his presence, as if God were a wrathful bigot. God doesn’t require that we become mired in our sinfulness. God invites us forward, and we consume the Body and Blood of his Son. God invites us into the divine life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity comes to us, and we are invited to share in the divine life of the Trinity, where one day, we hope to live eternally. God as Trinity is a God who will not stay removed from us, but comes to us and invites us to come to him. As Isaiah saw in his vision, God’s robes spill out from heaven to earth and sweep us up into relationship with him.

And just as the Father once lovingly sent his Son into the world to save and heal it, and as the Son lovingly sent his Spirit upon the Church so that the Church could be sent into the world to tell the good news, so after we feed on Christ, we, too, are sent. God says, “Whom shall I send?” Send me, we say. Sign me up!

And that’s where the trouble begins, or maybe even the hesitation. This is where we balk, because we’re asked not to bask in the majesty of worship forever, but to go to the streets, knowing our frailty but also knowing the incredible mission that God has given us. God, whom we worship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a God of mission. God’s very nature is mission, of an outward-looking love that spills out from the very being of God into our world.

So, sign me up, Lord, that my own love may spill out into the world. Sign me up, Lord, to go to the neighbor who’s been scorned and ostracized and tell him that God has forgiven all and that although the world may hate him, God always cherishes him. Sign me up, Lord, to wade into the fray of cruel, political speech to announce that I will have no part of it. Sign me up, Lord, to go to the outcast and forsaken to say that while many may deny them dignity, they still bear the irrevocable image of God. Sign me up, Lord, to tell others in the Church that although the laborers seem to be few, the harvest is indeed plentiful, and God will give the growth. The Church will thrive. Sign me up, Almighty God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because I have beheld your glory and felt it in my bones, and I can’t help but proclaim it to the world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday
May 26, 2024          

Far Better than We Can Imagine

There’s a poignant intersection of the Church and secular calendars at this time of year. As the Church hears Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples before ascending to his Father in heaven, professors, teachers, and students are saying farewell to one another. As we speak, college students are walking on stages to receive their diplomas, with smiles and cheers. They must feel free: free to read for pleasure, free to focus on what they really love either in the workforce, a gap year, or further study. Their freedom is symbolized in the tossing of mortarboards into the air and the shared joyfulness as one chapter of life ends and another begins.

Graduations are called commencements, of course, because although something is ending, a new thing, usually an even greater, better thing is beginning. It’s the start of a new life. But there must also be a sense of sadness, of going one’s separate way and parting from dear friends. Students must feel bereft of the guidance of their professors as they move alone into the world. While the future is bright and there’s a hope that things will be better, there’s also the hard reality of moving into greater maturity. With a high school diploma or college degree comes more responsibility, of living as a mature adult in a scary world and of being on one’s own. It takes a leap of faith to move from being mentored and guided into the risks and freedom of independence.

I remember driving to my high school graduation with tears welling up inside my eyes, knowing that I would probably never, ever see some of my classmates again in this life. I remember packing up my things and moving to a dorm room, away from so much that was familiar. Years later, I remember settling into an apartment thousands of miles from my hometown, with sadness but also excitement. But no matter how difficult all that was, in each instance, I changed. And things did get better. I matured and deepened as a person.

And I learned that what I had been first taught was only the first phase of knowledge. There were things I couldn’t accept in my younger years, and yet when I could eventually receive new wisdom, my deepening knowledge was indeed built on what came before. Things got better because my horizon was enlarged, and even though maturing brought more pain and sorrow, oddly enough, my joy expanded, too.

Jesus’s earliest disciples must have felt many strange and disturbing emotions as Jesus approached the cross. They couldn’t have fully understood what Jesus was saying in his great prayer to the Father on the eve of his death, the prayer we’ve heard in today’s Gospel. It must have been as if he was speaking in code. But later they would have a greater appreciation for his words. After Jesus’s gory passion and tragic death, after his rising again and post-resurrection encounters with them, after his ascension to the right hand of the Father, and after the pouring of the Holy Spirit upon them at Pentecost, they would begin to comprehend Jesus’s final prayer to his Father before his death. For the disciples, things were going to get better. And though some of them would face premature deaths for their faith, things did get better because they had come to know that even death could have no power over their life in Christ.

But back on the eve of Jesus’s death, after he and the disciples had broken bread together, and Jesus had washed the disciples’ feet, and then after Judas had departed and gone into the dark of night to devise his plans of betrayal, the disciples must have felt intense sorrow in overhearing Jesus’s prayer to his Father. It was both a prayer meant for their ears and a charge that only later would they come to understand.

How could they have understood that it would be to their advantage for Jesus to depart from them and go to the Father? How could they have known just who the Spirit was and how they would experience the Spirit’s presence? How could they have been hopeful about their next steps? How at all could they have imagined that things would get better when things seemed so utterly miserable and disorienting? As we say in Sunday School with the children, “they didn’t understand, but they wouldn’t forget.”[1]

It may be that we, too, feel the disciples’ confusion and sadness. It may be that we feel a great loneliness as we navigate one of the loneliest periods of history. Are you feeling bereft of guidance and hope? Are you feeling a waywardness in your life? Are you confused and disturbed by what you see in the world and even in the Church? Are you overwhelmed by the demands of an incessant job, of the ruthless competition of the academy, or by the struggles of trying to live in a world structured only for the rich? If so, it might seem foolish to believe that things can get better.

But this is precisely what Jesus promises on the eve of his death when he foretells the sending of his Spirit upon the disciples. It’s precisely what we celebrate on this Day of Pentecost. It’s precisely what we say when we welcome a new person into the body of Christ through the sacrament of Baptism. Things will get better.

It's not that humankind moves from bad to good, from ignorant to sophisticated, from brute beast to intelligent human. When Jesus suggests that things will get better, he means that God always has something in store for our future. God intends for us always to have a future. And because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that future is always better, bigger, and more incredible than we can imagine. It’s bigger and better because it can hold sorrow and pain with the fullness of joy.

And it’s all possible because of the power of the Spirit. It’s possible because Christ dares to entrust the care of the world to our fallible hands. It’s possible because Jesus invites us into more mature living, less infantilizing of ourselves and others, and more trust in what God can enable us to do. It’s so because Jesus sends us the Spirit to lead us into all truth. And at those times when we feel most forsaken or bereft, we know that there are still things we can’t bear. But one day, in the future that God has prepared for us, we will discover his astounding truth. And that truth will set us free.

Today, God is offering that gift of profound freedom to Douglas in his baptism. Things will get better for him. When he goes down into the water of baptism, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he will rise with Christ into a new way of living in and seeing the world. He will rise in the hope that things will indeed get better. His baptism is not an inoculation from the rough edges of the world, but it is a seal of hope that no matter what sorrow and troubles Douglas will face, God will always give him a better future. God’s future for us is always larger and brighter than we can imagine.

It was to the disciples’ advantage and it’s to our advantage that Jesus departed to his heavenly Father because it means that he’s with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Salvation is no longer localized in the finite constrains of Jesus’s earthly life but is spread across the global Body of Christ. The possibilities are endless. Things can be so much better than they are.

And what glorious news this is to a Church struggling to find her place in a world that has increasingly less time for God. It’s such beautiful news for all who’ve found themselves sucked into the mechanical grind of systems that rob us of the fullness of life that God longs to give us. Things will get better. The Spirit is still speaking to us and keeping the Gospel alive. And just when we’ve had enough of violence and factionalism and cruel speech, we can hope and trust that things will get better.

Things get better because Jesus has given us the Spirit to lead us into all truth. Things get better because death doesn’t have the final world. Things get better because no matter what people to do our bodies, they will be raised and we shall live with God. Things get better because even though we may be rejected by our biological families, we have an extended family in Christ. Things get better because when we mature in Christ, we no longer live to ourselves or to the world’s expectations of us. We live to God’s expectation of us, and this always means fullness of life. Things will get better because the Spirit will continue to lead us into all truth, the truth that will set us free. By the Spirit’s power, we will do even greater things than Jesus in his earthly life. And because of this startling hope, we know that by God’s gracious hand, we have a future that is so much better than we can ever imagine.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday
May 19, 2024

[1] From the Godly Play curriculum

Taking a Chance on the World

As I walked out of the sacristy, I was surprised to see them. They were two young adults, standing right in front of the Communion rail pointing at the stained-glass window and talking about it. “Hi,” I said. “Hi!” the woman returned. “You have a nice smile!” She was bright and cheerful. Her companion was a bit more morose, however. They continued to wander around the church, admiring the furnishings as I proceeded to set up for the concert that evening.

Soon, the couple approached me. They had some questions. The man started off with a zinger. “Do you think there’s evil around here, in this church?” I wasn’t quite sure what to say, except to acknowledge that I’m convinced evil exists. And, yes, I do think it infiltrates churches from time to time. But I shared my sincere belief that, as a Christian, I also believe that evil does not have the last word. We disavow it at our peril, and at the same time, it’s possible to be so preoccupied with resisting evil that it, paradoxically, begins to have more power over us than it should. I told the young man that I thought that prayer has healing power, and it’s something with which evil does not easily contend.

The man’s companion, the woman, in keeping with her radiant personality, was much more ebullient. She smiled and told me how she thought that love was the essence of everything. She said, “I just think that we’re all supposed to love each other, and that’s what everything is really about,” or at least it was something to that effect. The man and woman were like two extremes: one joyfully optimistic with a tendency towards a pan-religious understanding of moral values, the other a bit obsessed with the world’s darkness and evil.

The man said, “I look around at the world, and I just think we must be living in the end times. There’s just so much awful stuff out there.” I half agreed with him. No, I don’t think we’re living in the end times, but yes, I do think the world’s often a mess. I told the couple that I thought we weren’t supposed to know when the end of the age would be, and I believed the best way to deal with evil was to recognize its presence and then gently avoid letting it into our minds and souls. Let it go. Don’t fight it.

This man and this woman who stumbled into the church emblemized two ways of thinking in our increasingly polarized world. One attempts to reduce all religions to a happy-go-lucky, abstruse concept of love in which we all just need to get along. It’s perhaps naïve about the intractable tensions and persistent anguish of earthly life. But the other perspective is pessimistic, even reactive. The world is evil, and that will never change. The best we can hope for is the end of time as we know it, when we’ll be delivered from this sorry state. The world is something to be escaped.

This is the view of the Left Behind novels and other apocalyptic literature where the bad people are left behind to deal with the hell that is earth, and the righteous are raptured out of this world. This is also the view, if more subtle, of many Christians these days. In a world that seems increasingly more secularized and even hostile to religion, it’s easy to cast ourselves in the victim role, where it’s us versus them. Everyone is against us. Society is against us. No one cares about moral values anymore. Traditions are being lost. So, we must fight against it. Fight, fight, fight. And if you don’t fight, you lose.

Look around, and you will see Christian reactivity everywhere. The Great Litany compels us to “beat down Satan under our feet.” A painted shield in our cloister by the office door shows St. Dunstan stomping on the devil. The caption is “St. Dunstan gives the devil his due.” Evil is a scary thing, and it’s most certainly real. But sometimes we are unnecessarily violently and reactive against it. Wouldn’t it be better simply to acknowledge it, firmly renounce it, and then refuse to let it have any power over us? Doesn’t reactivity at some point end up giving evil more power than it really has or deserves?

If we want to find the perfect example of confident peace and stability in a reactive world, we need look no further than Jesus Christ. He’s the one who calms the storms while everyone else in the boat is losing their minds. He refuses to return violence with violence. He tells the disciples that when they are in the mission field and people refuse to listen to them, they should simply shake the dust off their shoes and move on. He doesn’t take the bait of petty arguments in which his opponents try to engage him. He resists Satan in the wilderness without fighting him. And in his high priestly prayer in St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is the epitome of prayerful calm as he both recognizes the presence of evil in the world and also entrusts the world to his disciples.

Yes, the world hates them because the world will always hate anyone who is committed to the upside-down values of the gospel. Yes, the evil one is out there, always waiting to ensnare the lover of Christ. Yes, Jesus is not of the world, nor are the disciples of the world. And yet—and yet—God the Father has sent Jesus into the world. Indeed, he was sent into the world not to condemn it, but to save it, to love it, to redeem it. And so, the disciples are being sent by Christ not away from the world as if they could be raptured from its perils but into the world. They are sent into the world because it’s worth saving.

To forsake the world, escape it, or fight it is to give up on it. But how can we give up on a world made by the hand of God and deemed very good? How can we give up on a world in which Jesus himself lived, and for which he died and rose again? How can we give up on a world to which heaven deigns to come down in every Eucharist? Isn’t there some middle ground between naïve overlooking of the world’s systemic sin and an obsession with it? Isn’t there some place between the extreme cheerfulness of the young woman I met and her somber companion?

It's not difficult for me to point out the darkness to you or the ways in which every one of us is and will be hated by the world. Just look outside the church doors at the eighty T-shirts on our lawn, memorializing the victims of gun violence in this county. The youngest victim was only twelve years old. As we speak, civil discourse appears to be breaking down, and lawmakers reject any consensus out of spite. Hateful speech and rhetoric are signs of power in a hard-hearted world, and compassion is seen as weakness. To retaliate means you’re strong, to forgive means you’re a sucker. Is there anything more difficult to live in the world but not be of the world? How can we be of the world without forsaking it? How can we live in it without selling our souls to the devil?

But the answer is not in fighting the world, nor does the answer lie in throwing up our hands in defeat. The answer seems to be in planting our feet more firmly on the soil of this earth, the soil that God made and called good, anchored in the hope that holy living can re-sanctify the world. We can do this with integrity because Jesus himself planted his own feet on the soil of this lovely world that God made. This is why our Anglo-Catholic forebears planted their churches in the darkest, grimmest parts of cities. They refused to run from the world’s problems but chose to go into the very midst of them.

At the end of his earthly life, Jesus prayed that the disciples and all who would follow them, including us, might be consecrated in the truth. And the truth is this: our home is in two places, heaven and on earth. The truth is that God created this world for goodness and still sees it as good. The truth is that God will never give up on this world. The truth is that God is calling us to be holy so that this world can also be holy.

What would happen if we started living in this world as if we were not of the world? What if we refused to be party to the open hostility and mean-spiritedness of our broken political system? What if we said no to the incessant demands of our culture that asks us to do more and more and more, and be more and more and more while giving less and less and less to the Church? What if we refused to feed the beast that demands more of our time and money? What if we faithfully worked our jobs and went dutifully to our schools but also chose to give more time and more money to our churches so they could help call the world to holiness? What if we brought our faith into our lives outside the Church? What if we trusted God’s view of us—that we are loved and beautiful in his sight—rather than the world’s, which tells us that we need its products and affirmations to be worthy? What if we started living this way, and teaching our children to live this way, still in the world but not of it?

Not long from now, at the end of this Mass, you and I will be sent by God into the world. It would be irresponsible to hole up inside this place as a refuge from the world. But we are asked to come here weekly, so that we can be made holy. We’re asked to take something of this place into the world, to pray for it, to call the world to the holiness of which it’s capable, to live as if the world can be better than it is while refusing to succumb to its darkest behavior. Because no matter how much we want to shun this world, God has never given up on it. And God never will.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day

From Jerusalem

Some years ago, on a trip to England, I had the privilege of seeing the famous Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral. It’s believed to be the world’s largest medieval map and is a rare extant example of its kind. But the Mappa Mundi is not known for its geographical accuracy. It’s unlike any map to which we’re accustomed, because the Mappa Mundi offers a view of the world shaped by a particular religious understanding. Places of importance to the medieval mindsight are represented through pictures, and certain places are given an outsized weight compared to others on the map. Religious sensibility carries greater weight than geography. The Mappa Mundi is both local and universal, even incarnational, we might say.

But perhaps the most peculiar feature of the Hereford Mappa Mundi is that the center of the world is not in Felicity, California, which in 1985 was designated by its own county supervisors as the center of the world. The center of the world according to the Hereford Mappa Mundi is Jerusalem. This shouldn’t be surprising for a medieval mindset, where for Christians the Church was the center of everything. Towns were built around their cathedrals, and the Church hierarchy wielded great power from its privileged place. In the medieval era, there was no such thing as a secular world as we know it. The Hereford Mappa Mundi knew nothing of the Americas or yet undiscovered lands. But the map’s creator had no doubt that the center of the universe, as he knew it, was in Jerusalem.

Perhaps the creator of the Mappa Mundi took a cue from St. Luke, for whom Jerusalem is unequivocally the center of the universe. In Luke’s Gospel, over the course of eight chapters, Jesus is born, grows into a man, and begins his ministry. He works miracles and teaches, and then in chapter nine, he sets his face towards Jerusalem. And it becomes clear that for Luke, just like the Mappa Mundi, the center of his theological world is Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was, of course, the center of centers for Jews, the destination of pilgrimage and the location of the holy Temple. It was to Jerusalem that Jesus and the Holy Family went for his dedication as a child and to keep the feasts, and from Jerusalem they returned home. But when Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem in chapter nine of Luke’s Gospel, he does so to move towards his passion, death, and resurrection. Jerusalem will give meaning to his life, as well as to the lives of those, like us, who will follow him.

Before they go to Jerusalem for Jesus’s final week, the disciples fail to understand who Jesus really is, and they have a skewed vision of discipleship. But once they are in Jerusalem and are witnesses to Jesus’s passion and death, Jerusalem will transform their lives and that of the known world. Forever after, Jerusalem will be the center of their lives, too.

There’s a gravitational pull towards Jerusalem that prevents the disciples from leaving even after Jesus has died and been raised from the dead. Is it fear or familiarity? Rather than return to Galilee, they’re left in Jerusalem, with their sadness and confusion. It’s in Jerusalem that Jesus appears to them. And it’s in Jerusalem that Jesus interprets the Scriptures to them. He tells them that from Jerusalem, repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name. In Jerusalem, they are to stay until clothed with power from on high. From Jerusalem, Jesus leads them out to Bethany, and then he ascends to the right hand of his Father. And to Jerusalem the disciples return once again with great joy, to worship in the Temple until they have received the Holy Spirit’s commission to go to the ends of the earth. And to the ends of the earth they will go, from Jerusalem.

But why Jerusalem? Why not Nazareth or Bethsaida or Bethlehem? Why Jerusalem? The answer is obvious and yet complex. It’s in Jerusalem where Jesus suffers, dies, is buried, and rises again. Only in Jerusalem can the disciples fully understand that their future is defined by Easter and Good Friday. Only in Jerusalem are they taught that to rise again with Christ they must die to their old selves. Only in Jerusalem, can they learn that to be first you must be last and to be exalted you must be humbled and to find one’s life you must first lose it. Only in Jerusalem can their narrow worldview begin to grow into a global vision of hope. Only in Jerusalem can they be fueled for a mission that will take them to the ends of the earth without diluting or distorting the Gospel.

Just a few years after I saw the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral, I went to Jerusalem myself. Like those earliest disciples, I felt a magnetic draw to that holy city. I got goosebumps as I walked the stones where Jesus trod. The holiness of the city was palpable. And yet, I also witnessed the disturbing irony of Jerusalem. I beheld violent tensions between three major world religions, and I was distressed by petty conflicts between Christian denominations fighting for their own piece of the holy sites. Aside from pious devotion, I saw little love in action. And it made me wonder, how such an irresistible draw to the center of so many religious worlds could fail to translate into an impetus of love from that place?

It’s as if many had found themselves drawn to Jerusalem as the center of their world but once there, they forgot that the story was not over. It’s as if many mistook being in Jerusalem for the end of the story. It’s as if they forgot exactly what we celebrate this evening on Ascension Day.

And what we celebrate is that the constant attraction and returning to Jerusalem was only part of the story. Jesus tells the disciples to return to Jerusalem and stay there, but only until they’re clothed with power from on high. But once they’re clothed in that power, they will be sent from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. From Jerusalem they must go, and to Jerusalem they might return, but in Jerusalem, they can’t stay forever.

The Mappa Mundi seems anachronistic in our own secular day when cathedrals are no longer the centers of towns, and the Church is hardly the center of the world. And it might reek of presumption and hubris to put Jerusalem at the center of the world, especially when it has proved to be a city of seething religious divisions and violence rather than peace. But what if we put the Church—our own symbolic Jerusalem—at the center of the maps of our lives? What if the entirety of our lives—our work, our play, our study, our social action—revolved around our Christian faith? What if we let the Church become the Jerusalem of our lives, just as it was for those earliest disciples?

In coming here this evening, in all the busyness of our lives, on a weekday even, we have given some witness to the power of Jerusalem. There’s some magnetic force drawing our lives to this church, where we offer all that we are and have to God. In the Mass we are blessed by Christ’s presence in Bread and Wine just as Jesus blessed his disciples as he ascended into heaven. We come to worship constantly in this place until we are clothed with power from on high. And then with great joy, we are sent from this little Jerusalem into the world. We can’t stay here. We must ultimately go from here.

Putting Jerusalem at the center of our lives paradoxically protects us from the arrogance of complacent power, crude authority, and tribalism. In Jerusalem, we learn that we must die before rising to new life in Christ. In Jerusalem, we learn that love is stronger than death. In Jerusalem, we learn that we must live not unto self alone but unto the One who died and rose again for us. Without Jerusalem, all evangelism and mission will be flawed because they will be pompous and harmful and will exhibit nothing of Christ’s self-emptying witness. We need Jerusalem.

So, to and from Jerusalem we must come and go, time and again. It’s here, in our own little Jerusalem, the center of our spiritual world, that we are fed and fueled for ministry. And it’s only from here that we can be sent with courage, authenticity, and hope to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ascension Day
May 9, 2024

A Need, A Question, and a Dream

A month after I arrived at Good Shepherd as the new rector, I discovered a stack of visitor cards in a mess of papers in the office. It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, and my assumption was that the cards had been completed before COVID struck and that none of the visitors had been contacted. A voice within me said, “Reach out to them.”

Truth be told, I was desperate to attract new people to the parish. We were trying to rebuild, and so stumbling upon a stack of visitor cards felt like winning the lottery. I also knew that anyone who would take the time to complete a visitor card probably wanted to be contacted. And although I was a bit embarrassed to reach out so belatedly to those visitors, I, nevertheless, listened to the little voice inside me. I emailed everyone in the stack of cards.

As I predicted, a few responded, but many didn’t. But one response came back quickly and enthusiastically, with capital letters and exclamation points. I arranged to meet with the author of that excited email—let’s call her Anne. We sat on the porch of what is now our retreat house, with our face masks on, and we talked. In-person conversation in those days was such a welcome relief to Zoom. I discovered that Anne frequently passed by the church on her daily walks, and one day, she felt compelled to fill out a visitor card that she found in the church. She was delighted to receive my email, because it had been a while since she had first left her contact information at the back of the church.

Little by little, Anne and her husband, whom we’ll call Richard, became involved, Anne more so than Richard. But Richard felt a draw to this church, too. At the time, we’d just decided to close our Thrift Shop, housed in the basement of the Parish House. It was chock full of stuff, and we had about thirty people involved in the parish, and many were avoiding social interaction because of COVID. So, I had no clue how we’d get all the items cleared out of that overstuffed basement. “Fear not,” Anne said. “We’ll get this done.” “Perhaps we could set a goal for the summer,” I said to her. “We’ll finish it by March,” she said firmly. And finish we did, largely due to the efforts of Anne and Richard.

Over time, it became clear to me that both Anne, Richard, this parish, and I had three things in common. We had a need, a question, and a dream. Anne and Richard seemed to be longing for community and a spiritual connection with God. Their question was how to reconnect with the Church after some time away. Their dream was to find fulfillment in their lives through a relationship with God.

For me and the parish, our need was to attract people to participate in the ministry to which God was calling us. A very specific need was to clean out a room full of stuff in a former Thrift Shop. Our question was how we could rebuild after so many difficult years. More specifically, who would help us clean out a Thrift Shop, not to mention where all the items would go! Our dream was to be a flourishing parish once again after coming so close to death.

The voice that urged me to email Anne was not just a whim. I believe, now in hindsight, that it was the Holy Spirit. And it was the Holy Spirit that connected me and this parish with Anne and Richard, changing our lives forever after that. This same Spirit is the one who speaks first through an angel of the Lord to Philip and tells him to go south to the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. And it’s the same Spirit who tells him to go and join the chariot in which an Ethiopian eunuch is sitting and reading from the prophet Isaiah.

The Spirit knows what Philip and the eunuch don’t yet know: they’re being drawn to one another by a need, a question, and a dream. The eunuch needs companionship in his quest to interpret Scripture. His question is how he can interpret Scripture without guidance. And his dream is to come closer to God through the study of his holy Word.

It would seem, at first, that the eunuch—this outsider and social oddity—is the only one with a need, question, and a dream. And maybe that’s exactly what Philip thought in his evangelistic fervor. But in the mysterious providence of God, aided by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the eunuch and Philip meet in their shared need, question, and dream. Philip has a Gospel with which he’s been entrusted, and he has a need to share it. His question is with whom it should be shared. And his dream, of course, is that he will be an instrument of God in bringing the good news to the ends of the earth. In the beautiful provision of God, shared needs, questions, and dreams coalesce as Philip goes up to the eunuch’s chariot and sits beside him.

The voice that prompts him to go to the chariot invites him to stick close to it, literally, to attach himself to it. And he does. He patiently journeys with the eunuch and interprets Scripture to him, and the eunuch’s enthusiastic response is its own gift to Philip. When they finally arrive at water, the eunuch asks the question that seems to be undergirding his quest for knowledge all along: “what is to prevent my being baptized?” Nothing, is God’s answer. Nothing at all. And in a stunning moment, both the eunuch and Philip go down into the water and rise up again, changed forever.

Philip and the eunuch go down into the water as old selves, people who might have thought they were the only ones with a need, question, and a dream. They go into the water as individuals, but they rise out in the shared knowledge that they need each other. They rise to the new life of Christian fellowship, where joys and sorrows are shared, where no one is alone, where we can’t be the people God has called us to be without each other. The same Spirit who urges Philip to go to that lonely wilderness road and climb into the chariot also unites Philip and the eunuch in the shared love of Christ, who died and rose again so that we all might die to our old selves and rise to new life in him.

Nearly two years after I first met Anne and Richard, Richard was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Early on one glorious September morning with the first hints of fall in the air, I was awakened by a phone call from Anne. Richard had died peacefully in his sleep that night. I went over to the house, and as Anne and I sat at Richard’s bed that morning, she said to me, “Well, the Good Shepherd certainly found the lost sheep.” I knew what she meant, but I also knew that Richard and Anne were not the only sheep in this story. The Good Shepherd had not only brought Anne and Richard to the sheepfold of this parish; he had also brought me and this parish to them. We were united in our shared needs, questions, and dreams.

A month later, Anne told me that she was moving back home to be closer to family. I understood. Our lives had intersected for a fleeting moment when in God’s mysterious providence our needs, questions, and dreams needed to be shared and held in God’s love. Anne’s departure was a bit like Philip being snatched away from the eunuch’s presence after the glorious moment of baptism. Their lives had meshed in the power of the Spirit for a time, and then they moved on, changed forever.

We’re told that the eunuch went on his way rejoicing. Philip, brought to him by the Spirit, had met his need, had sought to answer his question, and had given him a means to fulfill his dream. The eunuch had done the same for Philip. And then the Spirit sent them on their way, and I imagine that Philip was rejoicing, just like the eunuch.

Anne went on her way, as did I and the parish, each of us grieving over Richard’s death, but also rejoicing that we had known one another. We rejoiced that through the power of the Spirit, something of God’s earthly vision had been realized in the intersection of our lives. I suppose that we instinctively rejoiced that we had listened to the voice of the Spirit inviting us to get up, go, and find one another.

This is the bittersweet joy of the Gospel. Within each of us, there are needs, questions, and dreams. Within each of us, the Spirit speaks to prompt and guide us to those who will respond to our own needs, questions, and dreams with their own. And although we may feel that it’s presumptuous to attribute our nudges and urges to the power of the Spirit, when we take a chance and do, we’ll undoubtedly be surprised. We’ll learn that the Spirit isn’t just feeding us when our lives intersect joyfully with another. The Spirit is also feeding the world. And when we and the world are fed by the sweetness of the Gospel, however fleeting it may be, we are changed forever. And we go on our way, rejoicing.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 28, 2024

Led Back to Goodness

Recent studies show that there may be a genetic component to the tone and quality of one’s voice, and it has to do with more than just vocal inflections. There may be shared physiological features among voices of biological relation. Does your own voice bear any resemblance to your parents’ voice? What about your siblings? Can you find any tonal similarity between their voices and yours? I certainly can. On numerous occasions, my voice can sound just like that of my parents or my brother.

Our own speech patterns will naturally be similar to those of our family members. Perhaps your father speaks rapidly and excitedly and you do, too. Or maybe your mother has a funny way of lowering the tone of her voice at the ends of questions, rather than the other way around, and you do the same. It’s only natural that our distinctive voices, however unique they may be, would contain recognizable vestiges of our biological relations. But how far back do these shared vocal qualities go? What tone colors in the voice of your seventeenth-century ancestor might you find? If somehow you could hear a distant relative speaking from the past, would you recognize her voice, and would it sound like yours?

And if you heard Jesus speaking your name, would you recognize his voice? And how? St. John tells us that Jesus the Good Shepherd knows his sheep, and they know him. He calls them each by name, and they heed his voice. Above all, they recognize the sound of his voice. On the contrary, they don’t recognize the voice of the hireling because he’s not good. He doesn’t care for the sheep. He’s a mercenary, a con artist, a coward. But when Jesus calls the name of the sheep, they know it’s him, because they know that he knows them. And because he knows them, they will follow him. But how do they know it’s Jesus? Is it the tone of his voice? Do they, by chance, hear some remnant of their own spiritual ancestry in that voice? And what about that heritage is so favorable that they’re compelled to follow the voice?

I would be interested in taking a survey of Christians today, and I would want to ask them this: when you imagine the sound of Jesus’s voice, what is it like? Is the tone harsh or gentle? Is it scolding or affirming? Is it forceful or invitational? And I would bet that many people—perhaps some of us here today—hear Jesus’s voice as condemnatory, full of harsh judgment, scolding, and rigid.

Maybe it’s because we aren’t so good with our imaginations these days. Too much listening to robotic voices means that the voice of the Good Shepherd sounds like a GPS navigator. The seething anger echoing in the corridors of worldly power imprints itself on our minds. Facile lies make it difficult to trust anyone’s voice. The voice of the cruel teacher who was always chastising you unfairly still hammers away in the recesses of your memory. The cold voice of the distant parent haunts you. The mocking voice of the bully who tortured you as a teenager is subconsciously buried alive within your heart. Maybe this is why it’s so hard to accurately hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. We know his voice is good, but it’s difficult for us to hear good anymore. The reason the sheep won’t follow the voice of the hireling, the bad shepherd, is because something inside of them—something about who they are—cautions them against following such a voice.

And although St. John doesn’t describe the sound of the Good Shepherd’s voice, he does tell us something important about the Good Shepherd himself, which might help us understand the sound of his voice. The Good Shepherd knows his own and they know him, just as the Father knows the Good Shepherd and the Good Shepherd knows the Father. And this must mean that in the voice of Jesus, we perfectly hear the voice of God the Father. In the voice of Jesus, we’re taken back through our spiritual heritage to the Source and Foundation of all that is and who we are.

To discover who we are in the clamor of today’s world, we must sift out the gentle voice of the Good Shepherd calling our names, and then we follow it like obedient sheep back to the beginning. We go backwards in time and try to trace this thread of a voice through history. In doing so, we learn something about who we are, because truth be told, we’ve forgotten who we are. But who we are is in the Good Shepherd’s voice.

As we go back in time, we’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in the saints who called the Church back to her roots. We’ll hear his voice resonating in the tortured larynxes of martyrs crying out the good news even in the face of death. We’ll hear his voice imperfectly in the calls of the prophets who tried so hard to bring God’s people back into covenant with him. We’ll hear the Good Shepherd’s voice even in the flawed leadership of kings and judges, sent by God to lead his chosen people. We’ll hear it in the guidance of Moses trying to lead a recalcitrant people into freedom.

And even today, we hear the Shepherd’s voice in the oppressed and marginalized crying out for dignity, or in the starving child calling out for food, or in the mother of the murdered teenager demanding that something must change, that there must be some hope for goodness in all that is bad. If we listen closely, we can hear the Good Shepherd’s voice in every little corner of hell on this earth, crying out for goodness. And because we live in him, and he lives in us, our voices bear some resemblance to his.

But since St. John has told us that the Good Shepherd knows us and we know him, and that the Father knows him and he knows the Father, if we heed and follow his voice, we’ll discover not only the voice of our heavenly Father. We’ll also find ourselves back at the beginning, where we’ll learn more about who we are.

When we follow the Good Shepherd’s voice back to the beginning, we’ll hear the dynamic, gentle voice of God the Father emerging from the deep nothingness as the eternal Word in the power of the Holy Spirit saying one thing: It is very good. These are the words that are so difficult to hear these days, whether about ourselves or creation or our neighbors. It is very good. And something within each of us is instinctively searching for goodness.

The Good Shepherd’s voice invites us to follow him, back through the ravages of history, over the beating of pruning hooks into spears and the lamentations of the forsaken, to find the sheepfold to which he has led us. And when we arrive at the sheepfold, we find that it is a garden. It’s a lush, gorgeous garden full of green, colorful, blooming things. It’s an idyllic existence, where humans walk and talk freely with God, unencumbered by cares, concerns, or insecurities. It’s a time before there was murder or war or greed or jealousy. It’s the beginning of all that we know, and at that moment in time, God calls us each by name and makes us his own. And God says, it is very good. YOU are very good.

But the beginning is not just a beginning. It’s also an end. If we have found the beginning by following the Good Shepherd’s voice, we’ll also catch a glimpse of the end God has prepared for us. The gate into the garden of Eden is also the gate into eternal life. And the gate is tended by our loving Good Shepherd, whose voice does not berate or manipulate or coerce but invites us into the sheepfold. And far from being somewhere in the distant future, the gate to the garden of eternal life is right here, closer than it might appear.

To hear the voice of the Good Shepherd is to hear that we’re not forsaken but loved, not condemned but forgiven, not left alone but brought into community, not scattered but united in the love of the One who lays down his life for the sheep. And the One who is perfect goodness, the Good Shepherd, yearns for our voices to echo his voice and to tell all the world what we can only know by going back to the beginning. And, indeed, it is very good.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 21, 2024

The Startling Power of the Resurrection

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the great French organist and improviser Marcel Dupré climbed out of bed on his fifth birthday only to be greeted by his father who said to him, “Marcel, for your fifth birthday, you may now modulate to the dominant.” If this means nothing to you, just imagine a parent telling you on your fifth birthday that now, you can finally ride your bicycle without training wheels.

Waiting is simply a part of life, even though we’re an impatient lot these days. And our restless mindset ignores the fact that waiting is often for our own good and the good of others. Indeed, waiting is often necessary.

And yet, we rightly feel impatient at times. One more natural disaster reminds us that we’re moving ever closer to environmental ruin. One more mass shooting jolts us out of our complacency to say that enough is enough. One more suicide because of loneliness compels us to change something about our lack of social interactions. It’s a struggle to hold the infinite patience of God with the need for earthly action, and it can seem like a hopeless problem. In the quest to alleviate our guilty consciences, there’s a grave temptation to ignore the perfect timing of God’s providence.

Waiting is at the heart of the conclusion of Luke’s Gospel, although it’s not immediately apparent from today’s reading. Just before we pick up the story today, Jesus has appeared to two of his disciples journeying on the road to Emmaus. Only when Jesus breaks bread with them do they realize who he is. Only now can their eyes be opened; before, they couldn’t understand. Now, they know it’s Jesus precisely because he repeats the action that he commanded them to repeat incessantly on the eve of his passion and death. And when Jesus does this, their eyes are opened. Until that moment, we’re told that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It’s as if they had to wait for the right moment for their eyes to be opened, which is the moment that Jesus breaks bread with them.

And so, in today’s Gospel story, when Jesus appears to a larger group of disciples, including the two who have met him on the road to Emmaus, it’s finally the right time for the disciples to understand who he is and what their mission is. The disciples are, at first, startled by Jesus’s glorified body. They’re startled by the power of the resurrection. So, Jesus shows them the physicality of his body, however changed it may be.

But then, he does something very strange. He asks them if they have something to eat, and what they offer him is surely a profound sign of the startling power of the resurrection to make the impossible possible. They offer him a piece of broiled fish, and now, they must see that it was with five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish that Jesus fed the 5,000.

Only now, can Jesus speak to them and interpret the Scriptures to them. Now is the right time. Now they can see everything in a way they couldn’t see before. Before, when they encountered a vast crowd of hungry people, those disciples couldn’t imagine how they would all be fed. Then, they could see only scarcity and not abundance. Now, they have witnessed Jesus’s passion and death. Now, they see that Jesus has been raised from the dead by God. Now, they feed Jesus with a piece of fish. And now, their minds are opened. They could never have opened their own minds. Christ had to do it for them. Until now, these fickle, immature disciples have ventured no farther afield than their homeland. But soon, again, when it’s the right time, when the Holy Spirit has empowered them, it will be the right time to go to the ends of the earth.

Timing is everything. Before, Jesus fed the disciples and the crowds in his earthly ministry, showing abundance where there seemed to be only scarcity. Before, in his miracles, Jesus embodied God’s uncanny ability to do the impossible. But now, in the aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, it all makes sense as it never could before.

This is the startling power of the resurrection, where God’s infinite patience offers us peace amid our impatience, where the impossible becomes possible, where despair turns into hope. Through the startling power of the resurrection, God demonstrates a relentless capacity to make new what has grown old and to give life to what is dying. But for our eyes to be opened to this incredulous reality, we must submit to God’s time. It’s God who must open our eyes.

Right up through the Emmaus appearance, Jesus’s disciples have been fed by Jesus, in the actions of his earthly ministry and, literally, in the bread and the wine. In their post-Easter grief and despair, Jesus appears first on the road to Emmaus and then to a group of disciples trying to process their encounter with the risen Christ. But when Christ appears again and offers his peace, he opens their minds when he asks them to feed him. It’s what they couldn’t do back with the 5,000, but it’s what they can do now. Now, is the right time. They can do the impossible because of the startling power of the resurrection. They will even travel to the ends of the earth, and they are the reason we’re here today.

But those flawed, hearty disciples had their eyes opened to something about which we, in our modern impatience, can often be quite dense. Jesus opened their eyes to see that their mission could only be sustained after having first been fed by him. Jesus needed to feed them before opening their minds. The timing must be right.

And this is a remarkable challenge to us. For too long, the Church has rashly skipped over the only thing that will clarify her future mission. She has too frequently failed to be fed by Christ before feeding others. It’s dangerous for us to presume to feed others before we have first been fed, for then, we will only feed them with our anxiety and dysfunction.[1] It’s spiritually reckless to alleviate our own privileged guilt by using the needy among us as pawns in our selfish projects. We can only understand our mission in light of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, by sharing in the breaking of bread and the prayers, by coming here weekly, by letting Christ feed us, by letting God open our eyes and minds to what he would have us do, rather than what we want to do.

All our pangs of conscience and rightful indignation about the injustices of this world should compel us to be here first. Here alone, in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers, will God open our eyes and minds to the action he has in store for us. Here alone will privileged guilt be converted into self-emptying service. Here alone will we come to know just how God desires to include us into his remaking of a broken world by sending us out as ambassadors of reconciliation.

Before we came to this place, we, like those early disciples, could only see the impossible, but only now, as we are nurtured by Christ, can we have the courage to believe that anything is possible. Before we came here, we thought there wasn’t enough, but now, as we are fed with Christ’s abundance, we can trust that God has given us everything we need. Before we came to this feast, we thought we were no people, but now, God has assured us that we are his people and that because of his boundless grace, we, too, are witnesses to the startling power of the resurrection.     

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 14, 2024

[1] This roughly paraphrases Thomas Merton, who has written about the importance of contemplative prayer before action.

Solving the Mystery

If you ask me, the attraction of a great mystery novel is that the perpetrator of the crime is right under your nose until their identity is finally revealed. It would cheat the rules of the mystery genre for the guilty party to be suddenly plopped into the story at the end. That’s simply not fair! Part of the fun is knowing that any one of the many characters you’ve encountered throughout the mystery could be guilty. And it’s all too easy to miss the signs of guilt until the revelation of the culprit has been divulged at the end of the novel.

Often, a good mystery is difficult to solve because the perpetrator can hide amid the normalcy of life. Initial efforts at identifying the guilty party result in an immature blaming of the odd duck in the story. It’s easy to blame the quiet recluse who lives in a cabin in the woods whittling figurines from soap or the character with a volatile temper. But no one would suspect the churchgoer who bakes pies to deliver to new residents on the block, would they?

There’s a mystery that I’m interested in solving, although there’s no crime or murder involved. But it’s a mystery, nonetheless. It has its origins in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, where we get a glimpse of the behavior of the earliest disciples of Jesus. We’re told that all those who believed were of one heart and soul. They held all things in common, and surprisingly, no one claimed that anything was their own. There wasn’t a needy person among them. And those who had possessions sold them, and the proceeds were used to help those in need.

This is a mystery to me because it seems so different from the Church that we know, and don’t you want to know why? Don’t you want to know how a motley group of people could be of one heart and soul? Don’t you want to know how sinful humans could behave so selflessly as not to cling to their possessions? Don’t you want to know how in a world of deep economic and social inequities there wasn’t a needy person among the earliest disciples? Don’t you want to know how the communal concern of Acts 4 was possible in a world just as disordered and lopsided as our own? This is a mystery that needs to be solved.

If we were to employ traditional mystery-solving techniques, we would, of course, look not for the most unusual behavior but for that which appears most normal. After all, the best mysteries are usually solved by paying attention to the ordinary details, and in that apparent normalcy lies the solution.

But there’s a problem because nothing in this description of the early Church seems normal. These days, it’s not easy to identify ready examples of Christian unity. The norm is to be painfully aware of the Church’s divisions. We see denominations wracked by schism, making one group of people the scapegoat for disunity. Rarely, too, do we see Christians easily parting with their possessions. It’s hard enough to give sacrificially, much less believe and profess that what we have isn’t even our own. And we all know that if there weren’t any needy persons among us, food ministries and soup kitchens would be superfluous. There would be no need for church-sponsored shelters for the unhoused. The early Church in Acts 4 is so far removed from our own reality as to seem like a pipedream, if not a fictionalized tale.

And so, in trying to solve the mystery of what is happening in Acts 4, there’s no ordinary behavior that might be hiding the real solution to this mystery. It’s as if we’ve entered an alternative universe. And yet, the vexing question remains: why does the early Church seem so different from the Church today?

Maybe the answer to this perplexing mystery doesn’t lie in decoding the witness of the early Church. Maybe it lies beneath the behavior of the Church today. Could it be that the answer to being an Acts 4 Church is right under our eyes? Could the clue to solving the mystery lie in analyzing the normalcy of Church life as we know it, not as the early Church knew it?

It’s hard to deny that the Church of our own day is struggling, even if we choose not to accept catastrophic predictions of decline. It’s true that a Church full of believers who are of one heart and mind seems like a rarity these days. It should be obvious that few of our acquaintances talk about shared possessions but rather talk quite normally about their own possessions. It's blatantly evident that too many people are in dire need around us, in our own community, in our own neighborhoods, and even in the Church. And it appears that the Church frequently fails to embody the behavior of the early disciples in Acts 4. Something is missing. So, what is it?

Here, in our own context, we see a Church trying and at least aspiring to be the Church of Acts 4. Despite her many divisions, we still profess to be saddened by them. We still pray for unity within diversity and hope to share one mind in Christ. We still strive to help those in need and long for a day when no one will lack any necessary resources. All this is true, at least in theory, but the reality is far from our hopes and dreams.

As in any good mystery, perhaps the answer is right beneath our eyes. Beneath all our modern aspirations, there seems to be a marked difference between the behavior of the early Church and the Church today, a difference that we might overlook in our quest to be an Acts 4 Church. Amid evidence of the earliest Church’s unity, altruism, and social concern, there’s a fulcrum of momentum that powers the entire enterprise. We’re told that with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. It’s seemingly simple, but too often forgotten. This is the clue we’ve been looking for. This alone can explain the shared heart and soul of those early disciples. This alone can explain the genuine selflessness of the early Church. This alone can explain the lack of needy persons in the Church’s nascent days.

The power of the resurrection is what we too often fail to trust. If there’s anything that we can learn from the early Church, it’s that the Church we long to be will not be created by our own hand but by the power of God, the One who raised Jesus from the dead. It will happen when we start doing the one thing that seemed so obvious to the first disciples but sadly seems so strange in our own day. It will happen when we give our own testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. If we want to go anywhere and do anything, this must be our starting point.

The incredible behavior of the early Church was not the product of a better equipped Church. It was simply the sign of a Church that lived as if it truly believed in the resurrection from the dead. The early Church both believed in Jesus’s resurrection and lived as if that resurrection had taken over their lives. The early disciples believed that the dead could be raised, that sinners could be forgiven, that the old could become new, that the Church would thrive not decline, and that hope was greater than despair. The resurrection from the dead was the starting point for the early Church, not an aside to justify a means. The early Church lived out of a confident generosity, and such generosity reflected back to God, if imperfectly, God’s own perfect giving of himself to us, holding nothing back but giving us infinitely of himself, his love, his mercy, and his forgiveness.

Such courageous testimony to the power of the resurrection is what will give dynamism to the malaise of the modern Church. Such bold witness to a new creation is what will turn our normal, banal waywardness into the strange and life-giving direction guided by the Gospel. And our own unashamed proclamation that we believe the unbelievable can turn this world upside down. Because we’ve died and risen with Christ, we can never be the same again. And because of this, the world should never be the same again either.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Easter
April 7, 2024

No Going Back

In the hands of a great composer, a musical theme is recognizable but never stays the same. The stamp of superior craftmanship lies in how the themes are developed over time. Take, for instance, a piece of music in which the main theme is clearly stated at the beginning of a piece and then developed as the music unfolds. At some point, the theme will return, but in the hands of a first-rate composer, the theme will reappear not in its original form but in a different guise. Perhaps a trill or mordent has been added, or the rhythm is slightly varied. But because the theme has journeyed through time, it has changed. It’s as if the music has a life of its own. No musical theme can move through time and remain static.

There’s a profound question in John’s Gospel that is like a musical theme in the hands of a superb composer. It’s first stated in the exposition of this grand symphony, back in chapter one, when two of Jesus’s disciples begin to follow him. Jesus turns to them and asks them the question that will experience its own theme and variations until it reappears in altered form at the end of the Gospel: What are you looking for?

The entire Gospel is, in some sense, a development of this question. What are the disciples looking for? What is the world looking for? What are we looking for? By the conclusion of John’s Gospel, this question has been implicitly threaded through Jesus’s life-giving and controversial Galilean ministry, his miracles and signs, his final fellowship with the disciples, his journey to the cross, his entrance into the grave and depths of hell, and his resurrection from the dead. Now, on the other side of the empty tomb, the question reappears. But the question is not the same as it was in chapter one. It has changed.

At the Gospel’s end, Mary Magdalene stands outside Jesus’s empty tomb, weeping. The other disciples came to see the vacant tomb for themselves and then went home, trying to return to life as normal. But something has compelled Mary to stay. It’s as if the original question spoken to Jesus’s first disciples has become ingrained in her mind, too, perhaps by osmosis. What are you looking for?

Outside the empty tomb, Mary remains. She stands in a liminal space between the past and her future, which is still unknown to her. The question, what are you looking for?, became her question, too, when she decided to follow Jesus, and it must still haunt her, weeping at the tomb. Maybe that very question, for which she seems to have no answer, prevents her from going inside the tomb. Over the course of this theme and variations, the original question—the main theme—has not remained static. It’s as if Mary knows that going back into the tomb is not the answer. But her tears testify to her confusion about where to go and what to do next.

Could it have been a rustling on the path behind her? Or did she simply sense that the angels in the tomb weren’t the only ones with her? Whatever the case, she turns, and she sees Jesus, although she doesn’t recognize him in his resurrected body. And the theme of this grand symphony returns from the mouth of Jesus, although it hasn’t been heard in this variation before. Whom do you seek? Jesus beckons Mary’s gaze from the empty tomb of death to himself. Things have changed. There’s no going back.

And then Jesus does something that summons Mary irrevocably to the future. He calls her name, but it sounds different now because things are different. The world is different. Hearing her name spoken, Mary finally sees her new future. Yes, death is still there with her, just as it’s still here with us, but the theme of death has been transformed, just as the theme of life has changed over the course of this symphony. Back at the beginning of the symphony, it was Jesus who first turned to look at those disciples and posed its theme. Now it’s Mary who turns and looks at Jesus. He stands on the other side of death. He is her future, her life, her Savior, and the Way forward. Whom do you seek, not What do you seek?[1]

On this day, the first day of the week, we, too, have come to the tomb, as the darkness has given way to the light, and we stand at the open entrance, signifying the defeat of death. It may be that some of us are weeping over losses in the past year since we last gathered here at the tomb to greet the dawn of a new creation. We’ve all changed since last Easter, and the theme of this symphony doesn’t sound the same to us as it did last year at this time. Our world stands, too, at the gateway to the tomb, weeping as it always does over wars and natural disasters and planetary peril, but the world has been altered, too. Things aren’t the same as they were last year. There’s no going back.

And yet, there’s a subtle dynamic at work here at the entrance to the tomb in that space between past and future, between death and life. We celebrate that the victory over sin and death has been definitively won, but we know and recognize that sin and death are still with us. If we’re honest, we acknowledge that Easter isn’t a crude, triumphant erasure of our past, for then it would be injurious to all of us who still bear the marks of past wounds. And at the same time, things aren’t the same either. The persistent themes of sin and death are with us, but through the development of this symphony of salvation, they’ve been eternally altered, too. They will never be the same because they’ve lost their power.

Like Mary, we’ve heard the voice of Christ calling to us in the present and from our future, Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? In our worst and most despairing moments, we turn briefly and see him but don’t recognize him. We’re still looking for his dead body to provide its proper burial. We’re still gazing at an empty tomb, paralyzed with weeping. We struggle against the wiliness of sin and death as they try to drag us back into the past and into the empty tomb to search for something that isn’t there in the way we wish to find it.

We feel the pull of old anger and resentments. We feel the loss of hope and the firm grip of despair. We find ourselves rehashing the past that we want to control and correct. We find it so difficult to turn. But the truth is that we’ve changed. On the other side of the empty tomb, we can’t go back in. On the other side of baptism, we can’t cling to sin and death. So, weeping outside the tomb, like Mary, our future lies in following the voice that calls our name, because it knows us intimately and loves us so. He calls us by the name we’ve always had, but it sounds different now, uttered by the Risen One who is risen from the dead.

Our names have been developed and transposed over the course of this symphony. Now, as Jesus utters our names, we understand that although we were lost, now we are found. Although we were dead, now we are alive. Although we are imperfectly human, now we are invited to share in the divine life with him who calls us to his Father and our Father. We’re different. We’ve changed. We can’t go back. We’ll never be the same again.

And because of this, the power of our name being called by this One from whom no secrets are hid and who knows every hair on our heads has more allure than the tendrils of sin and death trying to grasp us back into the grave. Our name, signifying our new future, draws us out of loneliness into community, out of despair into hope, out of the old creation into the new, out of death into life. We’ve changed. There’s no going back. We will never be the same again.

 And the questions come back again, one final time: Why are you weeping? Why are you so anxious? Why are you so resentful? Why do you envy the love that God has for others, a love he also has for you in equal measure? Why are you rehashing the injuries of the past? Whom do you seek?

And so, we turn. We turn, knowing that at this time next year, we will once again stand weeping at the tomb, trying to look inside. We turn, knowing that the wounds of our past are still real and will always be real. We turn, knowing that sin and death will always try to drag us back into their hell. But in spite of that, something is different. We celebrate that we’ve met the One who has given us life because he first found us. We’ve been found by the One we were seeking. Alleluia! Christ is risen! And because he has risen, we’ve changed. There’s no going back. We will never be the same. And we step away from the tomb of death and walk towards the life ahead.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day
March 31, 2024

[1] See David Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 440.

On God's Terms

I had just taken a brief break from preparing for today’s sermon when I saw her walking up the path to the retreat house. To be honest, my head was in the space of Mark’s Passion account, and my first reaction was annoyance, to think of this visitor as a distraction in a week lacking in precious time. Then, the doorbell rang.

I descended the stairs, admittedly, with a sigh and grumble to myself, and I answered the door. “I need someone to talk to,” she said. She was seeking spiritual guidance about a distressing situation in her life and feeling devastatingly alone. She didn’t know where to turn except to a priest. That’s why she came looking for me.

I found myself moving from an intellectual reckoning with Mark’s Passion account into reality. We sat and talked. I offered whatever meager words I thought might help and prayed with her, but, ultimately, nothing was resolved. We were reduced to silence before the mystery of human pain and lingering problems. There were no clear answers, but both of us knew to trust in God’s loving care, which transcended anything we could understand.

And suddenly, it occurred to me that this woman’s finding me was not what I thought it was initially. It wasn’t a distraction from more important work that I had to do. It was, in fact, a deeper revelation about the Passion story that I had been mulling over in my head that morning. The woman’s situation was not a life or death matter, nor was it acute trauma. But it was, nevertheless, real human pain, which is always an echo of the suffering of Christ’s own Passion. The woman who sought me out, unwittingly, had brought me into the story of Jesus’s final days.

Which is precisely what St. Mark does in his own way. In the original Greek, Mark shifts his tenses, rather bewilderingly, between past and present. Linguistically, Mark is trying to bring us into the unfolding of Jesus’s Passion. In a literal look at Mark’s original words, we would become dizzy as we moved between the millennia of linear time. And this prevents us from easily extracting ourselves from the story.

For me, a woman whose ringing of the doorbell began as a seeming interruption in a busy week became a visible reminder that it’s impossible to compartmentalize Jesus’s Passion. There’s no way to hermetically seal his suffering and death in intellectual head space and then move on with the rest of our lives. His suffering and death, as well as his rising and glory, intersect with our embodied lives. It’s as if we were there with him on the cross, or standing by mocking him, or crying with the women at the cross, or running with the other disciples, away from his pain. And of course, we are there, even in this very moment. We’re at the cross with Jesus in Jerusalem. We’re in the crossfire between Israel and Palestine. We’re standing amid the rubble of a terrorist attack in Moscow. We’re at the hospital bed with a loved one dying of cancer.

On Palm Sunday, we’re faced with a theological dilemma. We recognize with awe and reverence that Jesus’s Passion is only his. It’s something we will never experience as he did; it’s his unique Passion that is tied up with the world’s salvation. “Never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine,” is how one hymn puts it.[1] And at the same time, Jesus’s suffering and death are ours, too.

But the greatest temptation as we begin Holy Week is to pretend as if we can remove ourselves from this story and put it at a safe distance. We can easily lie to ourselves, saying that because Jesus is the Christ, our own suffering can never be talked about in the same sentence as his. A woman’s distress that brings her to a priest is not worthy of being mentioned in the same context as Jesus’s own suffering. And then it’s a slippery slope, for our own sinfulness becomes nothing like the sinfulness of those who betrayed him. Our own fickleness is never like that of the crowds. Our mockery of the way of love is never in the same league as those who jeered at Jesus.

The dissonance of today’s liturgy reminds us that pride can become the source of our estrangement from Jesus. It’s what made me grumble as I descended the stairs to answer the ringing of a doorbell. Pride would deviously compel us to elevate Jesus’s suffering to such an extent that it has nothing to do with us, and then it’s only one small step for us to refuse to let him wash our feet, too. It’s only one small step not to let him love us and forgive us.

If Jesus came to save, then his Passion weaves in and out of our own lives. A hurting woman with her tears coming up the path to the retreat house has everything to do with our Lord’s Passion. Our own loneliness has everything to do with the world’s Savior hanging on a tree and crying out of sheer abandonment to his Father. Christ’s utter silence in the face of the powers of this world, a silence even unto death, is our own uncomfortable, anguished silence in the face of the mystery of suffering.

When we refuse to recognize that Christ’s own suffering and death intersect intimately with our own lives, we refuse, in some sense, God’s gift of salvation. But when we accept that we can never take ourselves out of his story, because it’s also our story, we see that suffering is an indispensable part of the Christian journey. We acknowledge in awe and silence that our salvation comes not as a triumphant erasure of evil and suffering but as a gift that meets us in spite of it and within it. The ultimate answer to the mystery of grief and pain is God’s wordless answer, which comes in the form of an empty tomb, standing silent on Easter Day. And that empty tomb will testify that, once and for all, the victory has been won, not on the world’s terms but on God’s.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 24, 2024

[1] “My song is love unknown,” Samuel Crossman (1624-1683), #458 in The Hymnal 1982

Found by Love

We might say that there are two kinds of people in life. In the first group are people on a quest for fulfillment. They’re deeply hungry for meaning, and whether they admit it or not, there’s some dissatisfaction with their lives. They sense that there’s a void there, but they don’t know what will ultimately fill it. These people are on a perpetual search to find whatever will. But for them, it’s just not God. It's their hobbies, their careers, their workout routines, their success, their money, their wealth. You name it.

In the second group, are also people on a quest for fulfillment. Like those in the first group, they’re deeply hungry for meaning. They, too, are dissatisfied with something in their lives. They recognize an emptiness within their souls, and they want someone, rather than some thing, to fill it. And truth be told, because they are human, they still try to fill the void in their lives with hobbies, careers, workout routines, success, money, and wealth. But unlike the first group, the people in this second group profess that God is really the one who will give ultimate meaning to their lives. We claim to be in that second group, don’t we? It’s why we’ve come here today. It’s why we come here week after week.

We’re often told that our world is polarized. There are those who don’t believe in God, and there are the ever-dwindling rest of us, who’ve not given up on God. But it seems to me that humanity is simpler than we wish to imagine. In all our diversity of beliefs, there’s a single deep desire that is driving our lives forward, and it can be summed up in one statement: Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

This seems odd, because we’re told more often than we care to hear that increasing numbers of people have no interest in seeing Jesus. We might wonder ourselves today where all the people are who want to see Jesus. True, we know that we’re here to see Jesus. But how can all those others, who prefer brunch to church and sports to religion, want to see Jesus?

And yet, there’s a simple but profound desire that drives the restlessness of our world. It’s what still draws some people to church and to the Eucharist. It’s what compels others to give to the poor, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry. It’s what drives some to nature or to silence. It’s an overwhelming desire to have the voids of our lives filled. And although many will never articulate the answer as we Christians would, for us, that universal desire can be boiled down to only one thing: Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

But for those of us of faith, it’s followed by an equally urgent question. Where do we find Jesus? This incisive question is what brings people to the parish priest, wanting to know if they’re on the right path. It’s what prompts some to reconnect with church later in their lives, as they see their years wane and fear for their souls. It’s what the dying person says at death’s door, as she begins to see beyond the veil between this world and the next. It’s what every Christian wants to know because, sir, we wish to see Jesus.

The desire in our own lives, and the unarticulated desire in the lives of others in this world, is the same desire that draws a bunch of Greeks to Philip, who then goes to Andrew, who then finds Jesus. These Greeks, who aren’t Christian, let alone Jewish, instinctively sense that this person about whom they’ve heard will add something to their lives that they’ve never had before. Sir, we wish to see Jesus, they say.

But when their stated desire reaches Jesus’s ears, he offers a less than desirable response. It’s an odd response, to tell the truth. It doesn’t clearly address the stated desire of the Greeks who wish to see him. It’s a kind of parable. And it’s a parable that seems to present a stumbling block for those of us who recognize and admit that we wish to see Jesus. It’s equally a stumbling block for those who wouldn’t characterize their own desire in such a way but who nevertheless are longing for ultimate meaning in their lives. And we, of course, know that it’s only Christ that will fill that gaping void.

Jesus responds to the Greeks’ quest to see him with a refrain that has become all too familiar to us this Lent. It echoes through all the Gospels. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Put another way: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

This odd response may be the reason why so many of us still think we haven’t found Jesus. It may be the source of anxiety and frustration in our lives. It may be the reason some have given up on the Church. It may be the reason some have forsaken Jesus, too, even if they’re still unconsciously searching for him. This stubborn, vexing Lenten refrain just won’t go away, but it nevertheless remains the gateway to finding Jesus. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. We must die to self in order to truly live.

This refrain, which is a thorn in our side, is about death, but it’s also about much more than death. It’s really about letting go of everything: letting go of our egos, our need for control, our longing for clear answers, our material things, our money, our sinful ways, our lives, and even of our very desire to see Jesus himself, as St. John of the Cross would remind us. And that may be the most perplexing revelation of all.

The reason we keep uttering our own refrain, Sir, we wish to see Jesus, is because we think we haven’t yet found him. And we think we haven’t yet found him because we haven’t been able to relinquish even that very desire to see Jesus. We haven’t been able to let it go because even though we tell ourselves otherwise, we really want not Jesus the Christ but Jesus of our own making.

We want a Jesus who will make us feel good about ourselves and affirm even our most sinful habits. We desire a Jesus who will tell us we can hoard our wealth and still follow him. We desire a Jesus who will assure us that we’re saved although we ignore the poor and unhoused. We desire a Jesus who tells us that we can keep our lives just as they are and still follow him. Simply put, most of the world wants a Jesus who lets them have their cake and eat it, too.

But the real Jesus, the Christ, the one who is our Lord and Savior and who lives among us as the source of our life, this Jesus tells us that to follow him, we must be willing to give up everything for his sake: our lives, our goals, our material possessions, even our desire for him, because in doing so, we will keep our lives.

And when we have the courage to let go of it all to find Jesus, we will not only find him. We will also find our truest selves, known and loved by God. When we arrive at the foot of the cross, on our knees and unencumbered by all that we once thought dear, we will see Christ as if for the first time. We can only see and know him fully when he is there, lifted high on the cross, “towering o’er the wrecks of time,”[1] as the hymn puts it. And lying among the wreckage of time there is all that we have had to part with, all that has given us false security, all the things that have become our golden calves. We can only know and love Christ as he reigns from the cross because the cross has transformed our imperfect desire into true love.

It’s there at the foot of the cross that we have prostrated ourselves and flung all our cares, desires, and worldly loves. And it’s there that we discover the most amazing thing of all. All this time, we had thought we were like those Greeks who came to Philip. Sir, we wish to see Jesus. That seemed to be the supreme motive driving our lives. But when we have finally cast off all our imperfect desires, we find ourselves naked and bare before the One who created us and called us good. And we finally realize that it was he, the living and true God, who brought us there in the first place. It was he, reigning from the tree in Christ, who had drawn us all that long way to the cross. It was he, who still draws all of creation to himself, both those who want to see Jesus and those who won’t admit that. It is he whose love was there before we ever knew it existed. And in that moment, on our knees at the cross, utterly vulnerable, known, and loved, we find who we really are. We discover that we’re finally meeting Christ for the first time, not because we have found him, but because he has found us.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2024

[1] “In the cross of Christ I glory by John Bowring (1792-1872), Hymn 441 in The Hymnal 1982

God's First Movement

I remember a day from a music theory class in college, when one of my professors was discussing the dominant seventh chord. Even if you don’t know what that chord is, you would recognize it. It typically precedes the tonic chord, what we might call the foundational chord of a musical key. The sequence of dominant seventh chord followed by tonic chord is like a punctation mark: a period or an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. The whole tradition of tonal Western musical, classical and popular, is based on the juxtaposition of these two chords. The dominant seventh chord is structured so that it will naturally resolve into a tonic chord. Put another way, the dominant seventh chord wasn’t initially intended to exist by itself. Its instability was meant to resolve into the stability of a tonic chord.

To demonstrate the aural function of a dominant seventh chord, my professor moved to the piano in the room and played the chord. But he didn’t follow it with the tonic chord. And then, in his typical edgy way, he said rather provocatively, “I’m not going to resolve it. I’m just not going to do it.” And he walked away from the piano.

Most of us in the room were cringing. Resolve the chord, we were saying in our minds, while we laughed uneasily. It was driving us crazy. Our Western ears have been acclimated to a tonal system that seeks resolution of tension. Dissonance resolves into consonance, tension moves into release. Our tidy Western minds want things to be tied up with a bow and put back in order. Dominant seventh chords are meant to be resolved.

Now, if I were to read only verse sixteen of the third chapter of St. John’s Gospel, I wonder if you might hear it as unresolved. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Our theological minds are no different from our musical ears. We have been formed in a Western system of thinking about God and salvation. And what is unresolved in John 3:16 is where each of us will end up when the dominant seventh chord is resolved. Will we perish, or will we have eternal life? I suspect that every citation of John 3:16, whether on a bumper sticker or tattooed on an arm or plastered on a billboard, is intended to play a dominant seventh chord and walk away from the keyboard. There’s an element of manipulation to it, and the primary tactic of that manipulation is fear.

We’re taught to fear how the chord will resolve. Do we believe correctly and will we be rewarded with eternal life, or do we fail to believe and will we perish? With this unresolved dominant seventh chord hanging in the air, we travel through a cloud of anxiety. God is somewhere away in the heavens, hands hovering over a keyboard, waiting to resolve the chord in one of two ways: towards eternal life or towards eternal destruction.

But just as dominant seventh chords don’t usually hang out in the ether without resolution, John 3:16 doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As we well know from hearing this morning’s Gospel reading, the evangelist gives us resolution. And yet, I’ve rarely seen a bumper sticker or tattoo or billboard with John 3:17 included as well. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

God’s gift of Jesus to the world was a gift of love, intended for salvation, not for condemnation. But this isn’t usually the way John 3:16 is interpreted. This famous verse is usually wielded as an anxiety-laden dominant seventh chord hanging in the air, waiting for resolution to eternal life or eternal death. The focus is too often on believing correctly, as if belief could ever be narrowed to a multiple-choice option. The focus is too infrequently on receiving God’s gift of salvation in Christ by trusting that God’s desire for us is salvation, not condemnation.

But maybe the problem is trying to conceive of salvation with our Western, future-oriented minds. When we think of salvation, we think of a defining moment, a judgment day on which we will be put into one of two places, heaven or hell. God’s hand, hovering over the keyboard of judgment, resolves the dominant seventh chord in one of two ways. And naturally, we fear what that will look like.

But imagine, if you will, a less Western way of thinking about things. If you’re a music aficionado, think of the music of Claude Debussy or Olivier Messiaen. Think of dominant seventh chords hanging in the air that are never resolved because their purpose is not to be resolved. Instead, the chords have been extracted from a world where tensions must be released and dissonances resolved. The chords are worlds in and of themselves.

Such a world—which we might categorize as more Eastern than Western—helps us rest more contentedly in the present rather than in the future. Unresolved chords don’t need to be resolved in the future. They’re harmonies intended for the present, to be enjoyed and received, like gifts. And if you can, imagine salvation as rather like that. Imagine that St. John knew what he was doing when he put verses sixteen and seventeen together in the third chapter of his Gospel. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

This world of John’s is not free of judgment. It’s just that the judgment is right here, in the present rather than exclusively in the future. We’re judged when we refuse to accept God’s gift of love by turning from our sin. We’re judged when we worry so much about resolving the dominant seventh chord that we pay no attention to the people around us who are suffering in the present. We’re judged when we call darkness light and light darkness. We’re judged when we’re unable to trust that God’s first movement towards us is love, not condemnation. And when we can’t see that, we’re condemned to a fearful hell in which we turn our backs on the God who is always facing towards us in love, with arms wide open. And in this hell, we find ourselves in a zero-sum game of competition with those around us. We covet what they have, we envy their gifts, and we resent their offenses against us. We become enslaved to anxiety and fear because we’re unable to believe that God has enough love, mercy, and gifts for everyone.

If we’re so intent on resolving dominant seventh chords in the present, our future life after death will be a hell of worrying about chord resolutions when God is simply inviting us to bask in the music of beautiful chords that are meant to be received and enjoyed. The paradox is that when we worry less about salvation, we find it, but when we judge others, we ourselves are judged.  

I don’t know how the individual chords of our lives will be resolved. That’s up to God. But I do know that the first step into hell is an inability to trust that God loved us from before we were made, that God still loves us, and that God will always love us. The roads of hell are paved with fear: fear that God was biased against us from the beginning, that we’re never enough for God, and that we will never know our eternal future. But Scripture is also clear that fear is the opposite of love. If we choose the path of love over the path of fear, we will be true believers, and we will find ourselves walking right into the arms of God. And then we will see that heaven is much closer to us than we ever imagined.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2024

A Sign Like No Other

A few years ago, we received an interesting message through our parish Facebook account. A man doing research on Anglican Eucharistic miracles was inquiring about a reported miraculous apparition here at Good Shepherd. He must have heard of an apparition of Christ’s face on the veil that hangs in front of the tabernacle on the high altar. I was not familiar with any reported miracle here at Good Shepherd, so I simply assumed that the person who messaged us was mistaken. How common it is for people of faith to long for a sign, I thought!

The real miracle of the Eucharist is that Christ comes to us again and again in ordinary bread and wine to feed us with his life. It doesn’t get more miraculous than that. But in our modern quest for certainty and evident signs, that miracle would seem to be insufficient. We need apparitions on tabernacle veils, as opposed to the unending gift of heavenly food to all sorts and conditions of people.

It’s my suspicion that the person who messaged us had mistaken this parish for another Episcopal church in northeastern Pennsylvania, where there was a reported apparition. It’s true; look it up. But why is it that some people of faith need the assurance of a supernatural sign? I, for one, do believe in miracles, even apparitions, but I also believe that miracles happen more often than we realize. And we usually overlook them because we’re looking for faces on tabernacle veils rather than the miraculous mystery of a God who allows us to receive his perfect self into our imperfect bodies by consuming Bread and Wine.

The real miracle of the Eucharist is that week after week, and day after day, broken people like me and you bring all our emotional and spiritual baggage to the altar. We kneel together with all our different viewpoints and diverse life stories, and Christ feeds us with himself. He puts us back together again and sends us out into the world to love and serve in his name. The real miracle is that even though we turn away from God again and again, and even though we demand proofs of his existence through apparitions or clearly answered prayers, God continues to welcome us back into his loving arms and feed us abundantly. And so, if there’s any evident sign of what God is doing among us, it’s the profound mystery of God’s unconditional provision for us. God gives us himself, God feed us, but sometimes we prefer a spectacular sign instead.

Rather than a mystery, we want a sign that is visible, clear, and extraordinary. To put it bluntly, we want God to prove himself. And this is precisely what happens to Jesus when he goes up to Jerusalem around the celebration of Passover. It’s one of three such occurrences in John’s Gospel. Jesus makes a whip of cords and drives out the moneychangers and their animals. He chastises the moneychangers for trading in transactions in his Father’s house. He overturns their tables.

It certainly appears to be an act of violence, until we realize what Jesus is doing. And although some in the Temple demand a sign from him to prove that he has authority to do what he has done, the sign has already been offered but unnoticed because his interrogators are looking for an obvious sign, an apparition on a tabernacle veil, if you will. What they fail to see is that the overturning of the moneychangers’ tables is the sign, although it’s a disconcerting sign. But if we read all the details carefully, we can see more clearly what Jesus is about.

It's Passover time, a time to celebrate the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. It’s a time for freedom, and so Jesus releases the animals that are the victims of a transactional system. He releases the people, too, from a demand for sacrifices that require money to purchase unblemished animals to offer to God. It’s a system that could easily be abused, where it might be perceived that nothing was enough to appease God. And yet, Jesus’s overturning of the tables is not abrogating the value of his own Jewish religion. It’s a visible sign that the freedom and salvation of the whole world are now located and enacted in a person, this Jewish man, Jesus, the Savior of the world.

Jesus is the sign. He’s enough. His impending passion, death, and resurrection are enough to release the world from the cruel grip of competition and the mad rat race of power games. The overturning of the tables is a sign that points to the real miracle that God is doing among humanity.

To our mortal eyes, clouded by sin, what Jesus does seems to be only an act of violence. He trashes the moneychangers’ tables and pours out the money they have collected. And it appears as if destruction is the intention and the final word. Yet we know through the eyes of faith that there must be a mystery beneath this visible sign. It’s a mystery because it’s not an evident sign like an apparition on a tabernacle veil or even a burning bush. This mystery is nothing less than the entire world being turned upside down. In the strange wisdom of God, an upended world is the greatest and most beautiful sign of all.

The overturning of the tables in the temple points to a mystery where wisdom is folly, and folly is wisdom, where poverty is spiritual wealth, and material wealth is spiritual poverty. In this mystery, loss is gain, and gain is loss. At the heart of this mystery, violence is countered with peace, and the vicious cycle of vindictiveness is broken. Through this great mystery, death brings new life. The whole world is turned upside down, just as Jesus overturned those tables in the temple. It’s a visible sign that in the mysterious providence of God, what is broken is put back together again. What is old is made new. Offenses are forgiven, and apparent destruction is never the end. For out of such destruction, God recreates our world.

It’s only natural on this side of heaven that we hunger for signs that God is actively present in our lives. It’s understandable that when we’re wandering aimlessly, we’d want God to give us even just a small hint of certainty as to his will and where we should go next. And when the stability of our world comes crashing down and the rug is pulled out from under our lives, it usually seems to be the last word. Chaos seems to be the end of the story, and it’s very hard to see past it to the other side.

But just like those who interrogate Jesus in the temple, it’s easy to miss what the risen Christ is teaching us. The destruction of his body on the cross has the appearance of hopeless finality, but after three days, the world is turned upside down. A crucified, broken body on a cross is a sign that the world is being redeemed and made whole again. We learn that the world’s Savior still lives despite a crucifixion. We learn that the ruins of loss are the material that God uses to remake the world.

To follow Christ is to allow our worlds to be upended and reoriented around his Gospel, and this will hurt. It will hurt to let go of those things that seem to be the most visible signs of God’s favor, but which are simply the path to death. It will be painful to let go of our control, of our unhealthy attachments, of our resentments, of our power, of our desire for religious certainty, of our comfort, of our need to be right, of even our lives themselves. When we let Christ into our lives, it will feel as if the tables of our lives are being overturned. It will feel like we have lost everything.

In recent days, I have watched the lives of people dear to me being turned upside down. The pain is real and undeniable. And yet, my faith tells me that through this woundedness God can do something extraordinary. The overturned tables of our lives are a visible sign of the unfathomable mystery of God. And in that mystery, our unbearable loss is our richest gain. Our humbling experiences are our path to exaltation. The daily deaths of our lives are how we will rise to new life in Christ, who is the visible sign of our life’s freedom. And although our world may be turned upside down, it’s only a sign that the God who loves us unconditionally will always turn us right side up. And in him, although we seem to die, we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 3, 2024

Only the Beginning of What God Can Do

Some years ago, friends of mine were selling their condo. It was a beautiful home: nicely appointed, in great condition, and in a desirable geographical location. But my friends were surprised to learn from a realtor that to showcase the home on the market, the house had to be completely restaged. All the lovely furnishings in the home were removed, and new furniture was brought in, furniture that, in fact, was not nearly as nice as what my friends’ owned. As I recall, even the walls were repainted. The house became a movie set to appear most viable to eager house hunters.

Apparently, the problem was that a younger generation of potential home buyers had vastly different tastes than my friends. One might rightly allow for a tolerance of varying preferences in home décor. But the most surprising, and perhaps disconcerting, thing of all was that those shopping for new homes were incapable of imagining what my friends’ house could look like with their preferred aesthetic. The realtor couldn’t trust that home buyers would have the imagination or capacity to envision a new domestic aesthetic with their mind’s eye. They literally had to see it in the flesh.

Maybe a technological age had spoiled their mind’s eye. Maybe it spoils our mind’s eye. These days we can go onto the website of a paint store and any room can be instantly painted with a color of our choosing. But with a perceptive mind’s eye, we should be able to look at anything and imagine what it could be. My friends’ experience of trying to sell their home revealed that many people are incapable of imagining an ending that is not limited to the beginning.

I’m not sure if this is more of a problem in our own day than in ancient times, but if it is, maybe it’s because an overreliance on technology has caused our innate imaginative capacities to atrophy. If we can’t repaint a living room in our mind’s eye, then there are far more serious things that we’re unable to do. We can’t imagine the perspective of someone who has a different political view from us. We can’t see with our mind’s eye how to interpret a written document metaphorically or language figuratively. We can’t imagine that a criminal could ever lead a decent life again. We can’t conceive of how peace will come to the Middle East. We can’t imagine justice without violence. It often seems as if we’ve lost our imaginations.

And this might be why Abraham and Sarah seem like ridiculous fools to us. It’s tempting to write off ancestors in the faith, like Abraham and Sarah. It’s tempting to see them as “unsophisticated.” But maybe we’re really the unsophisticated ones because we’ve lost our mind’s eye. And seeing with the mind’s eye was precisely what Abraham and Sarah were able to do. In response to a sudden and momentous call from God, they could somehow envision a new future with their mind’s eye. They could trust that the ending of their story need not be limited by the confines of the beginning.

When God appeared to Abraham at age ninety-nine and promised that he would be the father of many nations and that his equally elderly wife Sarah would bear a son, it’s a preposterous scenario unless your mind’s eye is vital and active. No less, Abraham and Sarah had been waiting on God to fulfill his promise to them for twenty-four years. It’s a wonder that they had any mind’s eye left. They were what some would call foolish, too trusting, naïve, maybe even simple, or at least they were through the eyes of those who can’t paint a room a different color in their mind’s eye or to pessimists who can only see a future limited by the present.

But St. Paul sums it up best through the mind’s eye of faith. He tells us that in hope, Abraham believed against hope. Although Abraham and Sarah did indeed laugh at God’s promises, there was yet a piece of their souls that in hope, believed against hope. Their spiritual mind’s eye kept them from hastily judging the ending by the beginning. And this is what it means to have faith.

Abraham and Sarah are, in fact, the ancestors of many who would follow them in faith. Think of Moses, who would lead a recalcitrant people through many trials and still not see the Promised Land himself. Think of the prophets who preached with great threat to their lives because they, too, in hope, believed against hope. Think of a fledgling, young Church who in hope, believed against hope in the face of an empty tomb and yet spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Think of martyrs who saw in their own mind’s eye, a future prepared by God, even in the face of death.

And here we are today, the modern Church, and because we have shown up this morning, I suspect there’s an active mind’s eye nestled within us. There’s some hope still alive within our souls that enables us to believe against hope. Despite all that seems so misshapen around us, it allows us not to judge the ending by the beginning. To believe against hope is to know that we might not see the ending we desire but are yet called to be part of a movement towards that ending, which we trust will be far more glorious than we can imagine, even in our mind’s eye.

This, too, is the call of Lent. “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea”[1] to trust that the risen Christ will walk on the stormy waves towards us and calm them. Lent invites us to see with our mind’s eye that our worn, tired hearts can still have life within them by God’s grace. While the room of our present may be papered with the wallpaper of old, sinful habits, the room of our future prepared by God can be painted with a freshness of forgiveness and new life.

And maybe the prevalent lack of forgiveness in our culture and even within the Church is directly tied to a loss of spiritual imagination. We see only a future of decline. We see only Christ’s Body tarnished by human failure and imperfection. We see only an institution that appears anachronistic. And we look at Abraham and Sarah with condescending pity because in their mind’s eye they could believe against hope.

But we forget that they were right. They were vindicated. We forget so easily that generations did follow from their lineage of hope. And we forget that we, too, are part of that lineage. We act as if God is not ready, willing, and able to give us a mind’s eye to see a new and marvelous future. We forget that even in our old age of the Church, we can yet be empowered to bear fruit for generations yet to come.

If we look deep within ourselves this Lent, as individuals and as the Church, we might discover that pride lurks there, and it prevents us from seeing with our mind’s eye. Such pride prevents us from recognizing that God can take even our worn-out, sinful selves and make them new. And yet, if we look way down in the depths of our souls, we will find the image of the living God there, along with a mind’s eye that can see  through any amount of darkness.

If you can, then, imagine with your mind’s eye this. Imagine that you or someone else’s worst deed is not who they really are. Imagine that the tired barrenness of your life can bear fruit yet again. Imagine that a Church that seems gasping for air at times will not only survive but also be a beacon of eternal light in the darkness. Imagine that what is moribund can be resurrected. Imagine that what is broken can be healed. See with your mind’s eye in hope, and believe against all hope that we are only living in the beginning of what God can do.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2024

[1] Hymn 549/550 in The Hymnal 1982, words by Cecil Frances Alexander