Sit Down for Jesus

Nestled within the hymnal in front of you is a well-known hymn. Perhaps you know it. “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross.”[1] Despite its rather militant language, the tune and commanding summons to stand up for Christ make it hard to remain seated. It’s one of those hymns that gets the adrenaline flowing and the emotions stirred up. It might enhance our excitement on this first Sunday of the program year. Stand up for Jesus! Lift high his royal banner, it must not suffer loss! Stand up and follow him! So, why are you still sitting down?

But not so fast, Jesus might very well say to us. Maybe we should sit down first. Although we spend a great deal of our time sitting down in a technological age, we are still the inhabitants of a stand-up culture, which is often impetuous and rash. Good intentions prompt us to stand up too quickly and to answer the call of discipleship too hastily. Even while sitting down at our computers or before our smartphones, our stand-up culture exhorts us to get up quickly and do something. Easy commitments follow, promises that are never kept ensue, meaningless platitudes proliferate on social media, and online signups count for nothing. We are citizens of a stand-up culture.

I once worked at a place that had stand-up meetings. The idea was that meetings would be more efficient if everyone were standing. Anyone tired of standing on their feet would, theoretically, be less prone to pull the meeting into frivolous side conversations or endless banter. Stand up for the brief meeting and then move on with the day.

Stand-up culture is nothing new, though. Fallible humans have always been willing to stand up for something and then abandon the project. It’s just a bit easier to stand up these days when a tech device separates us and our interlocutor. Easy promises are offered by text message or email and then never honored. Ghosting is an insidious phenomenon aided and abetted by technology. If the courage is lacking to say no or explain why a commitment is impossible, radio silence is chosen instead. So, it’s not that our stand-up culture is something new. It’s just much harder to refuse an engagement or to back out of an agreement when you’re face to face with someone.

As proof that stand-up culture has always existed, we could take a snapshot of those large crowds following Jesus towards Jerusalem in today’s Gospel and compare it with a snapshot of those left standing at the foot of the cross on Good Friday. Scripture doesn’t give us an accurate picture, but I suspect that the crowd was a good deal smaller at the cross. And I also have a sneaking suspicion that the faces of those at the cross were overwhelmingly different from those who started out on the road with Jesus many miles from Jerusalem.

And this is why Jesus might very well tell us to sit down before standing up. Hold your horses, he might say. Ponder the cost of what you’re about to do. Examine yourself and see if you have what it takes to follow me. After all, someone planning to build a tower wouldn’t undertake the project without first sitting down to estimate whether the project could be brought to completion. Nor would a king wage battle against another king without first sitting down to assess whether he could be victorious. Why then, would someone follow Jesus if the journey couldn’t be completed? Such a response would only be chosen by one who considers discipleship to be yet another meaningless option among many.

And the cost is steep, so steep that we might pretend as if Jesus didn’t really mean what he said, because we are prone to make Jesus conform to our world rather than allow God’s kingdom to transform us. To sit down before following Christ is to search the depths of our hearts and decide whether Jesus is really at the center above all else. If love for your biological family isn’t rooted in a stronger love for Jesus, you should sit down before going on the journey. We can fill in the blanks with other loves that we are wont to put before love of our Lord. Whoever doesn’t love Jesus more than financial security, should sit down before going on the journey. Whoever doesn’t love Jesus more than success or popularity, should sit down before going on the journey. Whoever doesn’t love Jesus more than ideology or academic prowess or personal security, should sit down before going on the journey. It's not that we shouldn’t love our biological family. It’s not even that we can’t have a right relationship with the many things that vie for our attention and affection. It’s simply that if those other lesser loves are not prioritized around Jesus, our ultimate love, then we should probably sit down before standing up.

Sitting down to count the cost is nothing less than contemplating the “risk of love.”[2] It’s the risk of being in relationship with someone who might break your heart or betray you. It’s the risk of giving birth to a child, caring for her, and then setting her free into a treacherous world. It’s the risk of being baptized, of dying with Christ and rising to a new life. It’s the risk of giving all you have and are to the living Lord, whom you cannot see but who you trust is eternally in love with you.

The risk of love assumes that, in following Christ, we will sit down to weigh the cost, mean what we say, and avoid false promises that will never bear fruit. To accept the risk of love means that we accept the limits of our finite humanity as God’s gift to us, while always striving to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.

Jesus’s words to those who would stand up quickly to follow him are more convicting than they at first appear. He uses earthly examples to speak of heavenly things, and his questions have an assumed, obvious answer. What person would try to build a tower without assessing whether the project could be completed? Not a wise builder! That’s the answer. And what king would go into battle before determining whether a victory would be likely? Not a wise king! The question is clear and cuts to the heart. Why are spiritual matters less important than worldly matters, not just for the imaginary figures in Jesus’s examples but for us, modern Christians? Why would we not sit down and invest more of ourselves in discipleship than in any other human endeavor?

We could very well pose the same question to our situation. Why would we claim to be Christian without letting our actions reflect what our words purportedly say? Why would we profess to follow Christ without letting him be the center, without letting his precious day of the week shape our entire week, without letting his kingdom be the focus of our time and money, without letting God be the fulcrum around which our life revolves rather than an afterthought?

If we refuse to engage in stand-up Christianity, we will first sit down and consider the risk of love. And if we contemplate the risk of love, we will discover something of almighty God. And the good news is that in Christ, we see most visibly a God who did not and does not shy away from the risk of love. We find a God who created everything not out of duty but out of love, who is committed to a completely free creation that will inevitably turn away from God and wound God’s heart.[3] But that is the risk of love, and it is worth taking.

In sitting down before standing up, the entire Christian journey becomes a journey of self-giving love. We can’t stand up once and be a real Christian. We must sit down and stand up, again and again. Our whole life is a process of becoming more and more like God in whose image we were made. And by growing more maturely into God’s likeness, we accept more fully the risk of love by bidding farewell to all that pushes God away from the center of our lives. We do it with God’s unending grace and through self-discipline, spiritual practices, and the perseverance of faithful discipleship.

So, sit down, sit down, for Jesus, you lovers of the cross. Lift high your eyes to the cross, where true love is most perfectly realized. Choose life, not death, again and again, for the remainder of your earthly days. Give up all that would draw you from the love of God. And then, stand up, stand up, for Jesus, and follow him all the way to heaven.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 7, 2025

[1] Words by George Duffield, Jr. (1818-1888), The Hymnal 1982, no. 561

[2] See chapter two in Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

[3] See again, chapter, in Tokens of Trust.

Resting in Christ

Generally speaking, I enjoy flying. Boarding, however—not so much. There’s the anxious hovering at the gate itself once the boarding announcements begin. The shoving between and within boarding groups once the actual boarding begins. The shuffling through the jetbridge to the airplane. And then the anxious, annoyed and exasperated, hovering and shoving and shuffling on the airplane itself as people attempt to locate and access their seat, and, perhaps most importantly, as they compete over those precious, oh so precious, overheard compartments.

According to a 2019 study published in the journal Physical Review,[1] some of this anxiety could be alleviated by boarding according to principles of Lorentzian geometry. Please don’t ask me to explain the ins and outs of Lorentzian geometry to you after the service—I can’t—but the upshot of these principles & of their research was that slower passengers—generally, those with the most luggage—should actually board 1st. This, according to math, is apparently the optimal way to board—reducing time & maximizing space. But, we don’t do it this way; we seat by boarding group. Why? Well, boarding groups are a money-maker. People will pay to board first, because most people like to be first. First to be seated; first to begin enjoying their Bloody Mary’s & Biscoff cookies; first to access that overhead storage directly above their seat. And so we all pay for that desire, that desire to be first, with chaotic and congested boarding.

I don’t know that Jesus had much interest in Lorentzian geometry. But, as we see in today’s Gospel, Jesus did have an interest in seating arrangements. Or rather, Jesus had an interest in people’s interest in seating arrangements, because Jesus had a deep interest in people, and He knew that where people sat or tried to sit spoke to where they stood, or thought they stood. In our Gospel, Jesus is at a dinner, and he is watching how the guests are choosing their seats. Most of the guests, it seems, think of themselves as Boarding Group 1 kind of folk, and are choosing “the places of honor.” And then, as Jesus often does, He begins telling parables in response to what He’s seeing and hearing around Him. And, as is also often the case with Jesus, what He says may seem, well, not like good cocktail or dinner party chatter. He implicitly criticizes His fellow guests and His host—criticizes them, in the case of the guests, for how they’re choosing their seats; and, in the case of His host, for his choice of guests.

And yet, despite Jesus’s critical note, there is good news here—for the host, for the guests; and for us. Note the immediate setting: it is the sabbath, the day of rest. And note the broader setting: we did not read these passages today, but Jesus has just been involved in a series of so-called “sabbath controversies,” where Jesus has confronted, and been confronted by, the religious authorities over the nature of sabbath observance. In the preceding chapter, for example—the Gospel reading appointed for Proper 16, last Sunday—Jesus healed a disabled woman on the sabbath and was criticized by the authorities for doing “work” in supposed violation of the sabbath. Jesus responded by decrying the absurdity and inhumanity of their criticism—and then He did it again. In the verses directly preceding today’s reading, Jesus has again healed on the sabbath—this time, a man with severe swelling.

Now, in these healings, Jesus was not just trying to push the authority’s buttons, to be a rule-breaker and a trouble-maker. Rather, Jesus was illustrating the true meaning of sabbath, of rest: rest not only as the cessation of activity, but rest as restoration and renewal, as release from that which ails and afflicts. And Jesus is doing the same here, at dinner.

The theologian Walter Brueggeman, who died just this June, characterized the essence of sabbath not as the abstaining from activity as such, but as resistance:[2] resistance to, and ensuing release from, the relentless striving of this world—for money, for status, for the best seat at the table or on the airplane. And in this resistance, Brueggeman argued, there was rest, true rest.

Today’s dinner guests’ and host’s strategic socializing reveals an anxiety, a profound anxiety about the world and their place in it. Rather than just enjoying the company and the food, they seem determined to use hospitality as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. How exhausting! And so, at today’s dinner, Jesus—far from just finger-wagging—seeks to heal those gathered from that anxiety and its consequences. He invites His host, the guests, and us, to resist that urge to always strive for the “best” seat, to resist the anxious and exhausting ways of this world: and not just for an hour on Sundays, but always. Jesus invites us, today and every day, to rest in the assurance that God—the ultimate host—has already set a table—or chartered an airplane, if you prefer—with the right seats for everyone. And these seats can’t be bought or sold; they don’t go to the folks with the most frequent flyer miles; they don’t depend on how much we make, or where we come from, or who or how much we know. They depend on God’s graciousness—and our God is gracious.

It may well be that, right now, when we look at our own lives and at the lives of those around us, it doesn’t feel that way: it may not feel like there are the right seats, or even enough seats. There is much injustice in the world, and, even for those of us who are well-off, we have nevertheless likely lived rejection, disappointment, & betrayal. Nevertheless, however turbulent the times, however poor the conditions may seem for rest, we are invited to rest in Christ, and assured that Christ, who “is the same yesterday and today and for ever” is with us and for us.

To actually experience this rest does require something from us, however: it requires faith, and faithfulness. It requires faith in the sense of humility, or the opposite of pride. Rather than living convinced that we are, or always deserve to be, first or number one, it requires acknowledging, as Sirach reminds us, that God is our “Maker.” As such, God is ultimately in control; He has final say on who sits where, whatever our notions. And He is the “Maker” of all. None of us then comes from better or worse “stock,” so to speak: we all come from God’s stock. It also requires faith in the sense of confidence, confidence that even when we suspect we’ve been seated in the wrong place, we have a God who “will never fail….or forsake [us],” and thus we already have and are enough.

And in this in-between time, as we may stand in the aisle, so to speak, wondering whether we will ever get to just sit down, and whether there will be enough leg room and baggage space when we do, we are, as the author of Hebrews reminds us, called to be faithful to God and His commands—not shoving and shouting at each other as we make our way, but continuing in “brotherly love;” welcoming the stranger; providing for those in need; respecting our bodies and those of others; using our wealth for good, rather than seeing it as a good in itself. And we are called to do this not with an attitude of superiority, or with the expectation of advancing our own position, but as “a sacrifice of praise to God,” in thanksgiving for all He has done, is doing, and will do for us, through Christ.

And in such faith and in such faithfulness there is rest, true rest. AMEN.

Sermon by Mrs. Lorraine Mahoney, Postulant for Holy Orders
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 31, 2025

[1]S. Erland et al. “Lorentzian-geometry-based analysis of airplane boarding.” Physical Review  100, no. 062313 (December 2019): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.100.062313.

[2] Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Westminster John Knox Press.

Down the Ladder and into Heaven

Some years ago, while in seminary, I entered a professor’s office for a chat. Plastered on the wall of her office was a sticker that said, “Keep church weird.” What did that mean? I wondered rather smugly. I considered whether weird church was just weirdness for the sake of novelty, like when the Day of Pentecost attracts fire eaters standing before congregations, and when Palm Sunday becomes a donkey petting zoo. But if weird church means that living as a Christian is inherently strange vis-à-vis the world, then I can get on board with that.

Let’s be honest. Christianity has always been weird, and I pray that it will always be weird, in some sense—not weirdness for the sake of itself, but weirdness as a way of affirming a new creation that subverts the horrors of the old. We who are gathered in this church today are strange. While many sleep in and have a late morning brunch, we rise early before the work week begins, in celebration of a bizarre event that occurred two thousand years ago, and we worship a God who took on human flesh. We come, not primarily to fraternize or for a social hour but to adore a God we claim is living and yet whom we cannot see. We sing hymns in a culture where singing in public is viewed with some degree of shame. We intentionally share with one another a gesture of peace that we know we can’t understand and that doesn’t belong to us. But outside the church, people spew venomous words at one another, use the threat of gun violence as a hoax to spread fear, and choose division over reconciliation. We come forward to the Communion rail believing that a tiny morsel of stale bread and a brief sip of wine somehow draw us mystically together with God, all the company of heaven, and one another. And on top of that, we claim that this meager meal is enough and will feed us forever. Indeed, it will give us eternal life. This is very strange.

It is perhaps a testament to how complacent and comfortable Christianity has become that we might not immediately discern the strangeness of what we do here at Mass. These days, in many quarters, Christianity has become a type of conformist state religion, upholding the sinful status quo. The strangeness of putting God at the center of our lives—of literally shaping our lives around God is anathema.

But there have always been oddballs in the history of the church who have called her back to her strange roots. And they still exist. One of the most famous examples was St. Simeon the Holy Fool, from the sixth century. He would randomly extinguish the candles during the Eucharist and throw nuts at people. He performed all kinds of bizarre acts around the village, and people wrote him off as deranged. But he also healed people, assisted the poor, and fed those in need. His weirdness was not intended to make church weird, nor was it some theatrical spectacle as an end in and of itself. His weirdness was a strange ploy to call himself and the larger Christian community back to humility and to distract people’s attention from the goodness of his life.[1] Simeon’s acts of charity and healing could have become the spectacle. But Simeon knew that to be a fool for the sake of Christ is the call of everyone who purports to be a Christian. To be a fool for Christ means that Christ gets all the attention.

St. Paul’s words to the church in Corinth are easy to misinterpret. At first glance, Paul could be seen to be complimenting the Corinthians. Read by the average denizen of our backwards world, Paul seems to be flattering the rather unruly lot in Corinth. They are strong, he is weak. They are held in honor, he in disrepute. But soon enough, it becomes clear that Paul is using sarcasm. The Corinthians’ honor and strength were only such in the eyes of a skewed world, where few people thought twice about trampling on the poor and valorizing power. In such a misshapen world, Paul and his companions were akin to rubbish, the dregs of all things.

It would be a severe mistake to think that Paul is urging us to self-flagellate or take on suffering for suffering’s sake. Quite the contrary. Paul is reminding us that if we have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, then we have not climbed up the world’s ladder of success but rather down it. We have traveled down the ladder to be with the poor, the suffering, the outcast, and the needy. We have signed up for a life that doesn’t promise easy success or glib happiness but instead for a way of living that rubs harshly against the self-obsessed ways of this world.

And this is why so many of the Church’s apostles who died for their faith have become a spectacle to the world. It’s why someone like Bartholomew, whom we commemorate today, is celebrated as holy. We know very little about Bartholomew’s life, but tradition tells us he died as a martyr, a word that means “witness.” For the early Church, to die as a martyr was to be born into new life. Martyrdom was the beginning of life. And this is truly strange. That is, quite simply, weird church.

St. Paul in his letter was addressing a church that had failed to be weird in its witness. It was a church in conflict that was puffed up with pride. It was a church full of members eager to climb up the ladder of worldly esteem through grand philosophical arguments, wealth, and status. In short, it was a church that hardly looked different from its surrounding culture.

St. Paul’s letter could very well be addressed to the Church today. We have indeed become a spectacle to the world, but often not in a good way. Her members are continually in schism because of pride and stubbornness. Her leaders have neglected the vulnerable and abused and exploited them. Her ranks are still full of persons whose lives are centered on self rather than on God.

And this makes the rigors of Christian discipleship seem bizarre, strange, weird, even unnecessary. It is weird to make worship the center of our lives and to let all our other activities and commitments revolve around it. It is weird to tithe and give sacrificially when everyone tells us we need to save for our future. It is weird that people who have endured unspeakable hardships persist in worshipping and trusting in a God who they believe is faithful.

But St. Paul does not eschew weirdness. When you are reviled, you should bless instead, he says. When you are persecuted and when things get rough, you should not give up; you must endure. When someone slanders you, you return their vitriol with kind words. St. Paul is simply rephrasing the words of our Lord. You have heard it said to you, but I say to you. . .

The cross of Jesus turns the world upside down. It’s what the early opponents said of the first Christians. They’re turning the world upside down. And because the cross turns the world upside down, to worship, adore, and follow Christ means that our ways will always be strange. We will climb down the ladder of success, not up it. We will sit not at the head of the table, but at the bottom. We will be a spectacle to the world not through physical strength and exploitation but through kindness, meekness, and humility.

In St. Paul’s day, a military parade organized by a conquering general would feature the winners at the front and those who were humiliated and defeated at the back. It was a spectacle of shame, for all to see.[2] And that’s why the apostles and martyrs like Bartholomew were deemed last of all, as a spectacle to the world. They were at the end of the parade, a visual climax of shame. And if we are truly following Christ, we will also be at the back of the line, a spectacle and witness to the weirdness of the cross.

But there is yet one more thing that is perhaps the weirdest of all. It is, quite bizarrely, good news. Climbing down the ladder into the dregs of the earth is not some perverse love of suffering and humiliation. It is a holy relinquishment of all worldly things that would drag us away from the perfect love offered to us on the cross. The foolishness of the cross is the means of true life. Jesus reigned from the cross to draw all the world to the Father. He still reigns in our midst, among principalities and powers that make a perverted spectacle of the vulnerable. Jesus reigns, and Jesus has won the victory. And if we are willing to climb down the ladder and up the cross and take our place at the back of the line, we will find ourselves walking right into the arms of God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of St. Bartholomew
August 24, 2025

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_the_Holy_Fool

[2] Richard Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation Commentary Series (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 71.

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

There is a seemingly curious discrepancy between peace and fiery division that Jesus takes up in St. Luke’s Gospel today. And this curious discrepancy may give us reasonable pause. Jesus provides the potent example of familial division to only intensify the general lack of peace which the advent of the Son of Man will apparently bring. Indeed, the present time that Jesus refers to can be nothing but the imminent reality of the coming of God’s kingdom with and in the Word made Flesh; the Word who has in St. Luke’s Gospel healed, taught, reconciled, and is on the road to Jerusalem to be crucified at the hands of a very divided world. Where did the Prince of Peace go?

Part of the dilemma here may be that we see Jesus with a very specific notion of “peace.” At the beginning of St. Luke’s Gospel, we hear of a bright throng of angels who sing about God’s peace to shepherds in the countryside. Our imaginations may be colored by wondrous and majestic images of some of kind of supremely pleasant union between God and humankind, wherein there is certainly nothing of the fiery discomfort about which Jesus speaks today.

But for St. Luke, there would seem to be no contradiction between the advent of the Word made Flesh and a lack of peace. The less comfortable and the more glorious attributes of light and fire tell us something more profound about the nature of our life in Christ than a simple dichotomy between comfort and discomfort can afford.

 Thousands of years before St. Luke, the prophet Jeremiah had spoken about the imminent word of God as being like fire.[1] And so, according to St. Luke, when the old prophet Simeon takes the infant Jesus in his arms, recognizing him as the blazing light that will enlighten the nations, he immediately afterwards tells the Virgin Mary that this blazing light will cause the rise and fall of many nations—and that a sword will pierce her own soul, too.

 “And would that the fire were already kindled!” Jesus cries. Where did the Prince of Peace go?

And yet, in a strange mystery, what would this kindling be other than the paradox of the way of the Cross and the rising again of the Word made Flesh? The paradox that the division of the world does not hinder God’s purpose but has, in the person of Jesus, shown that even the most cruel and horrendous divisions will not put out the blazing fire of God’s eternal light?

None of this is because God desires the pain of division. The point of St. Luke’s Gospel is that division—in our imperfect world, whether in ourselves or between one another—can often only be the result of the reconciling Gospel truth.

Jesus’ words, then, do not become a kind of fire that we can wield against one another. This is not a kind of fire that we can imagine ourselves always on the right side of and those with whom we disagree always on the wrong side of. There is one true blazing fire, and its true love will always be a challenge for the humanity that finds itself wielding God’s reconciliation against itself.

Most extraordinarily, the blaze of divine love is undertaken by Jesus himself. It is his great baptism. This is why division will not hinder the blaze that Jesus has brought. The Messiah, the great God who will redeem his people, precisely does not cast fire to the earth to destroy, but rather himself undergoes and transforms the fiery costs of true love in his own body in order to draw humanity into himself. The most ardent showing forth of that blaze is, as we have already suggested, the paradox of the Cross and Resurrection. But the nature of the divine blaze was shown to us, too, in the countless healings and professions of love and compassion that humans very often struggle to show.

That Jesus himself has undergone the lack of peace that true love will always bring in this world also provides a mysterious hope for those who share in the baptism of Jesus Christ. This hope is not rooted in a perverted resignation to the divisions of this world or within ourselves. Rather, the hope is precisely in the fact that the peace of God lies in the flaming heart of Jesus who has already redeemed us—even amid our divisiveness.

Having listed the manifold ways that the saints and prophets of old were not worthy of this world, the letter to the Hebrews puts the fiery hope like this: “Therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin that clings so closely.” This cloud of witnesses is gathered round the blazing Sun of Righteousness, whose own fire evermore consumes the dross of division and refines our gold in the long and imperfect work of following Jesus Christ.

This place—and you and I—are in that work even now. In a parish that may have seemed for a time to be defined only by the divisiveness the Gospel can bring, the hope of the Prince of Peace’s fire has shown forth to us the transforming possibilities of that mysterious fire. Our gathering round the Sun of Righteousness with the witnesses of all time and space will be imperfect, too; but I suspect that there is a special blaze burning here. I saw something of it last week at summer camp, for instance, when curious and buoyant children showed forth the quiet love of the divine fire while climbing trees and worshipping at Mass.

Indeed, the arc of fiery light in St. Luke’s Gospel has not ended. We saw it at the beginning with Simeon and we see it today—at something of a mid-point—in Jesus’ startling words. And the fire comes back in a quiet moment at the end of this Gospel with what must be one of the most beautiful lines in all of scripture. Two disciples have walked with the risen Jesus to Emmaus, and they do not recognize the transformed Son of Man until he breaks bread and disappears. But they later recall: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking with us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”[2]At last, the fire of the Word made Flesh is known, awakened, kindled in the hearts of two disciples; only now, after the Son of Man has undergone the fulness of his baptism in dying and rising again. Only now, after so much division, abandonment, and uncertainty is the Word of Fire understood to be shared by and with these disciples. The cost of true love has been borne, and it burns. And it will still burn with and in those who share mysteriously in the fire of the Prince of Peace.

Sermon by Mr. John Hager, Summer Seminarian Intern
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 17, 2025

[1] Jeremiah 23:29

[2] St. Luke 24:32.

The Song that Never Ends

Within the past few decades, it has been the rage among some parents to play classical music for their unborn babies. Search online for any recording of Mozart’s music and you will assuredly encounter at least one entitled Mozart for Babies.

It all started in the 1990s when a group of researchers at the University of California set out to determine whether listening to music had any effect on spatial reasoning. And they discovered that students who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for ten minutes acquired eight to nine more spatial IQ points than when they tested after ten minutes of silence. So, researchers thought, listening to Mozart makes you smarter. I suppose that means we will all be a bit more intelligent this evening after hearing Mozart’s Spatzenmesse!

But later studies seemed to show that it’s not necessarily true that listening to Mozart’s music increases intelligence. Rather, it’s the simple sound of the human voice that elicits favorable reactions from unborn fetuses. It enhances the ability of the brain to form important neural pathways while still in the womb. In short, singing to your baby is a good thing.[1]

 I can’t help but imagine what it was like when Mary sang her song all those years ago after she was told she would bear the Son of God. John the Baptist must have heard her song from within his mother Elizabeth’s womb, as she stood close to Mary, their bellies touching while they rejoiced in their respective surprising pregnancies. Our Lord himself, in Mary’s womb, would have heard her song as her vocal cords resonated and she gave voice to her exquisite hymn. Jesus’s developing body would have vibrated with the dulcet sounds of Mary’s voice. How could Mary have simply said those words? Wouldn’t she have sung them?

There’s something electric, almost primal, about the Magnificat. Mary’s song, of course, recalls Hannah’s in the Book of 1 Samuel, when she learned that God had heard her request and granted her a child despite her barrenness. Hannah’s song is emblematic of God’s innate proclivity to look upon the despised and lowly and bless them, just as his only begotten Son would later seek out the lost and heal them.

So, Mary’s song is nothing less than a song of potential fruitfulness, blessing, and hope. At its heart, it celebrates that God creates and gives life. From nothing he made everything that is. From situations of slavery and barrenness, he gives freedom and fecundity. And so, Mary’s song takes us all the way back to Abraham and God’s promise to him, that through God’s astounding grace alone, he would be the progenitor of a lineage more numerous than the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. To put it another way, this God could do anything from nothing, and this God fulfills what he promises.

Which is exactly what we see in the life of Mary. We see the God of all creation and King of the universe working miraculously through the natural order to dwell among us in Christ, to make all creation new, as he had promised through the prophets, and to raise us from sin and death to life eternal.

It's hard to imagine that one little song, nestled within Luke’s Gospel, could bear the weight of so much hope for the human race. But it does. It’s the song to which we give voice each day at Evening Prayer. As each day fades away, as we mourn our sins and bewail the state of the world, as our hearts break for one more unfed stomach or one more neglected person trampled on by cruel governments or one more ounce of hope lost by the destitute, we utter Mary’s song. We sing because we have no answers to all these tragedies. To singlehandedly subvert them is beyond our control, and to offer trite assurances of comfort would be insensitive. And so, we sing. We sing what Mary sang to the infant Lord, and we sing this song to bequeath it to those who will come after us, who are yet in the womb of creation. We sing as a mother playing a part in the formation of the mind and spirit of an unborn child still in her womb. We sing with the hope that the power of a song can play some part in the shaping of a people yet to come who will trust in the mighty power of God to do something new, to create fruitfulness out of barrenness, to turn sorrow into joy, to bring life out of death.

Just a few years ago, I heard a story about two children I know, both choristers in a church. Their mother overheard their intense, heart-wrenching conversation through the door to their room one evening. The youngest was weeping over the state of the world in which she was beginning to take her rightful place. She was inching slowly out of her childish innocence into maturity, becoming more cognizant of the ruthlessness of her fellow race, of societal bullying and angry, of vindictive speech in the public discourse. And she cried, overwhelmed by how to cope with such a world.

Her sister wanted to comfort her but was much too thoughtful and mature to offer platitudes. How could she tell her that everything would be all right, at least in this life? So, she didn’t. But what she did do was say—or perhaps she even sang—the words of the Magnificat. Those choristers knew the precious words by heart, sung in countless Evensong services. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away. And so, through tears, they sang. They sang of the mysterious hope that subverts the certainty of earthly sorrow.

On this feast day of the Blessed Mother, our Anglican heritage with its theological modesty and humility, is reticent to explain the specifics of Mary’s end. We are perhaps more comfortable with singing, and that is meet and right. Other traditions choose to speak of her dormition and assumption into heaven, both body and soul. But this evening’s collect holds back from saying too much about what happened to Mary while leaving us with a solid reassurance that Mary has indeed been taken up to be with God. How could it be any other way? And so, we are left with only a mystery about which we must sing.

The blessed Mother has been revered as the mother of the Church. It is she who bore the Savior of the world. Through her, the Church, Christ’s body on earth, is born.[2] As the mother of the Church, she is our mother. And in this earthly life, we are, in some sense, still being born. There is a great paradox here. In our daily dying, we are closer to our natural deaths. But when we finally die, as the Christian tradition has long affirmed, we are born into true life. Death is the gateway to eternal life. It is when new life begins. And in a world mired in sin, that new life is worth singing about.

The Blessed Mother continues to birth us into being. She is the midwife of a new creation. And we are still in her womb. As she sang to our Savior and Lord in her womb over two millennia ago, she still sings to us. Her song, if we listen to it and absorb it, can make us whole. It’s her song, the Magnificat, that forms within us the great pattern of salvation, whereby the proud are cast down and the lowly lifted up, and those who are hungry are fed, and the rich are sent away empty. This paschal pattern—the pattern of dying and rising again—is the assurance of hope that God has always done a new thing, God is always doing a new thing, and God will always do a new thing.

Mary, who has been exalted to heaven, continues to sing to us and gives us her song. The angels echo her song, too. And we on earth join our voices with the company of heaven and all the saints who have died. We persist in singing, through good times and bad ones, so that her song may become ours, and our song may be the proclamation of the good news to the ends of the earth. She sings, and we the Church sing, knowing that the song that is Mary’s gift to us is nothing less than the song of a God who is always making everything new. And this song is unlike any other because it has no end.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin
August 15, 2025

[1] Barnaby Martin, “Can Listening to Mozart’s Music Make Your Baby Smarter?” in Medium (https://medium.com/@barnabymartin/no-listening-to-mozarts-music-won-t-make-you-smarter-de90e07b6d26), accessed August 14, 2025

[2] See “The Virgin Mother” in John Behr, In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2025), 83-84.

Sticking with the Lord of Love

Discipline and tenacity are not always incompatible with freedom and flourishing. This is understood by Will McLean, the protagonist in Pat Conroy’s novel The Lords of Discipline.[1] Will is a cadet at the Carolina Military Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, a thinly veiled pseudonym for The Citadel. It’s not the likely choice of a school for him, but he attends the Institute to honor a promise made to his father on his deathbed. While Will is a vocal critic of the Institute’s draconian culture, he also seems to possess a tacit respect for the values of discipline and integrity upheld by that same institution.

Will McLean isn’t a typical cadet. His shoes are never polished. He detests the unnecessary hazing rituals at the Institute. And he doesn’t subscribe to the explicit racism that is a toxic presence on campus. Will finds himself at odds with the Institute’s President, the primary lord of discipline and a military general who is known for his past cruelty on the battlefield, as well as his current ruthlessness in making a tough military institute even tougher. This general idolizes toughness in and of itself. He has a vision of America as weak and flabby, and the Institute is a mechanism for changing that.

But Will McLean reveals a depth of character not found in many of the other cadets. On the surface, he seems to flaunt the Institute’s standards. But at a deeper level, he is perhaps the most honorable of all, refusing to be party to a culture of hatred and prejudice even as he sticks with the system. Will is able to stay in the game with people who behave and think differently than he does. If the Institute lets him down, he will not let it down. It’s as if he believes there is something greater than the dysfunctional environment he sees on the surface. His personal discipline is borne out of a trust in perseverance, a trust that he is made stronger in maintaining his own values despite the odds.

While the other cadets seem to prize discipline for the clarity it gives to their confused lives, Will is disciplined in challenging the status quo, maintaining an openness of mind, and not giving up when things get rough. There’s great integrity in a willingness to question an established system while remaining a part of it, hoping and believing that it can be better. For Will McLean, it’s as if he can see beyond the restrictive present into a future that bears more possibilities than he can imagine.

There’s something of this spirit of perseverance and discipline in Abraham. Although he hasn’t yet been renamed by God in today’s reading, let’s just call him Abraham for simplicity’s sake. Abraham is remarkably tenacious. By this point in the story, he has left his home in Ur of the Chaldees, uprooting his family and moving to the land of Canaan based on nothing more than a call from God and a promise that God will make a great family of his descendants. Abraham is keeping his end of the deal with God.

When we encounter Abraham in today’s lesson, it’s the third time God has promised a family for him. But still, Abraham has no biological child. Abraham has endured a sojourn in Egypt and gone into battle to rescue his nephew Lot from captivity. He has been on the go constantly, all to follow God’s command. And yet, by chapter 15, Abraham has no biological son.

Abraham is no pushover, though, and he demonstrates this precisely because he questions God’s failure to give him a son. He assumes that a slave will be his heir. He hasn’t given up on God; he’s just reformulated what the realization of God’s plan will look like. Indeed, it will not be until chapter 21 that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, will conceive. And they produce a child when Sarah is in her nineties and Abraham is 100.

To understand Abraham’s integrity more clearly, we need to take him off a simplistic pedestal. For centuries, since St. Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews extolled Abraham as the prime exemplar of faith, we have been tempted to imagine Abraham as a guileless, simple man who easily comes to his faith. But this only undercuts the depth of his faith. Abraham’s faith is realized most potently in his ability to trust in God despite the appearance that God isn’t honoring his end of the deal. Abraham is not some long-suffering puppet that God manipulates for a secret purpose. Abraham sticks with God and stays with God, patiently persevering with a rugged hope that there’s something he doesn’t yet understand.

The God and Creator of all is not some lord of discipline who demands Abraham’s patience, or our patience, out of an arbitrary cruelty. He doesn’t string us along because he revels in our submission. What we see in Abraham’s relationship with God is the confluence of two visions and two kinds of time. Abraham lives, as we do, with earthly, fallible dreams of what God will and can do for us. Abraham, like we often do, attempts to control God’s plan for him, assuming that his heir must be his slave since he and Sarah seem incapable of procreation and God has taken his slow, sweet time in honoring his promise.

But Abraham must come to understand what we often fail to understand, too. God’s vision exceeds all that we can desire or imagine. Its infinite possibilities explode the finite constraints of our human minds. And God’s eternity is simply his nature, his way of being creative, loving, and merciful, while those of us who toil on earth imagine that God is just stringing us along as some twisted lord of discipline.

And so, when Abraham’s impatience and finite vision rub up against God’s patience and infinite vision, God leads Abraham outside and shows him the sky. Try to count the stars in the night sky, God says. Try to imagine a universe and a way of being infinitely larger than your human mind can comprehend. Try to imagine how a patient, disciplined life can lead to flourishing and freedom. And above all, trust that I will honor my promise. I always have, and I always will.

God doesn’t honor his promise because Abraham is faithful. God has always intended to keep his promises. And God deems Abraham faithful because Abraham stays in the game and questions a God who is big enough to handle those questions. This is where discipline, perseverance, and integrity rise to the fore.

What a far cry Abraham’s persistence is from our low-commitment culture, where it’s acceptable to give up when we don’t feel like doing something anymore or when things aren’t going our way or when we don’t understand something. How easily we throw in the towel when confronted with an intractable problem or confounding mystery. How natural it is to be deeply committed at the beginning and then fall away as things get tough. But this is not the way of Abraham.

Discipline has fallen out of favor, because we understand it to be something negative. In our minds, we picture the lords of discipline of Pat Conroy’s novel, those cruel dictators and teachers demanding submission because of their own insecurity or need for power. And this dislike of discipline and good habits has infected our spiritual lives. We have come to think of spiritual discipline as just one more guilt mechanism wielded by the great Lord of Discipline in the sky.

But we have forgotten the virtues of sticking with things, of trusting in the promises of God, even when the world seems to be falling apart or the Church seems to be dying or we can’t explain the pain and sorrow that haunt us. The integrity of the Christian life comes not from trusting in easy promises or certainties but in patiently navigating through times of confusion.

In Conroy’s novel, the merciless general who heads up the military institute gives an impassioned speech to welcome new cadets and their families to the institute. He lauds strictness and discipline as tools to uphold American might and strength. He explains how breaking down all the cadets will turn them into true men. Then, he walks off the stage to enthusiastic cheers.

But Will McLean can see through it all. He knows those hasty acclamations are offered by hundreds of cadets who won’t survive even the first rigorous week at the institute, much less the whole year. But he is the real man of honor, the one who ostensibly defies customs, questions the system and nevertheless sticks with it through thick and thin. He is the one who has the integrity, openness, and moral virtue to see past the system’s limitations and encourage it towards something better.

There’s very little virtue in sticking with a God who offers us clarity at every turn. But when we can forge a path through our questions and doubts, trusting that God has something larger for us in store, we begin to see something of the path charted by our Lord. He was the one who agonized in the garden on the eve of his death, weeping tears of blood, until he was finally able to say perfectly what only we can desire to say: not my will but yours be done.

So, go outside and count the stars if you can. Trust in a God whose vision far surpasses ours. And through thick and thin, stay with the God who is not the Lord of discipline but the Lord of love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
August 10, 2025

[1] Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 1980, reprint 2002)

Which Will We Choose?

In my first semester of seminary, I took a class on canon law. The Episcopal Church’s canon law consists of rules for ordering the governance of the church, overseeing everything from what constitutes membership to the expectations of laity and clergy. My professor took an ordinarily dry subject and made it interesting, even funny.

He insisted that if we learned anything at all in that semester, we should understand the sole purpose of the rector’s discretionary fund. This fund, he said, should only be used to support charitable causes and to help those in need. And then he made us repeat a phrase that he insisted should be tattooed on our brains for posterity. It’s not my money.

Many clergy, he said, get into serious trouble when they don’t remember, it’s not my money. At the end of the semester, during my oral exam, the professor asked me a few questions, and then he said, “Tell me about the rector’s discretionary fund.” “It’s not my money,” I dutifully reported. And I’ve never forgotten that phrase since.

It has been tattooed on my brain so much that it has shaped the way I speak about the rector’s discretionary fund, as well as how I decide to distribute the money in it. I refrain from talking about it as my discretionary fund. It is, in fact, not my money. It’s the church’s money. If a rector leaves a parish, that money doesn’t go with her or him. The rector is simply the one who has the authority to decide how the money is used, within the confines of the purposes established by canon law. Interestingly—and this is an honest coincidence—today’s offertory collection is directed towards the rector’s discretionary fund, as it always is on the first Sunday of the month. And if you decide to contribute something towards it, just hear what I’m saying to you: it’s not my money.

I’ve found that being a good steward of this discretionary fund is a spiritual practice. There’s a sound theological rationale behind the knowledge that it’s not my money. From a theocentric perspective, nothing is really ours. Our lives aren’t ours. Our bodies aren’t ours. And our money certainly isn’t ours. If we revisit some key stories in the Old Testament, we can see this theme running persistently through God’s relationship with his people.

At the beginning of creation, God ultimately gives dominion of all living things to humans. But human beings don’t create those things, nor do they possess them. All living things are merely gifts from God, which humans should responsibly steward. The same goes for all of creation, which has been entrusted to our care.

And this is why, in that unfairly maligned Book of Leviticus, we find one of the most precious gems of advice from the Lord God as he is passing on a code of holiness to his people. When they reap the harvests of their land, they shouldn’t reap to its edges or gather up the leftovers of the harvest for themselves. They must leave them for the poor and the alien. It’s as if God is saying, “remember this: It’s not your land. It’s not your harvest.”

We could find countless other examples throughout the Old Testament and into the New to support the clear theocentric idea that everything is a gift from God. It’s not something we own or control or hoard. But this isn’t understood by the man in today’s Gospel reading who asks Jesus to help him get his share of the inheritance. He wants Jesus to arbitrate between him and his brother regarding an estate, and Jesus refuses to honor the man’s request. In turn, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool and attempts to direct him to a more God-centered way of living.

The central problem with the rich fool is that in his worldview, he’s the only character in a static drama of privileged complacency. If you look up “solipsistic” in the dictionary, you will see a picture of this rich fool. He has a dialogue with himself. He speaks to his soul, questioning himself, and then answering his own questions without seeking advice from anyone, much less God. He has no regard for the poor or alien who might benefit from his lavish crop. He’s the center of his universe. He’s what St. Augustine of Hippo would have described as curvatus in se, curved inwards on himself. The only pronouns he seems to know are “I” and “my.” If the rich fool were to describe his situation after his unexpected bumper crop was realized, he would have said nothing about God. And therein lies the crux of his predicament. He’s functionally an atheist.

Little does he know that he will soon die, and his profligate wealth and ambitious plans to build more storage facilities for his hoard will decay along with his body. If only this poor rich fool could understand that nothing was his. He, of course, is only the recipient and steward of it. He apparently is partly responsible for the success of the harvest. But nothing is legitimately his. It isn’t his land. It isn’t his harvest. It isn’t his future. It isn’t even his life.

And when this recognition occurs to us, too—that nothing truly belongs to us—we’re turned outwards from ourselves and back to God, from despair to hope. From the navel gazing obsession of our curved bodies, we’re straightened out to stand erect and adore the God of heaven and earth who gave us all that we have. We may have dominion over all living things and this glorious creation, but it’s not ours. We may take good care of our bodies so we can live as long as possible, but they aren’t ours. We may have a good year at work and bring home the bacon, but it’s not our money. We may choose how to spend our time and talents to our own satisfaction, but that time and those talents are not really ours. They are on loan to us from God, to be used to the glory of God, and to be returned to God. The circle starts and ends with God, not us.

In telling the parable of the rich fool, our Lord has invited us to leave a transactional paradigm and enter the infinitely creative paradigm of the kingdom of heaven. We begin with the paradigm of the man who wants his share of the inheritance. It’s what he perceives to be his by right in a tit-for-tat exchange. But Jesus refuses to engage in such earthly economics, where it’s a zero-sum game, where there’s never enough, and where a paradigm of fear and scarcity reigns. At heart, the man who asks for Jesus’s help is afraid. He’s afraid he doesn’t have enough and won’t receive his due.

Perhaps Jesus talks so much about money not because he thinks that having money is evil but because he knows that our willingness to part freely with our money is the barometer of how much we trust in God and of how much we are willing to re-prioritize our lives to put God at the center.

The whole life and witness of Jesus Christ attests to the economics of the kingdom of God. In this kingdom, the math doesn’t add up, because when someone receives, another doesn’t lose. All can receive. There’s no competition, and there’s always enough. Nothing is owned by us, and everything is a gift from God. To understand the paradigm of this kingdom, one must believe that God really does provide and that there’s enough to go around.

We see inbreaking glimpses of this kingdom in the miracles of Jesus, where he feeds the multitudes from a few loaves of bread and some meager fish. We see it in his healing miracles even while he faces opposition and mistrust. And we see it epitomized in his death on the cross, where what seems to be the final nail in the coffin of an earthly life is the gateway to true life, eternal life. In Jesus’s resurrection, God shifts our worldview from transaction to the abundance of pure gift.

And it’s only by dying to self that we can enter this kingdom, where food, wine, joy, and peace flow freely. When we die to our need to control, we rise to a new life of trust. When we die to our fear of scarcity, we rise to a new life of hope in abundance. When we die to our hoarding tendencies to ensure the perfect security of our future, we rise to the belief that if only we could take a chance on God’s generosity, it just all might work out in the end.

The question for us is both a challenge and invitation: are we functional atheists like the rich fool, or is God truly at the center of our lives? Can we say, it’s not my money, they aren’t my things, it’s not even my life? When our desires are rightly ordered, we give thanks for everything—good fortune and even disappointments and failures—because we know that all we have and all we are is really God’s, not given us by right or by command, but freely and generously given. Before us are two paradigms: the fear and scarcity of this world, and the hope and abundance of the kingdom of God. Which will we choose?

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
August 3, 2025       

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

The ancient Monastery of Saint Catherine is nestled deep in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The better part of the present Monastery was erected in the 6th century. But there were communities of monks praying in these abrasive red-brown mountains since the 4th century. They came there to pray because this area of the Sinai mountains had long been identified by Christians as the location of Moses’ encounter with God in the Burning Bush and the giving of the Ten Commandments. The basilica church in fact sits over the very spot where the Burning Bush was supposed to be.

Prayer is the business of the 20 or so Greek Orthodox monks that presently live in cells within the monastery’s massive fortress walls. Day after day, for the various liturgies, the monks come to together at a site sustained by some 1,500 years of prayer. Prayer that is at once both imperfect and unceasing. Even if always present, monks may trickle in late to the services. As they do, you may notice from time to time a monk stealing a seat by the electric heaters plugged in under ancient icons; whether their eyes are closed in a cozy dozing or peaceful contemplation one could not say. It is this imperfect and unceasing prayer that becomes a kind of chain moving endlessly, quietly, patiently between the God of heaven and human hearts.

That God would come to humanity first in a Burning Bush and then in the bodily, earthly fulness of Jesus Christ his only Son only solidifies the acuteness of prayer’s power at Sinai. It was never something done simply at the appointed hour. It is an entire way of being that yearns to know the fulness of the God of Sinai’s heights and the God whose truth for us is that the Kingdom is to be found in our hearts. Although a truck delivers food daily to the monastery there is still the need to ask for bread “for the coming day”, as the Lord’s Prayer according to St. Luke puts it. There is always a need to ask for God’s provisions. There is always the need to pray that the Kingdom of God will come. The Lord’s Prayer in its Lukan simplicity brings us back to ourselves in its very reminder that what goes on in earth has something to do with God’s celestial will. The reminder itself, brought into the world with our own God-given breath—and the whole way of life that must always be bound up with the reminder—is a prayer.

A man we know as John Climacus was the abbot at Sinai in the 7th century. He wrote a famous text about prayer as a way of life called The Ladder of Divine Ascent. He composed it as a guide for monks at a neighboring monastery, but it no doubt reflects his experiences at Mount Sinai.

Although profoundly aware of the imperfections and travails of human prayer, John’s good news for his monks was that prayer is “by nature a dialogue and union of man with God. Its effect is to hold the world together.”[1] Indeed, notice how in the Lord’s Prayer according to St. Luke that the declaration that God’s kingdom come is immediately followed by the injunction that we must forgive just as God forgives. The reality of the kingdom, coming even now, demands our own compassionate agency and participation in the divine mission. Prayer, a way of life, becomes the enfleshed, spoken reminder that we are “alive together with God” in Christ Jesus (as St. Paul puts it).[2]

That humanity and God might meet—and be bound together in some kind of dialogue—is not a notion necessarily peculiar to the New Testament; though it finds an extraordinary realization there in Christ Jesus’ Incarnation. In Genesis this morning we continue the story of Abraham and so find a curious image where the Lord “comes down” to talk with Abraham. In some sense, we might say that Abraham is engaged in prayer with the Lord; Abraham bargains with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, appealing to a sense of justice that humans are shown to share with God. Notwithstanding the complexities of this story, the point for now is that humans are engaged in extraordinary dialogue with their God. Not because they are gods, but because what goes on in earth means something to the God of heaven and vice versa.

And so, in St. Luke’s Gospel, the God of heaven has come down again, but now as one who is fully human and fully divine. And the God of heaven is, at this point in St. Luke’s narrative, on the way to Jerusalem to die on the Cross. And today, this God is teaching his disciples how to pray. The chain between heaven and earth is there, and it has strengthened even more as a dozen fishermen, tax collectors, and all kinds of other imperfect people have been taught by this God to say and live that they are a part of the holy Kingdom. The intimacy of calling upon the name of God as Father, the glorious but heavy reality that we must forgive as the Father forgives, the mutual need for daily provision of bread (and here, in a world always hungry and starving, we would do well to note that the heavenly kind is not to the exclusion of the earthly kind), the plea that we not be led into temptation; a few simple reminders become the way of life, or the enfleshed prayer, of the ones who follow this Lord Jesus, whose life is the meaning of prayer itself.

The Jesus of St. Luke—the great enfleshment of the God of Abraham and the God of Sinai’s covenantal heights—has revealed again an extraordinary binding between earth and heaven, and his prayer with us is a few lines long.

The very simplicity of Jesus’ prayer may mean that it falls into a complacent kind of ordinariness for us. Indeed, St. Luke’s prayer is even more concentrated in its striking brevity that the version in St. Matthew we all know. John Climacus, too, knew that the everydayness of prayer, the echo of familiar ones, and especially our perception of prayers unanswered could be cause for a certain kind of spiritual giving-up. And yet, John advised his monks: “After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. For, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and persevere in unceasing union with him?”[3] And, of course, this striving for holy union, this quiet, patient, chain binding heaven and earth, does not demand we be at Sinai—as much as that place may teach us about prayer. And John would have agreed. For the endless chain of prayer enfleshed, prayer as a way of being, is between a God who has taught us to call upon his heavenly name from within our own hearts, and so come to marvel even now at our place in truth of his binding Kingdom.

Sermon by Mr. John Hager, Summer Seminarian Intern
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 29, 2025

[1] St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by C. Luibheid and N. Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982; p. 274.

[2] Colossians 2:13.

[3] St. John Climacus, The Ladder p. 278.

The Direct Path to Life

We were having lunch at a retirement community not far from here, and I was explaining that I served both as a part-time priest in a parish and as a part-time choral director at a school in northeast Philadelphia. That’s when she said, “Oh, I’m happy to send checks to the school, but I won’t go there. I’m afraid to park my car on the street in that neighborhood.”

At that moment in my life, I was living in a constant whiplash of service between a Main Line parish and an under-resourced neighborhood of Philadelphia. I had been deeply touched by ministry in that school; perhaps I had become even too proud of myself for serving there. It was, therefore, quite easy for me to judge the honest remarks of the woman with whom I was having lunch.

But I had no reason or place to judge. I didn’t live in Zip Code 19132. I lived in Center City in a nice apartment building, and although I wasn’t afraid to park my car on the streets near the school, I spent only a handful of hours there a week. If I had looked more closely at my own life, I would have found plenty of ways in which I rerouted my life to avoid discomfort. Like the well-meaning person with whom I was dining, in the messiness of life, there were numerous metaphorical neighborhoods where I would have refused to park my own car.

We all do it, don’t we? We find excuses for taking an easier path in the Christian life, of following Jesus with our lips but not with our lives. We veer to one side of the room to avoid talking to our enemy, and then we receive Communion in the next breath, not thinking twice about it. We limit our social circles to people who think like us and refrain from challenging our own views. We blithely profess Jesus as Lord and Savior and then identify reasons why Jesus really isn’t calling us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. It’s a part of being human, and this becomes our excuse.

But the scandalous doctrine of the Incarnation makes a claim that both challenges us to more faithful living, while simultaneously filling us to the brim with hope. There’s no place on this earth where Jesus hasn’t been and where he isn’t already present and where he won’t be in the future. And as further proof of that astounding claim, we need to look no further than the Gospels.

If we start by viewing the Gospels as far more than mere historical accounts that present realistic geographical itineraries, we’ll see that the evangelists, such as St. Luke, are primarily imparting theological insight to us. It’s highly unusual—if not downright crazy—for Jesus to journey from Galilee—in the north of today’s Holy Land—to Jerusalem—farther south—by going through Samaria. As the crow flies, or as Google maps might plot it, it makes complete sense. It’s a direct path.

But Jews didn’t willingly pass through Samaria, nor did Samaritans voluntarily interact with Jews. Remember the Parable of the Good Samaritan? Jews and Samaritans were sworn enemies. And yet, Jesus, a Jew, did go through Samaria. It wasn’t the usual path taken by Jews at the time, who would circumvent Samaria by veering slightly to the east of Jerusalem. Jesus went right through the heart of enemy territory.

This, of course, suggests that St. Luke is telling us something far more important and theological than what route Jesus took. St. Luke affirms that God in Christ will not shy away from the world’s troubled places. God will not limit his good news to one particular group of people. God will not leave human-born animosities to eternal fighting or estrangement. God will, in fact, go right into the midst of the fray to bring good news, healing, and mercy.

That’s reassuring, indeed, except that it doesn’t stop there. When the Incarnation goes deep, we are touched and become part of the story, too. The Gospels show that God is in the thick of things with us. God doesn’t stay far removed from our affairs, waving a magic wand when the time is right and remaining silent the rest of the time. God dives right into the depths of the human condition to save and redeem it. And in doing so, Christ bids us follow him.

And this is where things begin to get complicated in the Gospels. Jesus is rejected by some. We see that the good news isn’t always easily accepted by others. And we see Jesus’s disciples brutally misunderstanding what that Gospel is all about. Jesus doesn’t stay in a place where he’s shunned in order to force the Gospel down the throats of his antagonists. He doesn’t bring judgment upon them with fire and brimstone, as the disciples wished to do. As one ancient manuscript of this text has it, Jesus responds to the disciples’ demand for condemnation with these words: Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.[1] Jesus’s words may be rejected by some, but those places of earthly dissension, touched by the feet of our Lord, will never be the same again. The Gospel has already sown its seeds there.

As Jesus continues, we see more mealy-mouthed professions of discipleship. As Jesus calls people to follow him, they’re willing, but the flesh is weak. One wants to honor the ancient tradition of burying one’s dead. Another only wishes to bid his family goodbye. Jesus’s replies sound harsh, but the point is clear. No one who decides to follow him can look back. And everyone who follows him must decide whether they are all-in or whether they want to have their cake and eat it, too.

In an age brimming with a plethora of choices, we must surely sympathize with the excuses offered by those who would follow Jesus but have it on their own terms. They make reasonable excuses after all. But Jesus is suggesting a drastic reorientation of one’s life to follow him. It’s so demanding that it sounds unreasonable, even cruel. The cost of discipleship can easily begin to seem like an arbitrary difficulty doled out by a God who demands our suffering for the sake of suffering. But the challenge of Gospel living is never difficulty for difficulty’s sake. It’s only difficult because our sinful world is oriented around values other than the gospel. It’s difficult because to prioritize God in our life means that we must put all our trust in him, not just a part of it, with strings attached. The Gospel asks us to choose one thing, no matter the cost, which is the new life given to us in Christ.

The temptation is to re-route our lives according to our own comfort, and usually such perceived comfort stems from a scarcity mindset. The thought of giving all our lives—our selves, souls and bodies—to God, seems as if we’re giving too much away. We think that if we prioritize our weekly worship on the Lord’s Day, we won’t have enough time for other things. And so, we re-navigate our journey through the nicer neighborhood, avoiding the gritty one. We imagine that if we give sacrificially towards Gospel ministry then we won’t have enough to save for retirement or our children’s education, and so we remap our path forward through a more secure route, glancing at the riskier path as we pass it by. In this mindset of scarcity, we become afraid of the risky, bold moves that require a firm trust in God’s gracious provision. We opt for safer paths that align with our desire for security. We compartmentalize our lives into church matters and secular matters. We fear integrating the components of our lives lest the affairs of the world impinge too much on the safety of our religious beliefs and vice versa. There’s no shortage of excuses to justify our reasoning.

But since the Son of Man didn’t come to destroy our lives but to save them, then the demands of discipleship are not fickle whims of a distant God but beautiful invitations to the way that leads to eternal life. As such, we no longer follow Jesus because we fear him; we follow him because we know that in every sacrifice, in every humbling moment of failure, and in every assumed risk, we come to rely more deeply on the abundant grace of God.

When Jesus passes through Samaria on the way to Jerusalem, he shows that there’s no place on earth God will avoid. He shows us that in losing ourselves, we find true life. And in his unrelenting journey to the cross, he shows that from the depths of hell we’re raised to newness of life.

The unyielding devotion required of Christian disciples is nothing more than a passionate quest to find our way back to the God who is utterly in love with us, who is bent not on destroying us but on saving us, even when we resist it, kicking and screaming. Although we may choose the easier path from time to time, God will always find us, even in the shadow of death. And he will place us on his shoulders and lead us safely to the other side.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 29, 2025

[1] King James Version translation

Sermon for Corpus Christi

A defining feature of our life in Christ Jesus might be said to be memory. Not memory as something static or distant, and certainly not nostalgic, but memory as something alive and visceral.

After all, when we remember the saving life and death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, we know that this Jesus lives. As we discussed in our first all-ages formation last Sunday, somehow the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is both something complete and something still happening to us. The church’s worship and sacred year does this in a special way: time after time, in our hearts and minds, in our own body and blood, we recall the sacred stories of our God. 

And we receive into our very selves the body and blood of this living Lord Jesus in that memorial that God’s son commanded us. 

Here at Rosemont, the church space is dominated by one visceral aid to our memory: the rood screen. The rood screen is so obvious and defining that, especially when the church is dark, it seems to disappear into the shadows. We could almost lose sight of the figures that define the screen: the Crucified Jesus with his mother Mary and John the Beloved Disciple.

We have to literally lift our heads up to remember what this screen is all about. 

The solid, weightier stiffness of the bottom part of the screen—rising from the church floor like slender trees—fractures into increasing detail. The screen rises through more tracery which creates a geometric netting like that of the forest canopy. The Blessed Virgin and Saint John inhabit these traceried realms near the pulsing source of this thriving, ever growing structure.

That source, of course, is the Cross of Jesus—the rood itself—whose three tips fracture still into six-pointed organisms. Even the tips of these six-pointed terminals feature little buds that might burst forth any moment. 

And it is through this great structure that we pass time after time to approach the altar to receive in our own selves the body and blood of this Jesus who hung on the Cross. The heights of the colorful chancel ceiling, the bright glass showing the radiant Good Shepherd, and that sacred moment of taking the bread and the wine into our bodies is impossible without first passing through the Cross. 

Notice, even, how the base of the screen is decorated with shields showing symbols of the passion of the Lord: the nails, the tunic, the crown of thorns, the pierced heart and so on.

The sacred meal of the bread and the wine of our world taken up into the fulness of Christ’s presence was always, in the first instance, to be consumed in remembrance of the Cross. 

St. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth two thousand years ago (indeed our earliest mention of what we would come to know as the Holy Communion) made it clear that the bread and wine were first offered by Jesus on that night that ‘he was betrayed.’ 

And: ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.’ And of course, there are the vital words that link memory of the sacrifice to the present: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ 

Even if the earliest Christians did not take up depicting the Crucifixion visually in the way that we are now familiar with (that took some centuries), they understood that the bread and the wine—and the fulness of Christ’s presence these transformed earthly materials brought—were inseparable from the reality of the saving passion and death of the Lord. 

There could be no beating about the bush, no softening of the bread broken and the wine poured into a nostalgic memory. Here was a kind of memory so viscerally real that, as St. Paul put it, those who were to take the body and blood had to seriously examine themselves. And he warned that those who partook ‘unworthily’ induced judgement upon themselves.

Such talk of a kind of unilateral judgement probably leaves many of us to flee in a little hesitancy. It would be better to soften the body and blood into a memory that is less demanding. 

But we might remember that for St. Paul the taking into our bodies of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus is not an isolated action. Memory is not only visceral and alive in the moment of Holy Communion, but the very memory of Christ’s offering of love calls us forth to actively live in memory. We are taken up into the fullness of life in Christ time after time.

The Holy Communion does not operate in the judgement of condemnation, then, but reconciles in the judgment of true love. As the bread fractures and the wine disseminates in our bodies, we find an astonishing truth: That the body and blood of the Lord Jesus desires to be so near us that the fulness of his sacred body willingly reaches both the bright plains and shadowy crevices of our own beings. And in so communing with our entire selves—especially those parts so hidden and so fearful and so worried and sad—the body and the blood of the Lord Jesus calls us forth to a new life which, day after day, assures us that even the things of this world, just like bread and wine, are not and will not be beyond transformation.

The very nature of bread and wine, offered and consumed in the memory of the God who becomes so entirely flesh as to die, the very nature of bread and wine to fracture within us, together, at the altar—there is the defining feature of the Christian life, which is to remember and so abide in the very nature of the Lord Jesus. 

Only once this is known day after day can the life of action, of prayer, be sustained. Only then, it seems, does ministry of all kinds, the work of justice small and great, the daily challenge to actually love one another and ourselves—only once we approach the promise of the true indwelling of the Lord in us in bread and wine can our life in Crist Jesus burst forth.

And so we come back to the rood, to the Cross. Whether we look at it or not when we pass through it day after day, the memory of the Cross is there.

The Lord of life, of all time and space, is hanging on a tree of death that has, in that great paradox, become the way of true life and love. The way of true life and love not because we must suffer and die like Jesus to live and love, but because God has and does come as close to us as possible. The Cross, sprouting forth only if we look upwards, calls forth in us time after time the sacred memory that God has and is becoming flesh and blood. And in so raising our eyes, our hearts, and our bodies, may we come to know—gradually—the astounding truth that adoring his body and blood may teach us to perceive within ourselves the ever-growing fruit of his redemption.

Sermon by Mr. John Hager
The Feast of Corpus Christi
June 22, 2025

Recovering the Raw Image

In my recent quest to engage in photography as a hobby, I’ve been learning how to use a photo editing program called Lightroom Classic. It’s a powerful tool, so much so that I’ve wondered whether using it is a form of cheating. The fact of the matter is that all professional photographers edit their photos, whether it's erasing the obnoxious photobomber at the beach or the piece of spinach in someone’s teeth. But the more I’ve used Lightroom Classic, the more I’ve discovered that the editing process isn’t cheating at all. It's a creative process of recovering the original, raw image that the camera was trying to capture.

No matter how sophisticated they may be, cameras are fallible. They’re only as good as the quality of the light when a photograph is taken and the skill level of the photographer. If the day is too bright, the photo is overexposed. If it’s too gray, the range of color is muted. If the camera is held upside down, the image is skewed. Editing software simply allows the photographer to approximate the original image as much as possible, to recover what was initially seen with the naked human eye.

But what do we do with images that can’t be physically seen, that is, eternal images? How do we fallible humans in 2025 recapture an image of the perfect God, the One in whose image we were made, the One who has never been seen with the naked eye, who can’t be seen in this life by human sight, and who was only seen most visibly in Christ two millennia ago? The doctrine of the Trinity is, at its heart, a valiant, if imperfect, quest to recover an image of God that is so often hidden beneath the changes and chances of this mortal life. Even if no living human can see God face to face, we yet long for an understanding of where we came from and where we’re going. The more we understand who God is, the more we understand who we’re called to be as humans created in God’s image. Speaking about the Trinity is a way of going back to the raw image of God, an image that even the most pious Christian is at risk of forgetting.

It might seem odd that a book from the Old Testament would provide a bit of help in recovering this image of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But there’s a method to this madness. The Book of Proverbs presents us with a striking image of Wisdom standing in the public square, open and transparent for all to see, calling out for all to follow her. Her cry is an invitation, a summons back to a God who is at the heart of creation. Wisdom herself was with God when all was created and the universe was set into motion. Wisdom is nothing short of an invitation into the life of God, a life of delight in all of creation, including humanity. Can you imagine that? A God delighting in all of creation?

But what we don’t hear today is the preceding chapter in Proverbs, where we encounter Wisdom’s foil, otherwise known as Folly. She’s depicted in negative terms, a crude contrast to Wisdom. Folly is one who lures the unwise person into deviant paths and away from God.

The metaphorical person of Folly is a voice that I’m afraid we all know too well. It is, at times, subtle, lurking in our subconscious or slithering through our everyday speech or masquerading as light within theological circles. At other times, the voice of Folly is less subtle, increasingly so in our technological age of social media and anxiety-laden news. The voice of Folly in our own day is not so much the voice of a sexual temptress, as in the Book of Proverbs, but more the voice of deceit. The voice of Folly is the one who makes us believe in a distorted, fallacious image of God. But on this Trinity Sunday, with the help of the Church’s beautiful doctrine, we’re trying to recover and celebrate the raw, original image of God who constantly calls us back into relationship with him.

We all know the voice of Folly. It’s the voice that trumpets the inherent malevolence of the human condition. It’s the voice that chips away daily at our hope. It’s the voice that convinces us that our world is circling the drain into despair. It’s the voice that accepts unthinkingly the demise of the Church. It’s a seductive voice in its own way because we don’t need to look far to find evidence that supports the claims of the voice of Folly.

But if we’re looking to recover the raw image of God, we can look beyond the voice of Folly. We don’t need to doctor a flawed image to make a God that is likeable to us. We only need to heed the voice of Wisdom, who calls us back into relationship with God, to savor the image of God that has always been true and always will be true.

Wisdom calls us back to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, the first account of creation. And in Wisdom’s bold cry in the public square, we’re offered a charming retelling of that first account of creation, a version that is reminiscent of one told by the late Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In Tutu’s retelling of the creation story, we’re brought very close to that original image that can tell us quite a bit about God’s nature as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “In the very beginning,” Tutu recounts, “God’s love bubbled over when there was nothing else.” What an image! God’s love bubbled over! And when God had finished creating everything, “God looked at everything that he had made and clapped his hands together in delight. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ And on the seventh day, God laughed, and rested, and enjoyed his glorious creation.”[1]

This sounds so much like Wisdom’s account of creation in the Book of Proverbs, where she’s with God when all was created, sharing in God’s unending delight and joy. To borrow Archbishop Tutu’s words, this delight and joy bubble over. Infinite love and delight and joy can’t be contained within the Godhead, and so they overflow into the created world. Infinity touches finitude.

It’s as if Wisdom, crying out for all to hear, is inviting all of creation to share in the divine life of joy and delight and love. And so, it’s no wonder that ancient interpreters of Scripture found a type of Jesus, the Word made flesh, in Wisdom. Jesus as the incarnate Word is the One who always was with God and certainly was with God when all was created with joy and delight, when God clapped his hands and laughed. And in that moment in human time when the Word dwelt among us, Jesus was the visible image of God—rather like Wisdom—calling us back to God.

Jesus was not a judgmental Savior come to earth to save us so that God’s wrath could be appeased. Jesus was the fulfillment of Wisdom’s image in Proverbs, the embodiment of the eternal Word come to earth to invite us back into relationship with God, to rediscover that original raw image of a God who has always and will always rejoice and delight in his creation.

Every call to repentance for our sin and every judgment of our sinful recalcitrance is not a condemnation but an invitation to shun the voice of Folly and to heed the voice of Wisdom, the voice of love, that calls us back into relationship with God. In Jesus, the Word made flesh, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s love bubbles over into our world, to draw us back to God so that we might share in the divine life.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a call to share in the delight of God that still spills over into our world. It’s a summons to remember whence we came and where we’re headed. We came from goodness, and we’re called back to goodness. We came from the impetus of delight, and we’re called back to delight. We came from God; we’re called back to God.  

In many ways, the Christian life is a pilgrimage in which we stand with two voices calling out to us. The voice of Folly is the voice of deception, feeding a perverse obsession with our own unworthiness and a desperate preoccupation with despair over the state of the world. The other voice, the voice of Wisdom, is the voice embodied in our Lord and Savior, the One who came to stand boldly in the public square and to invite us back into the life of God.

So, beloved in Christ, heed our Lord’s call. Come to the living water, the springs of eternal life. Come to the Bread of Life, who will feed you with his very life. Come to the One who makes everything new. Come to the One who calls you from your forlorn state into the life of God, a life of love, joy, and delight. Return home to the One who created you and has redeemed you and still sustains you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and whose raw image is one of unbounded love that continues to bubble over into our world. Come to the One who delights in you. And when you have captured this image in your soul, you will have found your true home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday
June 15, 2025

[1] Desmond Tutu, Children of God Storybook Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), pp. 1 and 3

Ignited by Love

Take a close look at this Paschal candle, burning in full sight for the last time as we close out the Easter season today. Do you recall that night fifty days ago on which we first lit this candle? Do you remember the darkness? Do you remember the horrible hissing of the sound system, trying to distract us from the holy purpose for which we’d gathered? But maybe you remember the suspense of waiting for a new light to be kindled in the darkness. Could you hear the flick of flint striking steel, just before the church was illuminated by brightness?  

In some Easter Vigils of years past, lighting the fire was a challenge. While I’m always slightly nervous that the fire won’t light, it always has. Indeed, sometimes it has gone up in flames a bit too vigorously. I well remember the Vigil three years ago during which the table supporting the fire pit caught on fire and an alert acolyte slapped it out with a towel. Was that part of the liturgy, someone genuinely asked? Not exactly, but perhaps it should be. The new fire signifies the dangerous unpredictability of life in Christ. It’s a risky thing to play with fire. It’s a risky thing to be baptized. It’s a risky thing to pray. It’s a risky thing to follow Christ.

We all know that when making a fire, a spark must ignite by touching something flammable.[1] In the case of the new fire at the Easter Vigil, a spark touches salt soaked in rubbing alcohol. So, when a flamed leaped from the fire pit onto the table a few years ago, part of the table ignited because it was also soaked in rubbing alcohol. The rubbing alcohol is what fuels the fire. Any good fire must be made ready so that it will ignite.

Of all the images the New Testament authors could have used to describe the Holy Spirit, fire may be the most understandable and yet also the most mysterious and vexing. Even scientists still consider fire to be a mystery. We may know what makes a good fire and how fires start, but there’s still something ineffable about them. Fire is an apt image for the Holy Spirit because it’s dramatic, sometimes uncontrollable, and hard to explain.

But it just so happens that in today’s Scripture readings, we get two vastly different images of the Holy Spirit. One speaks to our inner thespian, the other draws us deeper into the life of God. The image in the Acts of the Apostles is for showboats and those keen on high drama. Consider it. The disciples are gathered in one room, and the Spirit rushes upon them as a mighty wind, and tongues as of fire rest on their heads. They’re filled with the Holy Spirit, and they begin to speak in a variety of languages, and most amazingly of all, they understand those foreign languages! This is an epic story. Do you question why such wonders no longer happen among us? In an epic age, we want an epic manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Has that original Pentecostal fire just smoldered out? Have we done something wrong since tongues of fire haven’t rested upon our heads?

Or is it just that we live in a modern age where everything is dramatized for television, where we’re looking for the most obvious signs of the Holy Spirit among us. We want to measure spiritual success by great signs, by speaking in tongues and visible evidence of the Spirit’s power. We’re rather like Philip in John’s Gospel, who is seeking something visible and clear. Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.

And here, it may be that John offers us another image of the Holy Spirit’s presence, one that is quiet and profound, perhaps more realistic for our own day. In John, the Spirit is not a Pentecostal fire, because there is no Day of Pentecost. There are no tongues of fire, and there’s no commotion in an upper room. John doesn’t even attempt to define the Spirit as part of a narrative. The Spirit eludes our grasps, and above all, the Spirit is known in intimate relationship with the Father and the Son. As Jesus tells his disciples, the Holy Spirit dwells with them and is in them. The Spirit is with us and in us. The Spirit doesn’t just come upon us. The Spirit comes to dwell in us.

This same Spirit comforts, consoles, and encourages and is a good, faithful, and patient teacher, continuing to reveal to the disciples and to us the fullness of the truth that Jesus brought to earth. And like a good teacher, this Spirit will abide with us until our souls have been prepared to receive this truth. The Spirit is a Teacher that never gives up on the students.

But amid all John’s quiet, somewhat introspective images of the Holy Spirit, we’re prone to miss something that not even the world’s greatest short story writer could concoct. Did you catch it? Jesus says that he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do. This is utterly astonishing. And Jesus goes on: Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it. How could we make this up? How can this be true?

And Christ’s promise would seem like a license to abuse a gift, were it not for something needed on our part. It’s subtle, but it’s there. John is clear that only those abiding in Christ and in the Father will do such great works, and only those in that abiding relationship will properly ask for those things that the Father will give. Jesus’s promise is not permission to take advantage of prayer; it’s a call into mature, responsible prayer that is nothing less than allowing the Spirit to dwell within us—not outside us, but within us.

This could seem like something ambiguous if we didn’t return to that image of the new fire being kindled at the Easter Vigil. Remember that fire! Remember the salt soaked in alcohol and prepared for vigorous flames. Remember the quiet waiting in the darkness. And then remember that spark touching the elements in the fire pit. And then there was light!

We, in some sense, are the material in which the Holy Spirit’s flame is kindled, a mystery both incredible, profound, and unsettling. To be set ablaze with the life of the Spirit, we must be like good, prepared salt soaked in rubbing alcohol. While the Holy Spirit is always eternally present to set us on fire with love for God and to proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth, if our souls are not prepared to receive that same Spirit, the fire will be a tiny, unstable flame that peters out. Our whole lives must be an intentional formation to receive the spark of the Holy Spirit so that the Gospel’s light can shine in the world. The Christian life is about being ripe for ignition by the Holy Spirit. This is the spiritual antidote to the Church’s modern listlessness and malaise. And the life of preparation is the life of prayer.

This is the deepest mystery of John’s understanding of the Holy Spirit. Our abiding relationship with the Father and the Son and, then inevitably, the Holy Spirit comes through constant and faithful prayer. But because we’re so often like Philip, desiring a sign and a tangible revelation of the Father’s presence, our Lord himself gives us something to hang our hats on. And we find it here in the Mass on this Day of Pentecost and on every Lord’s Day that we gather to partake of Christ’s Body and Blood.

We, our selves, souls, and bodies, are with the bread and the wine, the fruits of the earth placed on the altar. We offer ourselves at the altar, steeped in prayer like salt soaked in rubbing alcohol. We bring our lives drenched in prayer, along with our sins that need forgiving and our suffering that needs healing and our enmity that needs reconciliation. And bathed in prayer, we’re present on that altar as the priest prays over the bread and wine and over us as well. The priest prays for the Holy Spirit to come upon us and the gifts of bread and wine, and it’s as if a spark touches salt, and all on that altar is set aflame. And we come forward to consume Jesus’s Flesh and Blood so that “we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”[2] It’s just as Jesus promised: the Spirit dwells with us and is in us.

Here, there’s no audible rushing mighty wind. There are no visible tongues of fire. But here, there’s a quiet, introspective, and mysterious drama of the Holy Spirit coming and making a home within us. Our lives, saturated with prayer and present at this Eucharist, are set afire so that we can go into the world to love God by keeping his commandments and loving our neighbors.

This is how we’re taught by God. This is why we find our deepest union with God in this life when we come to his altar. This is how we can do something so incredible that we could never make it up. This is how we can and will do works greater even than the Christ. And it’s all because when we’re steeped in prayer, with the assurance of Jesus’s promise, we will evermore abide in him and he in us. A spark touches salt, and a new light is born. And the whole world is illuminated with the glory of God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Pentecost
June 8, 2025

[1] St. Symeon the New Theologian in his Second Ethical Discourse uses this image to describe the Spirit igniting a divine seed within us.

[2] From the Prayer of Humble Access, the Book of Common Prayer, p. 337

Waiting for the Incredible

The Feast of the Ascension is inextricably tied to an image—a fantastic image, for sure, but an image, nonetheless. Jesus goes up into heaven to the right hand of his Father. Humanity and all of creation are brought up into the Godhead. And we know that soon, in just ten days’ time, the Holy Spirit will come back down. Up, then down. Up, then down.

But we no longer live with an understanding of a three-tiered universe, like the world in which St. Luke lived. Heaven doesn’t have to be literally above our heads. And gaudy representations of the Ascension, like that in a certain chapel in England, which show only Jesus’s feet hanging from the sky, may need some theological enrichment and a modicum of taste. So, perhaps another image is helpful on this glorious feast.

I’m thinking of a verbal image that a friend of mine once used to describe the lusty hymn-singing in the parish where we were both members at the time. One of the two brilliant organists there would begin a hymn introduction, orchestrating a grand crescendo that led up to the congregation’s first sung notes. By the end of that thrilling organ introduction, everyone in the church could sense that something magnificent was about to happen. It was as if the whole congregation, hymnals in hand, had risen to the tips of their toes, ready for a great drama to begin.

In the final seconds before the congregation began to sing, as my friend colorfully described it, you could hear the intake of breath. And in that tiny space, between organ introduction and congregational song, a dazzling electricity filled the air, sensed in inaudible vibrations and palpable excitement. You could even hear the breathing on audio recordings. It was as if the congregation collectively poised to sing in unison had its own personality. You could hear the intake of breath. Something incredible was about to happen.[1]

Ascension Day sits in the space between the intake of breath and the beginning of the hymn. Up, down. Breathe in, breathe out. The meaning of Ascension Day lies between Jesus’s going up into heaven and the breathing of the Holy Spirit on the Church at Pentecost. It’s as if on the Mount of Olives, as Jesus blesses the disciples and then is taken up into heaven, God breathes in.

And immediately after that breath, the disciples are left hanging in the air or standing on their tiptoes, ready to sing. They’re not ready to go to the ends of the earth in mission because they haven’t been properly commissioned. They haven’t yet been anointed for that purpose by the Holy Spirit. They’re left in that odd but dynamic space between the intake of breath and the release of that breath on the world in a marvelous hymn of good news. They return to Jerusalem to wait. Ten days might seem like an eternity, but it’s a blip on God’s radar as the eternal breath goes in, before that breath comes vigorously rushing out.

In the aftermath of Jesus’s ascension, waiting in Jerusalem, the disciples are once again in a strange place, bereft of Jesus’s earthly presence. It would be tempting to think of this as an end to the Incarnation, as some have wrongly described it, but in truth, the Incarnation makes no sense without this next part. The Incarnation goes on forever. This next part is part of the perfection of the Incarnation. What was concrete on earth in Jesus’s life will soon be made concrete in the lives of those disciples who will be propelled forth in mission by the power of the Holy Spirit when God breathes out again. And Christ will continue to be with us sacramentally in Bread and Wine. He will never leave us comfortless.

As Jesus goes up into heaven, we can hear the intake of breath. Something earth-shattering is about to happen. As God breathes in, we’re reminded of those mind-blowing words from John’s Gospel, chapter 14, where Jesus tells his disciples that whoever believes in him will not only do the works that he has done but even greater works. Try to wrap your mind around that claim. God is going to breathe out in due course, and something incredible is about to happen. You just wait.

But the truth is that, in her modern state, the Church usually lives in one of two places. On the one hand, she dwells predominantly in Jerusalem, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for a commission, as if she doesn’t already have one, resting complacently on her laurels and last vestiges of power, and shirking her responsibility to proclaim the Gospel in both word and deed. She lives imprisoned within the walls of her churches, narcissistically lost in her worship and watching hopelessly as everyone outside the Church reports on her decline.

Or on the other hand, the Church spends all her time out in the mission field, spreading herself thin to the ends of the earth but never returning to Jerusalem for sustenance. And scattered across the globe with no rootedness in Jerusalem, the Church becomes puffed up, arrogant, proud, and obsessed with her ego-driven human projects. She behaves as if the mission is hers or as if Jerusalem is simply in her past.

But Ascension Day is about going up and going down, breathing in and breathing out. Before Jesus goes up into heaven at the tail end of Luke’s Gospel, he opens the disciples’ minds to understand the scriptures, interpreting his own passion, suffering, and death in the light of the Easter Gospel of the resurrection. Now, it all makes sense. It’s as if Jesus is telling the disciples that before they’re breathed out into the world, they must be taken back to Jerusalem. They must remember the paschal pattern of dying to self before rising to a new way of life and entering into a new creation. Up, then down. Breathe in, breathe out.

Ascension Day is the great fulcrum that balances the Church. We can’t spend all our time in Jerusalem, watching the Church die on the vine or pretending like we have no call to mission. Nor can we wear ourselves out in the mission field with no return to the Temple for worship, prayer, and inspiration. Ascension Day lies at the hinge point of our paschal identity in Christ. When we’re drawn in with God’s breath, we return to Jerusalem. We’re humbled by the cost of discipleship and in recognizing what we must relinquish to follow Jesus. We adore the One who came to save the world first by going down into death and then rising up to destroy sin and death. But when God breathes out in Pentecostal fervor, we’re sent out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, having died to our egos and human aspirations and risen again to God’s vision for a new creation.

If we’re only out in the mission field, we will lose our breath. If we’re only inside our churches, we will hyperventilate. Ascension Day sits in that thrilling space where the breath has been taken in and will soon be let out on the world for its own salvation and inspiration. This is the space of the present, between the past of Jerusalem and the future of Galilee. In this present space, we puzzle in discernment over our next steps. In this present space, we anguish over a broken world and the collapse of relationships.

But the present space is never a vacuum tube. It’s full of dynamic energy, hopeful for a new future, anticipating a new creation. God has breathed in, and Jesus has gone up. But very shortly, God will breathe out, and we, Christ’s earthly Body, will put our feet on the ground and move forth to the ends of the earth. Do you hear the intake of breath? Something incredible is about to happen.       

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ascension Day
May 29, 2025

[1] This phrase is lifted from the Godly Play curriculum by Jerome Berryman.

From Singular to Plural

Something is off in today’s Scripture readings. There are grammatical inconsistencies that would have displeased my high school English teachers. Biblical scholars have puzzled over them. These Scriptural oddities grabbed my attention. Did they grab yours? They are quirky texts that need a little help, perhaps. Let’s rephrase them for our modern ears, a revision we might call the Modern Individual Version (or MIV, for short). The idiosyncrasies of these texts should now sound more pleasing to our individualistic ears. Have a listen.

Let’s start with the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. “A vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ And when he had seen the vision, immediately he sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called him to preach the gospel to them. Setting sail therefore from Troas, he made a direct voyage to Samothrace, and the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi.” Ah, that’s much better. We corrected that strange shift from the third-person voice to the first-person voice.

Now, let’s jump ahead to the baptism of Lydia. In our Modern Individual Version of the Bible, we might rewrite the end of the story: “And when she was baptized, she went on her way rejoicing.” That’s a bold move because we rewrote the end of the story, but after all, we needed to eliminate that ambiguous “us” pronoun.

Next up: John’s Gospel. “Jesus said to Judas (not Iscariot), “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and I will come to him and make my home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is mine.” Once again, we changed that strange “we” to the first-person singular. Don’t you feel so much better?

In this MIV translation of the Bible, an initial reading would probably not seem unusual to someone unfamiliar with the original texts. Our hypothetical edits would be consonant with the headstrong, independent strain of Western culture. An odd shift from the third-person singular to the first-person plural in the account of Paul’s travels to Macedonia would placate our sense of grammatical unrest. And likewise, Jesus’s words about inhabiting a place in the faithful believer’s heart who keeps his words might not seem odd or heretical to the superficial reader of John. We managed to get rid of that vexing ambiguous we that appears out of nowhere.

But all these changes in the Modern Individual Version of the Bible are fundamentally wrong, not only because we have no business altering this sacred text but because our presumptuous edits make no theological sense. They’re wrong because they destroy the essence of the Gospel.

Changing a we to an I might not seem like such a big deal to us. We’ve become rather good at inverting a theologically-proper order of things, and this permeates even our spirituality. God’s salvation of the entire world has become a matter of personal concern, a matter of my salvation and you can just fend for yourself, thank you very much. Our reading of Scripture has become my own individual quest to crack a perceived moral code of ethics in its pages. The Church’s shared ministry has morphed into one person’s job or someone else’s job. Our collective responsibility to be a visible witness of Christ’s love has been glibly foisted onto specific individuals while the rest of us sit by and watch.

But Paul’s mission to Macedonia is potentially harmful when we subtly shift that pesky “we” pronoun to “he” in our facetious translation. This mission is not even Paul’s mission. It’s God’s mission, and it’s a shared mission. Paul doesn’t decide on his own to go to Macedonia; he’s called by God in a vision. Nor does Paul undertake the mission alone. And after Lydia, and her entire household, mind you, are baptized, she doesn’t suddenly return home. That was the silly ending of our experimental translation. Lydia’s induction into a larger family of God—the Church—becomes the impetus to extend generous hospitality to Paul and his companions. She doesn’t merely invite them into her home. She invites them to stay, to abide with her household. She now has some responsibility for them because they have assumed responsibility for her.

And this should bring us back to that reading from John’s Gospel. To anyone who understands John’s theology, it’s unthinkable that the Son of God would claim his words simply as his own. It’s unthinkable that Jesus’s mission wouldn’t be a loving response to the Father’s sending of him into the world in love. It’s unthinkable that anyone who keeps Jesus’s words wouldn’t be swept up into God’s love and that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit wouldn’t come and make their home within that person.

It should be equally unthinkable to us to conceive of the Christian life as mine or yours singular. It should never cross our minds that we could keep Jesus’s words on our own without gathering together on the Lord’s Day in this paschal celebration of his victory of life over death. It should seem a heresy to imagine that ministry can happen effectively with only a few people giving their time while everyone else watches and reaps the benefits. And it should seem blasphemous to gather here for the breaking of bread and the prayers and not go forth from this place to invite others into the household of faith, where they can come and abide with us, basking in the infinite love of God. It should seem inconceivable that their wellbeing wouldn’t be bound up with ours and vice versa.

Something has happened among us to change the royal we of the Gospel into a self-centered I. We will probably never be able to trace its exact origins, but it has subtly insinuated its way into our lives like a serpent who has escaped from the garden. The power of sin has used fear to narrow our collective we into a fearful I. And it explains everything.

But Lydia’s fear is a holy fear of God, and it leads her, as a worshiper of God, to the riverside on the sabbath day. Operating from an assumed we, where else could she be on that day of the week? How could she not be in community with others on the sabbath? Her only fear is of God, a righteous fear, a fear not of condemnation but a reverent awe of God’s majesty. Lydia is no idler, and yet she finds time for God. Not even a fear of too many commitments or of making money or of wasting time has kept her away from the riverside on that sabbath day.

And Paul, too, has no fear of changing course and heading to Macedonia. His fear, too, is only of obeying God, a holy fear, that enables him to respond to God’s guidance in creating yet more community in the early Church. Paul doesn’t even fear a prolonged stay so that Lydia’s invitation of hospitality can take hold of him.

The love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that spills out into the world and draws us into it drowns out all fear. This love precludes a fear that when Jesus ascends to the right hand of his Father in heaven, we will be left alone, depressed, lonely, and forsaken. This love assuages all fear of not having enough or losing our security. This love moves us from worshiping God simply to avoid hell to worshiping him out of thankful joy.

If we keep Jesus’s word, we will have no fear of giving our precious time for the sake of Gospel work or of reprioritizing our lives so that God is at the center. When love reigns, the only fear remaining is a holy fear of a God who chooses not to remain isolated in the Godhead but comes to us, whose movement towards us is always first. God’s love is a proactive love, boldly seeking our wholeness at all times and in all places. And this love summons us to be proactive, too.

There’s undoubtedly a direct correlation between our modern individualism and the struggles of the contemporary Church. But we can learn a lot from a few pronouns in a handful of Scripture passages, which remind us that if we choose love and live love, we have nothing to fear. We is still our identity in Christ. We are meant to be here, together in praise and fellowship, and our collective response to the hospitality of God is to welcome others into our true home, the heart of God, not to visit for a time, but to abide and stay there forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 25, 2025

A Startling Paradox

When the white smoke went up from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel just over a week ago, we were reminded of just how large the world is. Massive crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, awaiting news of the election of a new pope. Whether among Roman Catholics, Protestants, or Anglicans, the election of a new pope stimulated great interest. The entire world was watching and waiting with curious anticipation.

But when the identity of the new pope was revealed, I had the distinct feeling that, in the blink of an eye, the world had somehow gotten smaller. It had gotten smaller because never in my wildest imagination would I have predicted the election of an American pope. And then, we quickly learned that he had received a degree from Villanova University, just a half mile up the road from here.

Suddenly, what had always seemed like a lofty, remote position occupied only by bishops from other continents seemed much closer to home. Claiming a connection to this new pope became the visible sign of infectious local pride. A church in Havertown proudly boasted that the pope had worked in their churchyard when he was a college student. And I, too, began to wonder whether Pope Leo XIV had ever walked past this church—most likely—or even walked inside for a quick look—possible?

The events of last week were a reminder that sometimes, the world gets both smaller and bigger at the same time. The world expanded as the gift of technology focused global attention on the events at the Vatican. But for residents of this area, the world narrowed as we realized just how closely we’re all connected, despite a 4,000-mile separation between Rome and Philadelphia.

This paradox of the world getting both smaller and bigger at the same time is at the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. In chapter three of his Gospel, St. John tells us that the Holy Spirit is like the wind, blowing where it will. The Holy Spirit’s movement and palpable presence is beyond our control, producing order from chaos, giving guidance amid aimlessness, generating fecundity from barrenness, announcing surprise within banality. Just as the Spirit moved over the face of the waters in the beginning of creation and alighted on prophets and leaders among the people of Israel, so the Spirit moved over the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, enabling her to conceive a child by that same Spirit’s power. The Spirit rested on Jesus’s head in his baptism and then propelled him into the wilderness in a surprising move that remains yet mysterious to us. And at the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus would tell the people in his home synagogue in Nazareth that the Spirit had anointed him to bring good news to the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, and those in need of healing.

This very Spirit empowered the disciples on the Day of Pentecost to send them into the world to preach the Gospel. And this same elusive Spirit upended the world of the early Church, which was flummoxed by Gentiles entering the fold without circumcision or conformance to Jewish Christian ritual practices. The Spirit is the tie that binds all the ages.

Peter’s astounding vision while praying suddenly magnifies his world. It’s incomprehensible to consider eating animals considered unclean by Jewish dietary standards. He’s told very clearly but irrationally that what was once verboten is now perfectly acceptable. It defies every fiber of Peter’s being. But this command is clearly from God, and so he acquiesces.

The Spirit continues to widen Peter’s world, like a camera lens expanding to include a wide vista. He’s sent to Cornelius the Gentile to eat with his household, a practice that horrifies others in the Jewish Christian community back in Jerusalem. Peter learns that while he was receiving a vision, the Spirit had already been at work in the life of Cornelius, asking him to send for Peter. Peter was to be an instrument in bringing Cornelius to salvation through Christ. The world is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

But then, in a dramatic moment, the blossoming balloon is popped, and in an instant, Peter’s world becomes smaller at the same time, too. As he speaks to Cornelius and his family, he witnesses the Holy Spirit falling on these Gentiles, and he knows deep in his heart that it’s the same Spirit that had alighted on him and the other disciples on that Day of Pentecost. Dietary and ritual practices that once seemed to separate Gentiles and Jews by a vast chasm turned out to be no impediment to the reconciling power of the Holy Spirit.

These days, there’s the delusion that our world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time. With each new technological advance, with each new piece of medical knowledge, with yet another mission to unseen places in the universe beyond planet earth, and with plane travel that allows us to have breakfast in Philadelphia and dinner in Paris, we think that our world is expanding and getting smaller at the same time. There’s so much more that we can see and do. There are so many more people we can meet. Our worldview is enlarging, and we’re simultaneously being connected with people in ways we could never have been before.

But there’s an odd irony in all this. Although intercontinental travel and evolving technology should bring us closer together, our world is increasingly polarized and divided rather than united. We’ve become more entrenched in our divisions, both socially and religiously. Ecumenical dialogues have faltered, and international conversations have ground to a halt. National dialogue is precariously volatile. Technology has prompted us to withdraw into our individual shells like tortoises pulling their heads back into safety. In some ways, we’re more isolated than we’ve ever been.

But for those of us attuned to the power of the Holy Spirit, we know that when the Spirit moves among us, our world always becomes bigger and smaller at the same time, and it always leads to greater inclusion and deeper relationships. The fruit of the Spirit’s work is perpetually reconciliation, not division. The Spirit teaches us that God’s purview infinitely exceeds our expectations and knits us all together more intimately at the same time.

Peter’s acceptance of the Gentiles into the life of the early Church without distinction is no mere whim but a response to the shocking impulse of the Spirit within his life. The Spirit teaches Peter and his fellow disciples that their own salvation is intertwined with the salvation of the Gentiles, from whom they would previously have kept their distance. The Spirit teaches the Gentiles that they can’t be saved without the preaching of a stubborn Jewish Christian named Peter. The Spirit teaches the Jerusalem Jewish Christian community that the same Spirit given to them has also been given to the Gentiles. The Spirit teaches us, too, that we can’t be saved without each other and that in Christ, life’s deepest contradictions can yet be bound together in a blessed unity. And as Peter aptly says, with this incontrovertible movement of the Spirit, who are they to withstand God? Who are we to withstand God?

And this should reduce us to an awesome silence. We should marvel at the Spirit’s ability to make our world simultaneously smaller and bigger. We should be speechless at how the Spirit’s power surpasses our control. We should be reticent to say who’s in and who’s out of the Gospel’s reach. We should be silent before the awesome reality that the Spirit doesn’t isolate us or create neat, tidy groups of like-minded people but that the Spirit will bind us all together, weaving a rich and cohesive tapestry from our intractable differences.

Our world becomes bigger because God always stands outside our grasp, and God initiates the action first. Paradoxically, our world becomes much smaller, too, as our foes become our friends and strangers become our family. This is a mystery that can only bring us to our knees in humble silence. And it’s a mystery that can only lift us to our feet again to praise and glorify a God who knows no bounds and boundaries and who can make a startling paradox the heart of our salvation.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2025

Warmth in the Midst of Winter

On a trip to Ireland over twenty years ago, I took a bus journey through the countryside of the Connemara mountains in the late dusk hours. Although it was June, the temperature outside was damp and chilly. On that bus ride, I experienced one of the coziest views I’ve ever seen in my life. In the deepening darkness, I spotted simple country homes dotting the countryside. Warm light radiated from their windows, and smoke curled from the chimneys. Or, at the least, the smoke was there in my imagination! I noticed the lights first, and then the houses. And although I was perfectly content and warm on the bus, I had the distinct feeling that I wanted to be in one of those homes.

I could imagine a fire crackling in the grate and a family gathering around it, perhaps reading or knitting or sharing a round of beverages. However, romantic and inaccurate my picture of the interior of those country homes was, the presence of light in the darkness and the prospect of a warm, safe abode tapped into an instinctual longing within me. I wanted to be near the warmth I envisioned in those little rural homes.

Do you feel the warmth in this church? After Mass, I stand at the Tower doors, waiting to greet people as they leave. But even after the last notes of the organ voluntary have ceased to sound, I’m usually still waiting. It’s as if people don’t want to leave the church. It’s as if everyone at Mass has been drawn to this sacred space as a moth to the light or as a shivering Irish farmer to the warmth of a fireside grate.

Five minutes after the Mass ends, there are more people in the pews than those who have exited. And while this could seem like mere clubbiness or exclusive fellowship, it’s not. There’s something deeper here. There is a warmth radiating within the room, and if we were to take the temperature of the inside of this church, it would register as a warm fireside amber. But outside the doors of the church, that color might fade into an icy cold blue.

Inside, close to Jesus’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament, we’re being warmed by an eternal fire.[1] Inside, close to the living Word proclaimed, we’re energized by the Holy Spirit’s comforting presence. Inside, in close company as members of one Body and one Spirit, any coldness in our hearts and bodies is warmed into life again.

It was so in Jesus’s earthly life. Wherever he went, warmth pervaded the atmosphere. The injured and sick were healed. The cold loneliness of human lives cast out of elite circles was warmed by Jesus seeking them out. The coldness of hungry stomachs was warmed by abundant feeding. The darkness of lives without hope was illumined by Christ’s presence giving them a future when all seemed lost. Jesus attracted people to himself like humans to a cozy fireside, although not everyone was receptive to the warmth, as we see in John’s Gospel today.

In John’s Gospel, nothing is coincidental. No unusual detail is haphazard, and so we must wonder why John redundantly tells us that at the time of the Feast of the Dedication, otherwise known as Hanukkah, it’s winter. Of course, it’s winter, Jesus. Tell me something I don’t know! It’s the time of shortening days, but it’s also another kind of winter. It’s a winter of the soul. Or as St. Augustine of Hippo, put it, “the winter before Christ’s passion.” In this winter, stubborn hearts refuse to acknowledge Jesus’s works as works of God. Cold, hard authoritarianism is the bane of the lowly person’s existence. Ossified hearts are unaffected by the warmth of this reconciler and healer, true man and true God.

Those who acknowledge Jesus’s works and those who would be healed by him are drawn to him as to a cozy fireside, longing to be warmed by him. But others, as St. Augustine said, are “slow to approach that divine fire.”[2] It’s winter, and although some approach Jesus, they yet ask Jesus to prove himself. Jesus must prove himself in their terms. But Jesus has only explained himself through his works.

To know Jesus, to become close to him, to be thawed by his warmth, is to be in relationship with him. We can tell whether people are truly disciples by how close they are to Jesus. Just as Jesus is close to the Father, so our proximity to Jesus puts us closer to the Father. We can only know the Shepherd’s voice when we are close to him. 

But we know all too well that outside the doors of this church, winter persists. The days may be lengthening, the flowers may be blooming, and it may be getting warmer, but winter is relentless. There’s an icy distancing in the air, which divides and scatters rather than unites. There’s a cold estrangement among the human family that is predicated on fear and prejudice. There’s a fragmentation of community that is fueled by competition and jealousy. And while the obvious solution should be to run towards the warmth of the Church’s life to be fed, so many resist it.

There’s a danger in the Church perceived as a sheepfold. She can so easily become an exclusive club or her own cold company of like members. She can become an instrument of unrelenting judgment that pits herself against the world rather than seeking to warm its iciness. But a Church gathered around her true Shepherd, around the One who heals, reconciles, and unites, is not a Church gathered merely around herself. A Church gathered around her Good Shepherd is a Church that recognizes that she’s always lost until she’s found by Jesus the Christ. And in that recognition, the Body of Christ becomes a warm fire of humble welcome, drawing others to the Good Shepherd.

To follow Jesus our Good Shepherd is to put ourselves as close to him as we possibly can. To come close to the Good Shepherd is to be here, nestled against his living Word proclaimed in community and close to his altar where he’s known to us in the breaking of bread. To come close to Jesus is to draw near to him with our sins and seek his forgiveness and mercy. To be close to him is to align every movement of our lives with his. To be close to him is to put him at the center of all that we do. He’s our North Star, not a convenient add-on to our busy lives. To be close to Jesus is to be close to each other, to affirm our different gifts and to encourage one another to good works and service. To be close to Jesus is to know that the only cure to the icy coldness of our worldly lives is the warmth of the Good Shepherd.

If we keep our distance, his voice will become unrecognizable to us. To know Christ is not simply to know him intellectually, it’s to know him in relationship. To know him is to know him in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick, and in the suffering among us. To know him is to know that we’re lost and that he has found us, that is, if we wish to be found.

And this brings us to an incredible mystery of finding the Good Shepherd. Jesus tells us that the Father has given the sheep into his care. And this may be the most humbling realization of all as the modern Church. No matter what we do and no matter who we are and no matter what projects we undertake, all the sheep who find Jesus by coming to this particular fold come because God sends them here. We often don’t know how and why. But we do know that the Father will constantly send us sheep. We know that there are other sheep not yet of this fold who one day will find their way here. And although we can’t control it, we can do one thing: we can be as close to Jesus as possible. In that proximity, our cold bodies will be warmed by his warmth and light. And that warmth and light will radiate from our bodies to all whom we meet.

We can celebrate the warmth of a community gathered around the worship of God in Word and Sacrament, a community that seeks constantly to be near our Lord, and we can celebrate it not as institutional narcissism but as the gift of almighty God. And we can continue to pray for those sheep whom we don’t yet know but whom God the Father will draw to his Son by bringing them here.

For now, it’s enough to be here, week after week. There’s no more important thing we can do than to come here in all the icy moments of life, and in the warm ones, too. Come and let your cold bodies be warmed by the presence of Christ’s care and love. Follow close to him, and let his grace heal the brokenness of your lives. Come and let Christ’s love thaw your frozen hearts of stone. Come and find your way to the warmth, and get close to Christ. And when you get close to Christ, rejoice that you have found eternal life and that you are God’s child. And no one, not even the devil himself, can snatch you out of his hand.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Easter (Feast of Title)
May 11, 2025

[1] This image comes from St. Augustine of Hippo. See John 1–10, vol. 4A, Ancient Commentary on Christian Scripture, eds. Joel Elowsky and Thomas Oden (Lisle, IL: IVP Press, 2019), 355-56.

[2] Ibid.

The Third Time's the Charm

I’m old enough to remember the days of public shaming in school. School discipline ran on the weaponizing of shame. Even a dutiful student like me was not immune from the dreaded embarrassment of having one’s name appear on the chalkboard. Any offense, however innocuous, was recorded for the length of a school day on the classroom chalkboard.

After the first offense, your name was written for the entire class to see. For all repeat offenses, a check mark appeared next to your name. I will never understand why a check mark was used, but perhaps it was shaming through sarcasm. Around three check marks tipped one over into the land of no return. You were headed straight for after-school detention or some similar, shameful fate. Everyone knew it because your name was on the chalkboard.

Although the names were erased at the end of the day, for a sensitive child like me, the shame was never erased. It still lingered in the dust wiped off that chalkboard. Is it any different in our modern culture? Is it any different in the Church? If not literally, then figuratively, we live in a culture of shame. One offense can mark a person as condemned forever. One crime can prevent a person from ever holding a decent job again. One misstep in religious circles holds greater weight than decades of faithful service. In some places, it’s not even three strikes and you’re out. It’s one strike, and your future is finished, canceled if you will.

What is it about the number three? Maybe it seems fairer than two. Three feels complete for some reason, and yet, in a culture of shame, three offenses extinguish any future a person might hope to have.

But in the kingdom of God, the number three signifies something else. It represents the expansiveness of love found in God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three is the pivot point into relationship and wholeness. It can’t be a coincidence, then, that the third time Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, involves a shared meal of fish and bread beside a charcoal fire. It’s no coincidence that Jesus appears to his disciples in this final story of John’s Gospel in the early morning, the time of a new creation. It evokes the third day on which Christ rose from the dead. The disciples caught nothing all night. How could they be fruitful in the darkness? But in the light of the morning, when all is fresh and new, Jesus helps them find a catch of fish that exceeds any of their expectations. And it’s this miracle of abundance that reveals Jesus to the disciples so that they know definitively that it’s the Lord. Here, the third time’s the charm.

But shame is still lurking beneath the surface of this story in the waning hours of the night. It’s as if St. John couldn’t end his Gospel without correcting the nagging shame that’s been throbbing at the back of our brains since only a few weeks ago. Remember the charcoal fire? Remember that Peter denied Jesus three times? Three strikes, and you’re out. Surely that shame must still be with Peter as he stands in the boat out on the sea and suddenly realizes that it’s his Lord on the beach.

It’s such a poignant moment. Peter has stripped off his clothes for work, but when he knows that it’s his Lord standing on the beach, he does the most curious thing. He puts his clothes back on before jumping into the water. And it’s in this moment, at the tail end of the Biblical narrative of salvation history, that we’re brought back to the beginning. We’re brought back to shame’s unholy birth.

Since that horrible moment in the garden when Adam and Eve were expelled by God because of their disobedience, shame has colored humankind’s relationship with God. God’s people have been unable to see themselves in relation to God except through the lens of shame. For centuries, their sin and faults have been perceived as the reason for the tragedies of their lives. For so many years, they’ve only pictured a God who purports to love them but nevertheless constantly showers his wrath upon them. This God must be appeased, his love must be earned, but nothing is ever enough. For so long, God’s people have only sensed a great chasm between themselves and their Creator, and it's no surprise that they, too, have sensed such a gulf between themselves and the rest of humanity, especially their enemies and those unlike them.

This horrible strand of shame pulsates throughout the narrative of salvation history. God becomes nothing more than another fickle god of polytheistic memory, nothing more than a super-human who is vindictive and who plays with retribution like terrible earthly rulers. Through the lens of shame, God seems to catapult from angry violence into passionate declarations of love. And this skewed, tragic image of God must be tied back to that first moment of shame, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. In the realization of their wrongdoing, they became aware of their nakedness, trying unsuccessfully to hide themselves with paltry fig leaves. The God who had walked so close to them in the garden now seemed removed from their sight, at a distance.

All this makes the final scene of John’s Gospel so touching. We can’t leave this grand Biblical story of salvation without correcting something that has bothered us for so long. What do we do with the shame? And on the beach in the post-resurrection light of early morning, we find the answer.

Peter puts on clothes. He undoes that hideous and futile cover-up with fig leaves that only magnified the shame of Adam and Eve. Peter doesn’t keep his distance from Jesus. With all his shame, he jumps into the water in his inimitable impetuous fashion and hurries toward his Lord. There’s something on the other side of shame. The chasm between humanity and God is diminishing. Peter can no longer stay away from Jesus; he needs to be close to his Lord and Savior.

Everything changes by that charcoal fire. Peter’s three previous denials are rehabilitated and redeemed as Peter affirms his love for Christ three times. In the light of a new day by a charcoal fire and during a shared meal, Peter is assured that three strikes don’t remove him from the story. This time, three is the number of redemption. The third time’s the charm.

The charcoal fire becomes the pivot point into loving service. Feeding and tending Jesus’s sheep is love not in word only but in action. Closeness to Jesus means proximity to all of humanity, to friends and foes alike. And only in the light of the charcoal fire and after the enactment of Jesus’s forgiveness, can he finally say, “follow me.”

What is it that we bring to this charcoal fire by morning light on this first day of the week? What shame are we carrying so deep inside that we can’t bear to look within? What are we trying to hide from God? Are we ashamed of our past? Are we ashamed of our present? Have we been told by an unforgiving world or an unforgiving Church that we have no present, much less a future? Has our world shamed us because of our social status or poverty or unwillingness to go along with the status quo? Are we ashamed of a Church that has backslid into the worship of power and money and that has allied herself with unholy earthly powers? Are we ashamed to be seen too close to Jesus, and is this why we keep our distance?

Or, despite the shame we feel, can we be like Peter? Can we move closer to Jesus out of repentance for past wrongs? Can we shed the shame that the world unjustly foists upon us? Can we let God re-clothe us in the shining baptismal garment of righteousness? Can we jump into the water and swim to Christ, who waits by the charcoal fire, not to condemn us but to share his abundant forgiveness with us?

In the garden after Adam and Eve’s disobedience, the final word was shame. Three strikes, and you were out. We know, now, that on that side of the resurrection, we could never fully understand God’s love. But on this side of the resurrection, Christ shows us a God who, even after Jesus’s death, appears again and again to draw sinners back to himself, to love and to forgive. The third time’s the charm. In a culture of shame that is ruthlessly unforgiving, there’s no better news than this. No shame is too powerful to separate us from God’s love. Now, in resurrection light and on the other side of the charcoal fire, we know and must tell all the world, that the final word, the only true word, is love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Easter
May 4, 2025

For You, Me, and the Whole World

There’s a funny thing that parents will often do when they’re irritated with one of their children. They might say to one of them, “go and tell your sister to come here!” Which of us hasn’t heard this before? Perhaps parents even use this circuitous way of speaking with each other. “Go and tell your dad that it’s time to mow the lawn!” It’s a funny thing we do, isn’t it? When we find ourselves angry or irritable, we distance ourselves from the sources of our irritation by failing to use their names. It's as if we’re saying, for the length of our annoyance, that the relative isn’t ours. It’s everyone else’s: it’s the son’s or the daughter’s or the wife’s or the husband’s.

Such verbal distancing is usually a rather harmless thing, a momentary response from out of human impatience. But broadly speaking, we could read it theologically, too. Our world is full of such distancing. Thank God I’m not like those people. You go tell him that he’s out of line. We can’t let them into our close circle.

The pronouns that families use to momentarily create estrangement amid conflict should be personal. Your father and your mother and your brother and your sister tell us that we belong to each other, even though that’s the opposite of how we use them in familial tiffs. But when Mary Magdalene encounters her risen Lord at the empty tomb on this day, the first day of the week, pronouns are full of theological meaning. And they’re very personal.

The scene is intensely personal, too. It’s poignant and heartbreaking and sweet, all at the same time. When Mary arrives at the tomb, she doesn’t yet understand what has happened. In her confusion and in the twilight of this hour, she reports back to Peter and the Beloved Disciple that they have taken away the Lord. Neither we nor she know who they are. And it’s the Lord, as if in her grief, her Lord is one step removed from her.

But after Peter and the Beloved Disciple have come and gone, noting the fact of the empty tomb but going no further in emotional or theological reflection, Mary stays at the tomb, weeping. And in the pain and emptiness of her grief, in her lingering consternation, she decides to look inside the tomb. She sees two angels, who ask her what she is looking for, as if she were searching for an object, maybe just a cold, dead body. And from out of her sorrow, Mary shifts her language. They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. We still don’t know who they are, but as Mary goes deeper into her heart, Jesus is no longer the Lord but my Lord. It’s personal now because it's always been personal.[1]

Then, Jesus himself appears, although Mary mistakes him for the gardener. Whom do you seek? he asks, suggesting that Mary isn’t looking for a dead body but a living man. And finally, in the most touching of moments, Jesus calls Mary by name. She’s not merely Woman, but Mary. The Good Shepherd has called the sheep by name. Mary knows his voice. She’s always known his voice, and now, she knows just who he is. He’s not it, some impersonal dead body. He’s her Lord and Savior. In turn, she calls him Rabboni, Teacher, because he’s not just any man to her. He’s her Lord and the Lord of all. He’s also the one who taught her in the past and will continue to teach her by the power of his Spirit. And he’s the one who will continue to teach the whole Church.

But Jesus responds by saying something strange. He tells Mary not to cling to him. Perhaps she was reaching forward to embrace him. It seems cold, as if Jesus is distancing himself from her. But he’s not. He’s drawing her closer, and not just Mary, but others as well. This personal exchange has broadened beyond the garden to encompass the entire world.

And as Jesus looks at Mary, it’s the look that we remember from Maundy Thursday as Jesus washed our feet. It’s the look from the cross on Good Friday. It’s the look of love that entrusts us with a mission that we can’t reject. Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. This charge is both personal and universal. Mary can’t hold on to the risen Christ, because to do so would be to make this moment of resurrection glory about only her and Jesus. But this moment, this Gospel mission, is about Mary and the whole world. It has always been about the entire world, the world Jesus came to save. It will always be about the whole world that Jesus continues to save and heal.

It should all make sense now. As Jesus formed community in the upper room, commanding his disciples to wash the feet of one another, and as he formed community at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, entrusting his mother to the Beloved Disciple, so on the first day of the week, Jesus entrusted the members of the young Church to one another. He gave them the Gospel message, the Easter proclamation.

And here we are, too, on this first day of the week. We’ve followed Jesus from the cross to the empty tomb. We’ve stuck with him. But in an individualistic age, we must beware that this Easter Gospel doesn’t get warped into an individualistic faith or an individualistic sense of salvation. This Gospel is personal, but it’s also about the entire world, not just you, me, and God.

The powers of death and the systems of oppression that crucified Jesus didn’t win. It was believed that, by eliminating this perceived troublemaker, earthly power would win the day. But in crucifying this man, the powers of darkness failed to understand that something far stronger and lovelier and more beautiful would triumph in the end. And it all came about at the foot of that cross on Good Friday, when the Church was formed. And it persists this day, before an empty tomb, where the absence of a body is not the conclusion of a story but only the beginning. Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene are words to us as well.

We aren’t here to fulfill an obligation or to soak up our Easter joy and then leave as if we aren’t changed. Jesus says to us, Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. In these words, Jesus has drawn us into the very life of God. We’re no longer servants but children, children of God, who is Jesus’ Father and our Father, too. Go and tell the good news, Jesus says. Go and tell all whom you meet that the Good Shepherd has found you and given you life. This message is not for you alone. This saving message is for the whole world.

On this day of a new creation, we undo our betrayal on Palm Sunday. That betrayal is like Peter’s, where we sit by countless fires as people judge our Lord, denying our relationship with him. I do not know him, we say. Today, our Lord bids us tell the whole world that we do know him, who is not only for me but also for all of us.

The One who calls our name in a nameless world, asks us to call others to him. The One who gives his life for ours commands us to bring others who are lost to him. The One who feeds us with his very Body asks us to feed others and bring them to the Bread of Life. The One who gives us life commands us to go and tell about this life to others so that they can have life. The victory of life over death is this: even after the world has crucified its Savior, his power to heal and give life persists. It lies in the Church, inspired by his Spirit, which will continue its community until the end.

The empty tomb on the first day of the week is a celebration that life’s worst cruelties can’t defeat the Easter Gospel. No anonymous abuse of the least of these, no divisions within the human family, no distortions of Christianity, no exclusive connection between Jesus and a particular group of people, no brokenness within the Church herself can undo the Easter Gospel. The truth that Christ rose from the dead and still lives is not my truth or your truth or any sole individual’s truth. It’s our truth. It’s the truth that Jesus came to bring for the entire world.

So now, go. Go and tell your friends and my friends that on the other side of the empty tomb, our world is not the same. Go and tell the whole human family—show them with your lives—that there’s a truth that will always outlast betrayal and deception. Go and tell the entire world that your Lord and my Lord, our Lord, has risen indeed. Alleluia!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Resurrection: Easter Day
April 20, 2025

[1] This observation is from John, Gail R. O’Day and Susan E. Hylen (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006, 193.

Remembering from the Other Side

With all the light drained from the world, we gathered at the foot of the cross, just a day ago on Good Friday, looking up at our Savior gazing down lovingly at us. And in the terrible darkness and emptiness of the aftermath of that moment, when our Lord’s body was resting in a tomb, we came to the church this night, to keep vigil. Since we lingered in this silent emptiness a year ago, so much has changed. There are some, dear to us, who aren’t here with us. We came here to the tomb tonight to keep vigil, sad and bereft at their absence, and we remember.

Over the past year, others have joined us in the uncomfortable silence of waiting at the empty tomb. Some of them have been through the valley of the shadow of death more than any of us could imagine. Many of us have grieved painful losses in our own lives. Perhaps we’ve left a past sense of security for a present feeling of deep uncertainty. But all of us, no matter what our life story is, have lost something. We’ve lost minutes of our lives, hairs on our heads, friends, and perhaps our hope. We’ve all done things we wished we hadn’t done and left others undone. We’ve lost more of our innocence. In some sense, we were all grieving as we entered the church doors this evening and sat in the darkness, although some of us may have been more willing to admit it. We were all in Egypt, slaves to sin, anxiety, and fear. We were all victims of a cruel world giving us more work to do each day but also telling us to gather more bricks to do the work while we were at it. We were all on one side of a vast expanse of water looking across, wondering how we’d ever get to the other side.

But then, something happened in the dark emptiness before the tomb, both expected and unexpected. With one flick of flint against stone, light was kindled. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. And we began to see each other’s faces, dimly at first. We saw the face of a fellow parishioner across the church who had had a particularly horrible year. We saw the face of a newcomer to the church, seeking community in a life of loneliness. We saw another who knows deeply the cost of speaking the truth and yearning for freedom. We saw the faces of the sick, the youthful, and the aged all searching for something deep in a shallow world. And we realized that we were hardly alone. This spark of light, lighting our world and the faces of our friends in Christ, was really kindled at the foot of the cross yesterday as our Lord looked down on us in love. We forgot about it as the emptiness of loss overwhelmed us.

And then, that tiny pinprick of light moved slowly through our midst, our pillar of fire by night, leading us through the darkness and wilderness of our lives. And the Red Sea parted, and we left death and sin behind, and we crossed over into the Promised Land. By that same tiny dot of light, we remembered. We remembered that from empty nothingness, God created all that is good. From slavery, God brought us to freedom. From sinful anarchy, God renewed the face of the earth and called us again to goodness. From dry bones of apathy and malaise, God gave energy and a Spirit of newness to humanity. From the despair of exile, God gave us the hope of bringing us home once again.

Hearing all this, we remembered on the other shore, by the light kindled by a God of love. Our hope was also rekindled, because it was shaky when we entered the church tonight. Of course, we remembered that our Lord had once said that “he must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified.” Because we remembered that, we had fallen into despair. That’s all we remembered in our despondency and sorrow and hopelessness. But when the light was kindled, on the other side of the water, standing at an empty tomb, we remembered that other part, which had been drowned out by living in a world oriented towards death. Our Lord also said, on the third day, I will rise.

And now, it all makes sense. Why are we looking for the living among the dead? Why are we moping in the graveyard? Why are we hanging onto that anger and those resentments? Why do we refuse forgiveness? Why are we giving up on our future? Why are we looking backwards instead of forwards?

When the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee to the cross returned to the tomb on this day, the eighth day of a new creation, they were living in a world of death. They brought spices to anoint a dead body. They were fully prepared for the stench of a decaying corpse and the sadness of looking at the inert face of the one they had known and loved.

But upon arriving, they were reminded of our Lord’s complete teaching, the full proclamation of the Easter Gospel. Why do you seek the living among the dead? And then they, like us this evening, remembered. They remembered the brutal execution of their friend on the cross, which they witnessed with their own eyes. They remembered how his cold body was laid in a tomb and sealed with a stone. But they also remembered that he said he would rise, and now, looking at the absence of a body in an empty tomb, it all made sense. And they ran and told the good news.

But they ran and told it to a world like ours, a world that resembles creation in reverse. It’s a world in which fear is choking the life out of all its inhabitants. It’s a world without hope, without a recognizable future. And so, the words of those first women apostles, whose voices were routinely ignored and stifled, seemed like an idle tale.

To powerful government officials whose power was and is built on the trampled souls of the poor, those words were and are an idle tale. To a nascent group of disciples thinking it had put its trust in the wrong person, those words were an idle tale. To a cowardly group of men who presumably hadn’t followed Jesus to the foot of the cross like the women, the brave women’s words seemed like an idle tale.

To everyone this night who will not have the courage to recall their own losses, their own sin, their own daily deaths, their own suffering, the Easter Gospel will seem like an idle tale. To the complacent and the powerful and the privileged who fail to recognize their own poverty, the words could seem like an idle tale. At least, until we look back across the empty tomb and Red Sea and see by a newly kindled light, a past that isn’t forgotten but is now redeemed.

The Easter Gospel was first preached by those women disciples not by an accident of history but because they had been with Jesus all the way to the cross. They had seen his torture, suffered it inside their souls. They had achingly watched his helpless body removed from the cross and sealed in a tomb, presumably forever. But they also went back, to remember what had happened. And when they returned to the tomb, they remembered what they’d forgotten. He would rise again, and he had. This story was only just beginning.

This is the night to remember. We remember not with maudlin sadness but with the desire for our memory to be reformed and redeemed by God. We remember because in remembering, the good news of Easter can never be just an idle tale. It’s those of us who have been face to face with death, those of us who have been persecuted or tortured, those of us who have held the hands of loved ones who are dying, those of us who have seen what’s dearest to us, even our very own parish, stand at the brink of the grave, who can be the most effective conveyors of the Easter proclamation. Like the women at the tomb, those of us who have known death run, unbidden, to tell the good news. On the other side of the Red Sea and the Jordan River and the waters of baptism, there is another story to tell.

So, we run. We hurry from the empty tomb and tell all those who need to remember, too. We proclaim that our haunted past is not eradicated but transfigured by the rising from the dead of Jesus, who gives us life. We announce to a world turned towards death that it, too, should look for hope among the living not among the dead, that a tomb of death is not permanently sealed by a stone. It’s indeed open to a new future. We announce to an enervated Church that every moment in Christ is a new creation. We tell each other, through the sharing of our own stories of loss and pain, that at the door to the empty tomb, we’re not looking for the dead but for the living, and all because Jesus, the one who died for the life of the world has risen as he said.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter
April 19, 2025

Where It All Begins

Here at the foot of the cross, one image is seared into our memories. It’s an image that is gentle yet powerful enough to outlast betrayal and a change from light into darkness. It’s the look of our Lord, kneeling at our feet and washing them, as he did for us last night. As he washes away their dirt, as we let him serve us and as he calls us to serve others, we remember that loving look, which is not from above but from below. Jesus looks up at us as he washes our feet. And that look is worth a thousand words.

We, who know how this story ends, who’ve heard it countless times, can’t forget that look. We humans know how to communicate all kinds of things with just a look, especially when we can’t say anything. In the most furtive of circumstances, sometimes, a look is all we can give or receive. In this cruel world of ours, we must keep that look alive. With that look, we announce to those who have eyes to see that there is a truer story than the one that purports to be true.

         Throughout the entire drama of this holiest of weeks, there are two narratives happening. There’s the plain, obvious narrative of the drama, of a man unjustly brought to a fake trial, sentenced to death, and crucified on a cross. But there’s another narrative, the narrative we know that threads its way through the brutal events of this week, and this narrative is guided by that loving look from Christ, as he gazes upon us while washing our feet.

These two narratives are in deep juxtaposition and tension on this day. It’s as if John’s Gospel is written in code. On the level of the world—the cosmos—everything is fighting against the truth of God.  This is the world without eyes to see or ears to hear. To encounter the precious story this way is to experience it from creation to the cross, as a treacherous undoing of God’s work. But with eyes re-formed by that loving look from below, we can experience the story from the cross back to creation. Two narrative strands are twisting together on this day, vying for our attention and a place in our hearts. Which one will win?

With Jesus’s loving look from below in our minds, we enter the story. Judas with his band of soldiers seek Jesus out, a chilling foil to the disciples who would honorably seek and follow Jesus. Judas and his cronies pursue Jesus in the garden with lanterns and torches and weapons. The garden is just a garden, but we know it’s more. We know that creation and light and goodness start in the garden, and so we have a hint that flowers are ready to bud. We know that if those dishonorably seeking Jesus had believed that he was the light of the world, they wouldn’t have needed torches and lanterns.

We know that when Jesus is dressed up like an earthly king and Pilate introduces him to those calling for his death, he says, “Behold the man!” We know that he is true man, but we also know that he is true God. We know that those calling for his death look upon him as an impostor, a human criminal. But we know that what the world considers criminal in this case is indeed truth itself.

We know, too, that when Pilate says again to the people, “Behold your King!” that Jesus is indeed a king, but not the kind of king the people were anticipating. Recalling that loving look of Jesus from below as he washed our feet last night, we know that this king will not save by brute strength or revenge or violence. This king will die on the cross as the Passover lambs are sacrificed in the Temple. Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is what John the Baptist said earlier about him. John knew something early on that no one else could understand.

And here we are, standing at the foot of the cross, as our sacrificial Lamb gives of his life willingly so that the entire world can be saved, so that we can be reconciled with God and one another. In the narrative of the world that encounters this story and has encountered this story from time immemorial, there’s only a wayward man hanging on a cross with a band of bereft former disciples wondering why they ever followed him.

But in the narrative propelled forward by that loving look from below in the washing of feet, there’s so much more to the story. Behold, the man hanging on the wood that will enable flowers to spring up from the dead earth! Behold, the Good Shepherd who has called his sheep by name, who know his voice, which is why they’ve followed him all the way to the foot of the cross! Behold, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep! Behold, the door, the gate of heaven! Behold, the bread of life whose broken body will be our eternal food for life’s journey! Behold, the light of the world that shines in the darkness of human cruelty! Behold, the vine whose blood becomes our spiritual drink! Behold, the way and the truth and the life, the one who gives us life in the face of death!

This entire week we have moved from fickle, faithless betrayal on Palm Sunday to allowing our feet to be washed by our Lord last night, to experiencing that loving look from below as Jesus reminds us of the truth of this story, our story. And today, we’ve made it all the way to the foot of the cross, closing that horrid distance between Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

And something remarkable happens out of the deep darkness. After the last act of betrayal, after Jesus has been nailed to the cross and his earthly garments divided as a visible sign of an undoing of creation, our perspective shifts. For those of us who know the true narrative of this story, who know the secret code of this Gospel, who remember the loving look of Jesus from below, darkness turns to light. The undoing that has happened since Judas’s betrayal last night is suddenly transfigured into a glorious remaking.

Until this point, everyone has been pointing fingers at Jesus. Behold, the Lamb of God! Behold, the man! Behold, your King! But now, in his final words, Jesus speaks. Reigning from the tree, he says the words that spark this new creation that his life, death, and resurrection will bring. Looking, now from above, at the Blessed Mother, he says, “Woman, behold, your son!” And looking, now from above, at John, he says, “Behold, your mother!”

At the foot of the cross, in the face of betrayal and violence and cruelty, Jesus forms the Church, his risen body that will continue his work in the world. And now, instead of looking at Jesus from the narrative of the world, we look at the world from the perspective of Jesus on the cross. We are there with him. All has changed. A new creation is born.

And having completed this final action, Jesus utters his last words, “It is finished.” As he looks down again, we look up into our new future, into heaven, which is our destiny. Now, we are living from the perspective of the cross looking at the world in love. It is finished. It is complete. To that angry, factious world of ours, those words are a death sentence, an end to the antics of this perceived troublemaker. But to us, who know the real story, who know Truth incarnate, who believe in him, who have followed the voice of the Good Shepherd all the way to his death, we know that in this end, the story is only just beginning.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 18, 2025