It All Started with John

He started it. John the Baptist, that is. So, blame him if you don’t like what he did. Maybe we could say that he simply continued what began way back with the Old Testament prophets. Their prophecies unsettled and angered people, but oddly enough, they didn’t draw attention to their own eloquence or perceptiveness. They pointed to God’s word. We Christians might say they gestured towards Christ even if they didn’t know it. They pointed to something beyond themselves. They pointed to God.

But it was John, that wild rabble-rouser, who really started it. During the time that he was baptizing, his disciples came to him, a bit disturbed that Jesus was also baptizing and drawing a crowd to himself. Presumably, this would draw people away from John. John, after all, had come first. And that’s when John said it, putting into words what the great line of prophets had done from the moment they were called by God. He must increase, but I must decrease. I’m not the Christ, he said. John added his own finger to that bold line of prophets, pointing not to his own work or to himself, but to Christ.

Yes, John the Baptist started it. And Jesus’s apostles, in the aftermath of his death, eventually learned how to keep John’s spirit alive. When the apostles were spreading the Gospel to the ends of the earth and Paul healed a man who couldn’t walk in the city of Lystra, the crowds were amazed. They claimed that Paul and his companion Barnabas were gods. But they pointed away from themselves. He must increase, and we must decrease. We’re merely human, they said. The miracles are simply signs that point to the work of almighty God, not to us. John the Baptist opened that can of humility. Blame him, if you want to.

But the disciples weren’t always so humble. Look at the twelve on the road with Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, arguing about who’s the greatest. They’re concerned with being great, not with being faithful. And all this just after Jesus’s tells them quite clearly that the way to the cross requires self-denial and suffering. The disciples still don’t even understand what Jesus is saying when he speaks of his future passion and death. They refrain from asking him what this really means because they don’t really want to know. They just want to be great. At this point, they can only point to themselves and not to Jesus. They must increase, and he must decrease.

The disciples, as we so often do, think in terms of lines. Someone, of course, needs to be at the head of the line. Someone needs to be great, indeed, the greatest. And of course, that means that everyone else will fall behind, and someone will be dead last. Some student needs to be at the top of the class or the most popular or the most likely to succeed. Some politician needs to be the winning candidate. Some priest needs to be known for growing their church the fastest or having the most TikTok followers. Someone in the top one percent needs to be the richest person alive. And in a oddity of statistical greats, some big city needs to be the poorest one, like Philadelphia. Life has its pecking order, so get in line.

But Jesus mixes it all up when he says that the first must be last and the servant of all. He takes a line and begins to turn it into a circle. And then he does something even more spectacular. He doesn’t tie it up. He leaves it open, and he does yet one more thing that truly confounds the disciples. He invites a child into their midst and puts it smack-dab in the middle of the circle.

To us, this seems like a cute little exercise, like a children’s sermon where all the kids come forward so the adults can marvel at how child-centered the church is. But this is not what Jesus does. Imagine, instead, that Jesus takes the convicted felon on death row or the migrant who’s escaped from Venezuela or the poorest of the poor and puts that person in the center of the open circle and embraces that person. That’s what Jesus does. The child in his day barely qualified as a person. It was the one with no rights, who was constantly at the mercy of adults who often failed to care properly for the child. This child—this utter outcast in society—is placed at the center of the circle. Then Jesus says that to welcome this one, the one at the end of the line, is to welcome Christ himself.

And this is when Jesus does the most surprising thing of all. He continues what John the Baptist started and points away from himself to God the Father. Even the Son of Man, the Lord and Savior of all, doesn’t put himself at the front of the line. Yes, John the Baptist really started this whole mess. Whoever welcomes the child welcomes Christ. And whoever welcomes Christ welcomes the One who sent him, that is, God the Father. The line has become a circle, and at its center is God.

To be a Church that’s true to the values of the kingdom, we must stand in a circle and not a line. Outside the walls of this church, we can’t avoid standing in lines, whether it’s at CVS or the Phillies game. We can’t avoid getting in line to see whether Harvard will accept us or whether we’re next up for the transplant. Lines are the reality of life, and we must stand in them. And yet, Christ asks us to stand in those lines as if they can be shaped into circles of welcome. They’re circles that always have space for one more person to stand.

But along the waiting line of life, there’s a common emotion, and it’s usually not happiness. It’s stone-cold fear. Fear is the mechanism that ossifies lines and makes some great and others least of all. Fear is what causes us to hunger for tribal greatness at the expense of the greatest well-being of all people. Fear is what propels us to rush to the front of the line no matter how many others we have to trample on. Fear is what causes us to point to ourselves and not to Christ. Fear is what causes us to look some people in the eye when it’s just her and me but ignore them completely when we’re around the more important or popular. Fear is what has turned even the Church’s three orders of ministry into a rat race of ladder climbing. Fear turns open-ended circles into lines.

This fear starts with a nagging sense that we aren’t loved enough by God or that we must appease God to earn his love. And if we’re not loved enough by God, then we need to be loved by someone else. And to earn that love from someone else, we begin pointing to ourselves more and more, and the circle of inclusion becomes a line where some are great and others are not even human.

When we put a child or a despised immigrant or a condemned felon or an unhoused person at the center of our circle, we have nothing to gain. It’s simply a gesture of pure love. Loving the poorest of the poor will get us nothing in the world’s straight line. It won’t get us a promotion or a raise or tenure. Genuinely welcoming the poor and the stranger is the most selfless act of love possible because it has no ulterior motive except putting God at the center of the circle.

If our life in community at Good Shepherd is to be Christlike, then it must be an ever-expanding circle, not a closed one but one in which there’s always room for another to stand. It’s a circle where only God is at the center. All that we do and all that we are points to God, not to ourselves. In this circle, our own personal preferences and opinions can and should be voiced but are never given undue weight to the exclusion of the good of the whole. In this circle, no person is silenced, no matter how little money they make and even if they’re standing at the end of line. In this circle, the newest person to the group is valued in the same way as the person who’s been here for decades. In this circle, the need of the person on the other side of the circle is ours, too, and we’re always willing to take one for the team, despite any inconvenience it might cause us.

We can do all this only if the center of this circle isn’t fear. Fear would only warp it into a line. At the center of this circle is selfless love in the face of Christ, who we see is actually pointing to God the Father. In this life in community, we can only point away from ourselves and to God, who stands at the center of our open-ended circle. Yes, John the Baptist started it all, and we must keep it going. With every fiber of our being we should let the circle remain a circle and not be forced into a line. And in this circle, there’s always room for one more.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 22, 2024

The Costly Way of Life

It’s just after five a.m. on a Sunday, and you’re walking quickly—but not too quickly—through the streets of Center City Philadelphia. You have a purpose to your mission, but you don’t want others to pay you too much attention. Although it’s a Sunday, the city is already coming alive. Sunday is no longer a day set aside for public worship. It’s another busy workday like the rest of the week.

You’re on your way to Mass, but you don’t want anyone to know about it. What you’re doing is illegal, and if you’re caught, you could end up in prison, or worse yet, be killed. In one of your pockets is a small piece of bread that you baked at home. You turn a corner and are on Delancey Place, but you discreetly head to the back alley to enter the house of a wealthy Christian. Someone is keeping the door to ensure that those who enter are familiar and not spies. You nod at the doorkeeper and enter the parlor of the home. A small but faithful congregation has assembled around a table, covered by a white cloth. A man in civilian clothes sits in a chair, and you recognize him as the Bishop of Pennsylvania. Before you take your seat, you place your piece of bread on the plate resting on the altar.

After a few more minutes, the bishop rises, welcomes those gathered, and begins to pray. He’s joined by several other people in civilian clothes. They’re priests. The bread and wine, which have been brought by you and all those assembled, are prayed over, the Bread is broken, and then the Bread and Wine are shared.

When this sharing in the breaking of bread and common cup is ended, everything is put away, and all are dismissed. While you’ve only been there for twenty minutes or so, the city is now bustling outside. Under the current government, production is king. The workday is starting earlier and earlier. Many people are rushing to work, and should one of them see you and a host of other people leaving this prominent house at the same time, you might tip them off to the fact that you’re Christians.

If they noticed several people leaving the house on Delancey Place, it wouldn’t be too long before they whipped out their cell phones and called the police. Shortly thereafter, you, the others, and even the bishop, too, would be handcuffed and hauled off to the police station. You’d be efficiently judged—hastily, because there’s no real just process these days. You’d be asked if you’re indeed a Christian, and of course, how could you deny it? To deny it would be to deny Christ himself.

Now, there might be someone in the group that was hauled off to the station who waffles before that question, “are you a Christian?” He says no, but the judge suspects that he really is. “Bow down before that picture over there of the president and show your allegiance to our real ruler,” the judge says. For a time, the person is tempted to do it, but then he simply can’t. He turns his back to the picture on the wall and proclaims that he’s a Christian. You and your handcuffed companions become the next victims of the state’s violent system of capital punishment. And it’s not even noon yet.

What I’ve just described is very difficult for us to imagine. It’s a modern riff on an imaginative scenario posed by the late Anglican monk and liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix in his famous book The Shape of the Liturgy. Dix, writing in the 1940s, imagined a similar situation in his own day. A London grocer attended a furtive celebration of the Mass in the home of a wealthy woman in the Hyde Park neighborhood, under the constant threat of persecution from an anti-Christian monarchy. Dix was trying to demonstrate how modern Christians have lost a sense of the danger of Christianity.[1]

In the early Church, sharing in the breaking of bread and in the common cup was a life-or-death matter. But the riskiness of going to Mass was softened, even eliminated, once Christianity was legalized and became a source of power rather than a target of persecution. Christians became complacent. Dix’s transposition of the early Church’s Eucharistic practice into twentieth century London reminds us that at the center of every Mass, beneath the ritual actions and layers of tradition, is the seminal question of Christ: Who do you say that I am?

Jesus’s incisive question to his disciples lies exactly halfway through Mark’s Gospel. And Peter’s hasty answer shows that he, like the rest of the disciples, have no clue who Jesus really is. They may grant that he’s the Messiah, but they’re ignorant about just what kind of Messiah he is. And this is why Jesus immediately forbids them to tell others exactly who he is. To speak of Jesus only in terms of his healing work and miracles is to shield Jesus from the cross and to protect his followers from the cost of discipleship.

But while Jesus urges reticence about his messiahship, he speaks openly and plainly about his future passion, death, and resurrection. This is the kind of Messiah he is to be. He won’t be the anticipated Messiah who’ll gather an army and drive out the occupying Roman forces, thereby winning victory for the Jewish people through violence. He’ll be the victim of the state, the one who goes to the depths of hell and refuses to return violence for violence as part of his saving work. And by this action, he’ll destroy the power of human violence once and for all. In this great inversion, death becomes life, and life becomes death.

In an age where we can walk or drive without fear from home to Mass, we have it all backwards. In this nation, at least, we need not worry about being spied out leaving this church and then hauled off to a crooked court of law and executed. We can be Christian without others so much as blinking their eyes. Increasingly, it seems that the world outside the doors of this church is more and more apathetic to what we’re doing inside this church. And paradoxically, this has caused a huge problem for us as Christians.

We’re willing to confidently profess who Christ is for us. We wear crosses around our necks as attractive jewelry. We’re the rightful heirs of that primal Christian charge: go and proclaim the Gospel to all nations. And, of course, this we should do. But there’s also a tragic cost to the ease with which we embody our Christian faith, and the cost is that we forget about the demands of discipleship. We forget that when we answer Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am,” our response is a matter of life and death. And what we think is life is often death, and vice versa.

Whether we’re living in a police state where Christians are persecuted or on the Main Line in the twenty-first century, one thing never changes. Christians in every time and place are always at the risk of choosing death over life, especially when they want to save their lives. To take up our cross to follow Jesus is far more than bearing with the annoyances and frustrations of a relatively uncomplicated life. And it’s most definitely not about voluntarily introducing unnecessary pain and suffering into our lives. Finding life is about putting ourselves behind Christ, to whom our answer is always yes, no matter the cost.

To walk the way of life and to follow our Lord is to find our lives bound up with one another. Another’s death becomes our own death, another’s pain becomes our pain. Another’s loss is our loss, but another’s rejoicing is ours, too. And in a privileged and complacent society like ours, this means that the seemingly small choices in life are really matters of life and death. They’re the choices of how we treat our neighbor, because the dignity of another can never be sacrificed to our own personal, emotional, or financial security. These are the difficult choices that lead us to deny our own comfort for the flourishing of the whole human family.

And while we might not lose our physical lives by choosing life over death, we’ll experience a kind of death. We’ll die to our selfishness and greed. We’ll die to some of our most deeply cherished convictions. We’ll die to our tightest alliances with earthly rulers and instead choose loyalty to our true King, the one who rights the world not by violence but by sacrificial love.

Here in the Mass, we choose life over death. At its heart, it appears to be an action centered around death, but it’s really all about life. Here in the Mass, we celebrate that the worst of human violence doesn’t have the last word but is overturned by a selfless act of love that sets us all free. Here in the Mass, we give it all—our selves, our souls, and our bodies—back to God. We give God all our petty grievances and all our selfish instincts. Here, we refuse to make peace with oppression, but we know that real peace doesn’t come quickly or easily. Here, we can’t choose life by ourselves; we must choose it together, in community. Here, we must make an honest answer to the question that Christ daily poses to us. Who do you say that I am? You are the Christ, we boldly say. And before we go to tell all the world that Christ is our Lord and Messiah, we must speak plainly about the way in which the Gospel will give us life. It will give us life when we’re willing to face death, whether physical death for the sake of the Gospel or death to our unholy allegiances that comfort us while causing death for others. You are the Christ, we say, and we know that if we lose our earthly life for the sake of the Gospel, we’ll gain something far greater.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 15, 2024 

[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), 142-145, also referenced in Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), 102-106.

More than Meets the Eye

Something changed for me in ninth grade, and it happened in Mrs. Hancock’s English class. She teed up the year by assigning us a ton of reading for the summer, which I was less than pleased about. While others played outside in the southeast Texas heat, I was reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and other classics from a long reading list and draining the ink from highlighters like there was no tomorrow.

We’d been instructed to mark comments and underline in the books themselves, which was new to me. I admit that I didn’t care very much for Hamilton’s Mythology. The world of the gods and goddesses was bizarre to me, and frankly, I didn’t see the point of reading about them. I said as much to an aunt who’d majored in literature in college, and she reminded me that reading about mythology would be helpful in making sense of allusions in other literature. I inwardly thought, okay, whatever. But I dutifully did my reading, and I’m glad I did. It changed me.

It was in Mrs. Hancock’s class that we devoured Shakespeare, parsing it for allusions, foreshadowing, paradox, symbolism, and above all, irony. It was in her class while reading Lord of the Flies that I learned that Piggy’s glasses were not just glasses, and owls in Shakespeare were not just cute animals. Although I was a complete and utter bookworm as a kid, I’d never realized that words weren’t just words. Stories weren’t just stories. The text was more than its literal meaning. There was more than met the eye. Things were not as they seemed.

Those high school literary exercises foreshadowed the way I would come to think about life in general. They might only have been interesting mental exercises for a ninth grader, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that the art of de-literalizing our speech and our thinking is part of what it means to be a mature human being. Finding echoes within a text and savoring the multivalence of words moves us from a simplistic, binary mode of thinking into honoring the complex nuances of our humanity.

I’m not sure why the lessons from Mrs. Hancock’s English class don’t always translate to the reading of Scripture. But since the word of God is a living word of God, then even and especially in Scripture, things are more than they seem to be on the surface.

I wish we’d read Mark’s Gospel in Mrs. Hancock’s class. We could’ve had a field day in discussing irony. Why do we always think of irony as sarcasm or skepticism or equate it with the hermeneutic of suspicion? Irony is also theological. Irony can tell us a great deal about the dissonance between our lives and the vision that God has for us. And if we can understand the irony of our spiritual lives, there will always be an invitation to something greater and deeper than what meets the eye. Irony can even move us into spiritual maturity.

There’s one person in today’s Gospel passage, other than Jesus, who understands that there’s more than meets the eye. I think she understands irony, too. It’s the Syrophoenician woman, whom tradition has called Justa. Let’s use that name, because she deserves a name. Justa is an outsider, a Gentile, and she inserts herself rather boldly into Jesus’s mission to the Jews. And that’s the root of the problem.

But poor Justa has been used by countless commentators to promote their own agendas. For some, she’s the one who “bests” Jesus in an argument. Give it to him, Justa! they say. For others, she’s the victim of Jesus’s rudeness, yet one more reason to try to exhaust the complex intricacies of Jesus’s humanity rather than embrace its mystery. But rather than go down one more rabbit hole with this story, what if we let Justa be the one who sees that there’s more than meets the eye.

Here's where we need Mrs. Hancock’s English class and a generous helping of faith to discern how Justa fits into the larger story of Jesus’s ministry. Context is everything. Justa appears from out of the blue after Jesus has fed the 5,000 and before he feeds another 4,000. Justa appears after Jesus has questioned traditional understandings of what’s clean and unclean. As one of the Gentiles, Justa might be offensively likened to a dog by some, and she emerges on the scene and aces the English test on literary devices.

Meanwhile, Jesus’s disciples are clueless and missing every question on the quiz. Although they’re of the chosen people and are chosen as disciples by Jesus, they’ve still failed to understand the meaning of his feeding of the 5,000. And even after he feeds another 4,000, they still don’t get it. They can’t understand that Jesus’s healing of the sick is more than meets the eye. They don’t understand that bread in the miraculous feedings isn’t just bread. They don’t understand that when there doesn’t appear to be enough, there might be far more than they need lurking below the surface. The disciples are royal failures in humility most of the time. Some want to be first in line and have the best seat at the table, but Jesus reminds them that the first will be last and the last will be first. But what does that mean? they wonder.

And then here comes Justa, with the unshakeable expectation that Jesus is more than meets the eye, that he can, in fact, heal her daughter who’s possessed by a demon, that even though he’s a Jew and she’s a Gentile, perhaps Jesus’s mission doesn’t have to rigidly follow a neat ethnic and geographic map. And when Jesus abruptly remarks that the children—that is, the Jews to whom he has been sent—must be fed first and that the dogs—the Gentiles—should not receive what the Jews deserve, she won’t take no for an answer because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. Justa must comprehend that beneath Jesus’s remark, there’s a spiritual test, or better yet, an invitation to rise above petty emotions and reactivity. Is she offended by Jesus? Who knows? But what she does know is that a crumb is more than a crumb. It’s a gift from God. And no one else in the Gospel, at this point, seems to understand that.

And yet, commentator after commentator will tie themselves into knots trying to figure out how Jesus doesn’t sin here while behaving rudely. Or they use this as an opportunity to direct their latent anger at Jesus by accusing him of deplorable behavior. But Justa, the only one who might have a right to take umbrage at Jesus’s curt reply, rises above it because she knows that there’s more than meets the eye. The woman understands that even a few crumbs from the hand of the Lord are enough. She’s utterly persistent in that belief. She won’t take no for an answer because she knows in the depths of her soul that a little bit can go a long way. It doesn’t matter if the crumb is small. It doesn’t matter that one must eat it from below the table. It doesn’t matter if the acquisition of a crumb seems like an afterthought. This woman is most interested in the fact that the crumb is food indeed but also that eating the crumb is more than sating hunger. It’s about being spiritually fed, and it’s about being healed and made whole. And Jesus’s response to her gumption proves her right.

The irony in Mark’s Gospel is that we, the readers, know exactly who Jesus is and how the story will end. The disciples don’t, but oddly, Justa the Gentile outsider knows something that the insider disciples don’t. And yet, this irony is more than just an interesting literary device. It also points to the dissonance between our lives and the lives that God desires for us. Too often, we’re like the disciples and others who can’t see that there’s more than meets the eye. We see the unanswered prayer as the absence of God. We see our meager situation in life as a reason to be angry that we’ve only been given the crumbs beneath the table. We see someone else’s success as our failure. We imagine that we’re simply one more participant in the great game of competition, where those who are fed first are favored and those who eat last get the short end of the stick. And if we’re the ones being fed first, we imagine that we’ve done something right and that those eating the crumbs are inferior. The irony is that no matter how many literary devices we can pick out of a Shakespeare play, we often read the story of our lives on a literal level. But faith and charity demand that we rise above the literal level, because there’s much more than meets the eye.

In the kingdom of God, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear like Justa, those who have perfectly good hearing fail to hear, but those who physically can’t hear are healed and understand who Jesus is and what he’s done. In the kingdom of God, a crumb is far more than a crumb. It’s a sign that when we think there isn’t enough, we’ve failed to see that there’s more than meets the eye. In the kingdom of God, every tongue that is fettered must be unloosed to tell the world that death on a cross is more than death; it’s life. In the kingdom of God, Jesus can’t remain hid. He must be recognized and loved, and his marvelous works must be told out among the nations. In the kingdom of God, things aren’t what they seem to be, and we should never take no for an answer. Because in the kingdom of heaven, what’s impossible is always possible with God.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2024

Straight to the Heart

Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec isn’t your ordinary detective. He’s, of course, not a real person but the protagonist of Louise Penny’s murder mystery series set in the fictional town of Three Pines, just over the U.S.-Canadian border in the Eastern Townships region of Québec. Inspector Gamache is a French Canadian who graduated from Cambridge University. He has a fierce intelligence and a big heart. He’s brave, courageous, and thoughtful, with a penchant for reciting poetry in conversations with other members of the police force. Gamache tries to see the best in people and is known for giving opportunities to the most ostracized members of the Sûreté du Québec. He believes in the goodness of people; everyone deserves a second chance.

But Gamache is a particularly unusual detective in that he hates guns. He usually doesn’t carry one, and although he certainly uses guns in the line of duty, he detests them. More than one person accuses him of being a coward for not carrying a gun, but they simply fail to understand Gamache’s bravery. He dislikes guns not only because they harm and kill but because he’s acutely aware of the dangerous alliance of a weapon and human emotions. In the heat of the moment, with passions flaring, it’s easy to pull the trigger when a gun is readily available. Gamache knows that the most difficult course of action is to manage one’s own emotional volatility and see potential victims as real human beings, capable of conversation and dialogue, of conversion and redemption. Gamache is extraordinarily self-aware and psychologically mature, which is part of what makes his character so engaging. He doesn’t simply solve crimes through facts. He uses his heart, too.

Gamache is deeply in tune with the inner recesses of his own heart. When he sits across from a serial killer, he sees not only a murderer but the presence of murderous inclinations within himself. When he’s trying to figure out who committed a crime, he’s acutely aware of his own biases and unchecked suspicions. And that’s why he loathes carrying a gun. He can see what lies within his own heart. He knows that when dealing with the worst of human behavior and the presence of evil, he can’t fully trust his motivations for relying on a gun. Will he fire out of self-defense or because he despises the evil in someone? Will he use physical violence to keep the peace instead of taking on the more difficult task of risky dialogue in a hostage situation? Gamache is humbly aware of his own frailty as a human being because he’s befriended the scariest of human passions lurking within his soul.

There’s a spiritual analogy to the self-awareness seen in a character like Armand Gamache. Gamache himself is religiously inclined, although not a faithful practitioner of religion. But he nevertheless understands a spiritual insight that is quite ancient. It’s what the monastic desert fathers and mothers came to understand all too well when they fled the cities to be silent with God. They discovered that although they thought they had left the world, the world had followed them. They learned that each of them was a “little world,” to use the words of the early Christian theologian Origen.[1] Inside of them were all the evils imaginable in the wider world: murder, envy, rage, adultery, licentiousness, theft, deceit, pride.

And it was in the desert that those fathers and mothers learned to befriend the little worlds within themselves. They weren’t supposed to like the inclinations they saw inside, but they at least needed to recognize their presence. They couldn’t run from those real human emotions, and they couldn’t fight them. But they could acknowledge their existence and then ask for the grace of God to relinquish their power. Paradoxically, by embracing the darkness in their hearts, the desert fathers and mothers found that the darkness had less control over them.

It should be no surprise that the desert fathers and mothers came to see that they were “little worlds.” It should be no surprise that the demons of the world found them in the desert because those demons had made a home within their own hearts. None of this should surprise us because it’s precisely what Jesus taught.

His encounter with the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading seems, at first, to be a simplistic overturning of legalistic ritualism. But such a shallow reading conveniently excuses us from being honest with the state of our own souls. Armed with Jesus’s words to the Pharisees and scribes, it’s tempting—indeed dangerous—to lambaste those who are rigidly obedient to the Law or to Church teaching. And in doing so, we get no further than a vague preference for the spirit rather than the letter of the law. But Jesus is not eschewing the Law or religious duty in his exchange with the scribes and Pharisees. His teaching might as well be directed at us, too, and at every Christian who enjoys pointing fingers at those they deem immoral or law-forsaking. Christ’s wisdom is for any of us who secretly judge others while ignoring the spiritual turmoil within our own souls.

Jesus’s teaching goes straight to the heart because he’s showing us that each of us is a “little world.” Our souls are so often like closets under the staircases of our homes and of our retreat house next door: they’re the convenient places to store all our junk while making the visible parts of the house look presentable. Only by doing some spring cleaning within the closets of our hearts can we grow into spiritual maturity. If we recognize the murderous impulses within, we’re less quick to judge the convicted murderer. If we own the fact that we give our loyalty and love to gods and idols of our own making instead of to God, then we’re perhaps less willing to point fingers at a sexually promiscuous person. If we face the overwhelming covetousness within our own souls, we might be reluctant to judge the person locked up for embezzlement. Each of us is a “little world,” which means that none of us is far removed from those whom society considers to be the dregs of the earth.

But this sobering knowledge of our own little worlds would be nothing more than a source of shame unless we could see that there’s a profound grace in it. In this realization of our own little worlds, we’re brought to our knees in humility and utter dependence on God. We stand, of course, before God “to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid.” It's futile to hide our hearts from God, as much as we might try to hide them from others, and this rather terrifying reality is also a gift. There’s a profound moment of grace in recognizing that the confusing mess of our hearts is the source of our shared humanity.

Our own fallibility, our human tendency toward sin, however awful that may be, is what unites us but not in a morbid acceptance of human depravity. It’s a humble recognition that each of us, from the weekly churchgoer to the felon on death row, is made in the image of God and is therefore nakedly reliant on the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God to be healed and saved. That is indeed the only thing that will make us whole.

Our unkind words and judgmental actions, our exclusion of others, our moral superiority, are all weapons that we wield to defend ourselves from befriending the terrifying emotions that nest within our souls. And like Inspector Gamache, that brave detective, we, too, would do well to cast away our spiritual guns and courageously honor our shared frailty with those whom we long to attack. Often the ones we try to attack are mirror images of ourselves.

Christ gently directs our spiritual eyes into the terrifying depths of our hearts. Those hearts are open to him even when we try to hide them from the rest of the world. Despite what lurks there and is disquieting, our hearts are made for goodness, not for evil. And although demons may find a home there, because Christ has the final word, those demons have no power over us. Christ is the light in our darkness. Christ is the one who forgives all that seems unforgivable. Christ is why we have no reason to be afraid of our hearts, because Christ himself dwells in our hearts. And when we befriend the turmoil of our hearts, we will find that Christ has been there all along. He’s always there, unafraid of what terrifies us, because he has unlocked the prison doors and set us free.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 1, 2024

[1] Martin Smith, A Season for the Spirit: Readings for the Days of Lent (New York: Seabury, 2004), 29-30.

The Unceasing Invitation

One of the most memorable travel experiences I’ve had was a train ride from Blackburn, England, to Durham Cathedral. The journey took about three hours and was relatively nondescript. After miles and miles—or kilometers and kilometers, if you wish—of rather uninteresting scenery, the train rounded a bend and suddenly, hovering over the flat landscape was the mammoth hulking mass of the cathedral. Its Norman tower was like a fortress, rising hundreds of feet—or meters, take your pick—above the surrounding town.

When I first saw it, goosebumps pricked my spine and neck. It was as if by looking at the cathedral, I could feel the weight of its thousand-year history. The tower leans slightly, further emphasizing how old it is. Durham Cathedral dominates everything around it. It makes a clear statement of what, indeed who was at the center of life in the 11th century.

I know we should be wary of idealizing the medieval era, but it’s also difficult to get away from the fact that it was a time when God was at the visible center of village and cultural life. Small towns in Europe that would be mere dots on a map of the United States have their own gargantuan cathedrals. In some sense, villages existed because the cathedrals did. To understand medieval music, you must inevitably understand sacred music.

Make no bones about it. Medieval times were pretty raunchy. Corruption was rampant. It’s not that the medieval Church was better than today’s Church, but it did put God more visibly at its center, at least aesthetically if not always in practice. The towering cathedrals with their peals of bells were constant discernible and audible invitations. Come to the Mass. Come and meet God.

Our modern religious landscape might seem flat by comparison. Many eschew the Church for a variety of reasons. On Sundays, the siren calls are often to places that promise fulfillment beyond the Church. There are few cathedrals that dominate the skylines of our towns, and when they do exist, some people don’t even know they are there. I was vividly reminded of this in my first trip to Washington, DC, when I exited a metro station and asked an employee of a CVS store where the National Cathedral was. She had no idea what I was talking about. And the Cathedral was just a stone’s throw down the street.

My train ride to Durham Cathedral over a decade ago was both a stunning sight and a salient reminder of how far removed we are from the days when churches dominated and infused the culture and lives of those around them. Long gone are the days, to quote a friend, when we could ring the Mass bell and the people would come pouring in through the doors.

But in this humbling realization, I think there’s a profound gift. We’re not worse off than a medieval yeoman, and in fact, religiously speaking, maybe we’re better off. And I’m not interested in continuing to spin the nauseating woes of Church decline. I’m interested in the opportunities for grace latent in an age when the Church has been brought to her knees and is still grasping for a vision of her future. If the medieval cathedral was a visible call to God and to hope, then what is it in our own day?

What about Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs? Wisdom, who is associated with femininity in Scripture, has built her sturdy house of seven pillars, most likely symbolizing completion and expansiveness. She has prepared a rich feast with sumptuous wine. She has even set the table. All is ready. All is prepared. Lady Wisdom has done everything possible to establish a setting for nourishment and fellowship.

But she doesn’t stop there, because more is needed. No one will know the feast is ready or how lavish it is. No one will even know that they are welcome at this feast. So, Lady Wisdom goes the extra mile. She sends out her maids to the highest places in the town, towering over the landscape a bit like Durham Cathedral. But Lady Wisdom doesn’t seek to attract by her dominating power. She calls by virtue of her generosity and hospitality. Her maids call out the invitation, “Turn in here!” This isn’t an invitation intended only for the brainy and sophisticated people of the day. It’s for everyone, especially for the simple and naïve. The invitation isn’t to a theological symposium or scholarly debate. It’s to a feast. It’s to something practical, even necessary for human existence. Come, eat some bread and drink some wine. Choose this feast, this relationship with Wisdom, and you will find life.

What we don’t hear in today’s reading is Lady Wisdom’s foil, and we can’t really know Lady Wisdom without understanding her opposite, who is Lady Folly. She appears just a few verses later, and she’s described as noisy, without knowledge. She has no shame and is perhaps even promiscuous. She’s prepared nothing for others, no feast, no set table. She’s far from generous. She simply lounges at the door of her house or at the high places of the town, and she calls to those who pass by, inviting them to partake of stolen water and bread eaten in secret. Her ways are furtive. In short, Lady Folly is lazy and offers nothing of real substance. Her inertia is the exact opposite of Lady Wisdom’s preparedness and proactivity.

What we also might not know from reading Proverbs is the long tradition within the Church of associating Lady Wisdom with Christ. It echoes within the New Testament. Christ is the one who offers us a choice: follow him and find life, or refuse him and encounter death. But it’s even more complicated than this. Some imagine the Christian life as a dichotomous choice between life and death at a single point in time, for good or for ill. Once you’ve decided which way to go, you’re destined either for heaven or for hell.

But the choice Christ offers us is more nuanced, I think. He’s the one who’s built a stable house for us on strong foundations, not on sand. He’s prepared a rich feast for us, of bread and wine. He’s set the table. He’s, indeed, done everything possible to feed and nourish us with his very life at his banquet. He’s even experienced death itself so that we might choose to follow his way and live. He seeks to call not through domination but through the quiet power of his generosity. And no matter how many times we choose the way of death, Christ gives us infinite opportunities to turn aside in our simple-mindedness, to grow into spiritual maturity, and to feast at the banquet of life that he offers us.

In the days of medieval cathedrals towering over their towns and ringing their bells, the buildings and the bells seemed to be enough. They called others to the feast. But there’s something inspiring in the days before those cathedrals asserted their visible claim on the world’s landscape. Before that religiously-privileged time, Christ, our Incarnate Wisdom, pitched his tent among us and prepared the feast, but there were no visible towers and clanging bells to call others to the feast. Christ, our Wisdom, first called people into relationship with him. He changed their lives, and this catalyzed a mission to the ends of the earth. And then, as the incarnation of Lady Wisdom, he sent out his maids—his disciples—into the highest places of towns to issue his constant invitation: “whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” And this is why we’re here today.

There’s an astounding moment of grace in our own lackadaisical day. Our glorious buildings and beautiful bells are gifts to be used and to call out from the highest places that God is among us. But something more is needed to call others to the feast. Those who’ve not yet found their way to the table need us. They need our stories, our retelling of the transformative encounters we’ve had at the table with Jesus, our Lord, our Wisdom. They need us to tell of our own relationship with the one who has done everything—even given of his own life—so that we might turn aside to celebrate at his life-giving banquet. Jesus, our Wisdom, calls not only to the geniuses and brilliant or to the cultured and well-known but particularly to the simple and innocent, to the hurting who have been worn down by the brutality of our own age. He calls to all, not once and forever, but daily, and he invites us to come and sup with him.

The foil of Christ, our true Wisdom, is a lazy, complacent, inert Church, who rests on her laurels and offers nothing but hollow speech, hypocrisy, and cheap tricks, who goes not into the streets to issue an invitation but proudly expects that grand towers, loud bells, and social media are enough to draw others to the feast.

Now is a beautiful moment for the Church. Christ’s command is still valid and true. Go and preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Go and make disciples. See, our loving Wisdom has done it all. He has given his life for us, and he has prepared his feast and set the table. He has promised to be with us always, even unto the end of the age. We are the maids of Lady Wisdom. We are Christ’s messengers. Let us go to the highest places of our town and neighborhoods. Let us issue the invitation, the timeless and eternal one: Come and eat the bread and the wine that give true life. Turn aside and see what Christ is offering you. Come this way, and you will find life.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 18, 2024

Too Close for Comfort

There’s been some about the TV show The Chosen, which depicts the life of Jesus starting with his Galilean ministry. Much of this contention is located within Protestant evangelical circles, which are suspicious of creating visible images of Jesus. If you can’t make a statue of him, then it’s likewise problematic to have a sinful human portray him in a television show. Some Christians are also uncomfortable with a TV show that imaginatively expands on the sometimes-sparse stories found in the Gospels.

The director of The Chosen has responded to these criticisms in a YouTube video, where he explains that the producers of the show have made their best efforts to stick close to the Gospels, while also taking judicious liberties in fleshing out certain characters and stories from Scripture. This means that there are scenes in which characters within the Bible are shown doing things that never appear in the Gospels but could very well be things they actually did in real life. Nicodemus, for instance, gets a lot of screen time, rather than a brief mention. Simon Peter has a wife named Eden. And Jesus is seen camping out in the woods outside Capernaum, making fires to keep warm at night, and even brushing his teeth.

If you ask me, based on the few episodes I have watched until this point, the somewhat imaginative portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen is consonant with a long line of Christian tradition. For centuries, until rationalism flattened any kind of personal, prayerful encounter with Christ in Scripture, Christians read the Bible through several different senses, rather than literally. There’s a venerable practice of reading between the lines in Scripture and of prayerfully placing oneself within the text. This means letting Jesus speak to you and me, right here, right now. This means hearing the sounds of a Galilean street, smelling those who crowded around Jesus as he taught, and looking into the eyes of the beggar pleading for healing.

But I do wonder if the controversy surrounding The Chosen is more than a simple fear of idolatry. It’s not surprising that some Christians are deeply wary of straying too far from the Biblical text in portraying the life of Jesus. There is a discernible risk involved in allowing a fallible human to portray the Son of God. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more at work to the objections to The Chosen. And I think it has to do with Jesus becoming too close for comfort.

We’re used to what the Gospels show us about Jesus. We hear his words and glimpse some of his actions. But we don’t see him brushing his teeth or uttering a prayer to his Father before falling asleep at night, alone in a tent. We don’t see him playfully telling stories to local children who find him in the woods or creating funny sounds with his mouth to make them laugh. And when we do see Jesus doing these things, it probably disturbs us a bit, because Jesus begins to seem a bit too close for comfort. He’s like us in his full humanity, but unlike us in his divinity. He reminds us of who we’re called to be, and also of who we’re not.

It’s the same with those who mutter and complain about Jesus in John’s Gospel. Just as our bodies manifest hidden illnesses through visible signs, audible complaining is often a signal that there’s unrest and turmoil within the heart. And we would do well to probe such visible signs to befriend our uncomfortable emotions.

I would guess that those who murmur against Jesus when he says that he’s the bread come down from heaven are put off for the same reasons that some in our own day are put off by seeing Jesus portrayed in a television show. He’s too close for comfort. In John’s Gospel, those who murmur against Jesus know his mother and father. How can a divine claim be made by someone with flesh and blood parents? How can the bread of life be one of us? How can humanity be so tied up with divinity? And if he is, how does that convict our unholy alliances with power and privilege? We’re disconcerted by the human side of Jesus because his perfect humanity reminds us of who we’re called to be and of how much we’ve fallen short. And no one likes to be reminded of that.

This is the judgment in John’s Gospel. God himself has come terrifyingly close to us in the incarnate Word, Jesus, and yet we have pushed him away. We have refused to allow ourselves to be taught by God. God has made everything personal for us, and yet we long to go back to an impersonal relationship with God. Those who grumble against Jesus in John’s Gospel don’t seem to want a person; they’d prefer a thing. And maybe it’s also true with us. We like the idea of Jesus, not the person of Jesus. We prefer Jesus as a moral exemplar and not as one who lives within us, convicting us and challenging us. We like sanitized Gospel stories that point to God’s justice and yet leave our daily encounters with injustice untouched. We simply don’t want a Jesus who is too close for comfort. And this is how many Christians see salvation. They want a salvation that’s accomplished by Jesus but that requires no transformation or effort on their own part to realize it.

Perhaps more than anyone else, the Church’s martyrs give witness to a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. I was vividly reminded of this a few days ago when we commemorated Edith Stein, who converted from Judaism to Christianity when she was thirty years old. A gifted philosopher, she was forced out of a teaching position in Nazi Germany because of the pervasive anti-Semitism in the 1930s. She eventually entered a Carmelite community as a nun, and later moved to the Netherlands. After the Dutch Bishops Conference condemned Nazi racism, the Nazis retaliated and arrested 243 Dutch Christians of Jewish origin. Edith and her sister Rosa were in this group and eventually died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Before her death, Stein had already challenged the Roman Catholic Church, speaking out about its failure to stand against the Nazi regime. Her words judged a Church that ultimately couldn’t grapple with a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. She challenged a Church that was centered around the Eucharist, around Jesus as the living bread come down from heaven, where God brings himself closer to us than we could ever imagine. And yet that Church ignored Jesus in the gas chambers. Hear Stein’s words from a 1933 letter to the pope, which received no reply. “Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles?”[1]

Here's the rub of a Jesus who’s too close for comfort. In Christ, we see who we’re called to be and how we’ve fallen short. But we also see how the risen Christ is all around us, everywhere we turn. And we see that it’s impossible to be an honest Christian while putting Jesus into a hermetically-sealed box that we open on Sundays and close at the end of Mass. Christianity is currently in a state of crisis because some have pushed Jesus away to regain their comfort, because a Jesus that’s too close for comfort challenges our unholy alliances, whether with government or any sinful human system that, to use Edith Stein’s words, denies the holiness of humanity.

When we get close to Jesus, we must be changed. We can no longer plead innocence in knowing what Jesus wants us to do, because in him, we’re taught by God. We can no longer behave as if our neighbor’s need isn’t our own. We can no longer hide our spiritual gifts rather than use them. We can no longer take shelter from the world instead of living well in it. We can no longer say one thing and do another. Coming close to Jesus demands that we be integrated human beings, people who live in the world and yet are not of it, people who show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith.[2]

And this involves a death to many things, to our pride, to our safety, to our power, to our comfort, to our protective isolation. But in this death, we find eternal life. The Jesus who’s too close for comfort is also the true living bread come down from heaven, whom we take into our own bodies and digest and feed on. And the one who’s too close for comfort has promised us this good news: that if we let him into our lives and allow him to get close, we will never be hungry. And we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 11, 2024

[1] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/11/Lesser-Feasts-and-Fasts-2022_final.pdf

[2] From the Collect for the Second Sunday of Easter, The Book of Common Prayer (1979)

Set Free by Love

It’s said that with age, people mellow. Youthful arrogance is transformed into more flexible humility. Rashness is tempered by thoughtfulness, impatience by patience. Those who were firebrands for a particular cause in their 20s choose their words and battles more judiciously in their 70s.

In my early twenties, I moved from Texas, where I’d lived my entire life, to Connecticut. In my youthful arrogance, I considered it a liberation and an escape from insularity. I then spent four years in New York City, soaking up its culture, riding high on its electric busyness, and quietly feeling sorry for those who had to live in other less sophisticated places. I relished being around people who, on the whole, thought as I thought and voted like I voted. I was a member of a parish that echoed my social values as well. It was very comfortable and very affirming, and it felt good.

But then at age twenty-eight, I moved to Washington, DC, and immediately realized that I was in a different milieu. I quickly learned that the people in my circles at church and work didn’t necessarily vote the way I voted. They didn’t always agree with my opinions. I had to check my tongue and speak with greater discretion. Life had gotten much more complicated, and I became frustrated, even angry, with that messiness. I even thought that I had made a mistake by moving away from New York City. I worried that I was regressing and undoing the progress I had made since moving to the northeast.

Just a few years after relocating to Washington, DC, I found myself sitting at a table with the vestry of my parish. The vestry was there to sign off on my candidacy for ordination. One by one the vestry voted, and each person said yes until one person said no. I sat there as he explained why he had voted in that way. He didn’t believe that openly gay persons should be ordained. But he also told me that he respected my education and my qualifications. He had no qualms about my academic suitability, just with who I was. And I took great offense.

I later discussed my impressions of the vestry meeting with the interim rector of the parish, a retired bishop. I expressed to him how angry I was that the vestry member had voted no in that meeting. And I’ll never forget how the kind, wise bishop responded. He looked at me, smiled, acknowledged my feelings, and then said, “But he said it in the most loving way, didn’t he?”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. In my spiritual immaturity, I wanted him to side with me, to say that it was unjust of that vestry member to vote no and tell me in front of the whole vestry that I wasn’t suitable for ordination. But over a decade later, I’ve realized how wrong I was in that moment. When I could have welcomed with genuine love, if quiet disagreement, the challenging opinion of a brother in Christ, I reacted resentfully, at least inwardly. But why? That vestry member didn’t yell at me. He didn’t tell me I was going to hell. He wasn’t mean or rude. He wasn’t trying to sabotage my ordination process. His one vote didn’t even change the outcome. That man was simply being honest about his own beliefs, and he was trying to speak the truth in love.

It's probably only the gift of time that enables us to hear the truth spoken in love and to speak the truth in love. We could argue about what is truth, but let’s say for just a minute that truth, as it’s referenced in the Letter to the Ephesians, might refer to what a person in good faith perceives to be the truth. There is, of course, an eternal truth that is objectively so and independent of our fallible understandings of truth, but we often can’t fully comprehend that truth. It eludes human wisdom because it lies only in the mind of God. There are, in fact, times when we believe ourselves to be speaking that truth, but on this side of the eschaton, we will never be speaking it perfectly. How can we?

And yet, neither is the Letter to the Ephesians arguing for a relative truth, where you speak your truth, and I speak mine. As we follow Jesus, we strive for the truth, and at the same time, if our perception of how that truth is manifested in our lives is always imperfect, then it’s possible for each of us to aim for the truth in good conscience and still miss the mark somewhat. And this takes us to a very gray place, where the demands of Christian community require us to exist together in love as we struggle to grasp the truth, even while each of us presumes to know it or tell it. In that ambiguous, uncomfortable place, we must exist with those who are trying to speak the truth that can sound very different from the truth we are trying to speak, even as each of us does so in good conscience.

The Letter to the Ephesians seems less concerned about defining truth, apart from the revelation of God in Christ, and more concerned about human relationships in the body of Christ. Whoever wrote this letter, whether Paul or someone writing as him, must have been around the block more than a few times. The author must have understood that it’s hard to grow up into spiritual maturity until we’ve experienced the frustrations and disappointments of life and been significantly humbled, like Paul was. He was, after all, a firebrand in persecuting Christians and later found himself preaching the Gospel to Gentiles while also trying to stay in conversation with the Jews. He never gave up on that conversation. It’s hard to grow into a mature Christian until you’ve been in dialogue with those who question your most deeply held convictions and possibly question your very identity.

To grow up as people of faith, we need the Church. The Letter to the Ephesians may, in fact, provide a very good answer to the question we’ve been exploring on Sunday mornings in our book study. Why go to church? Why? Because the Church is the place in which we learn to live together in unity, peace, and love. The Church demands that to be the Church we strive for a higher calling even while our roots grow deeper into the earth.  The Church is the place where our diversity of perspectives and variety of gifts demand that we rely closely on one another to discover unity. The Church is the place where peace exists because tensions and conflicts have been wrestled with, not avoided, and where love abides because the health of the body is more important than personal comfort. The Gospel tells us that strength is found in lowliness, meekness, and patience with those who push all our buttons. We have grown up when we can sacrifice our own certainty and sense of superiority for the sake of the unity of the body of Christ.

We need the Church because she calls us to a constant truth that surpasses the instability of the world in which we live. It’s a world that’s capable of so much good but is often governed by wily voices that dupe us into self-righteousness and binary certitude. In such a world, we’re told that we should silence the voices who disagree with us or at least ignore them. We’re told that progress is far better than patience. We’re told that those who think differently from us simply need to be converted to our way, and for those of us in the know, it’s our job to help them see the error of their ways. Is it any wonder that there’s so much division among us?

And so, we need the Church more than ever. We need the Church as she implores us, just as the author of Ephesians implored the residents of Ephesus, to strive for a better way as revealed in Christ, to grow up into spiritually mature adults. We need the Church to teach us the gift of time and patience. We need an open space for tense words that are still spoken in love. We need room to lovingly agree to disagree.

The place where the mettle of the Church is tried and tested is in the Mass. Our actions in the Mass are the litmus test of whether we’re really Christians or simply self-righteous hypocrites. At the Communion rail, if we’re truly seeking a better way and if we long to speak the truth in love, we let Christ speak his truth into our lives. We kneel beside others who color different bubbles on the election ballot, and together we stretch out our hands and receive into our very bodies Truth himself. At that moment at the rail, Christ is the only thing that matters. We serve together in ministry with others not because we necessarily like or agree with them, but because in love, we agree to act out of our shared belief that Christ himself is the source of our actions, not our own personal convictions. We share Christ’s peace every week, even with and especially with those that challenge every ounce of our patience, because that peace is not ours to control but Jesus’s gift to receive.

And the greatest paradox of all, is that when we become prisoners of the Lord, just like the author of Ephesians, we become truly free. We’re free because we’re released from the slavery to self and human ideology into the glorious freedom of abundant life in Christ. And what a marvelous gift that is.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 4, 2024

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.