The Road to Emmaus

Sermon by Father David Beresford

In 2013 I visited the Holy Land for the first time. It was an amazing experience. Having read the Bible stories for so long, it was a revelation to see the country itself, to smell the air, to notice the dust under my feet, to feel the sun on my face, to experience the strangeness of it all, and at the same time have the feeling that it was all somehow familiar.

I say familiar, but on the surface, many of the places we visited were unlike the vistas I had created in my imagination. There was one place in particular which turned out to be the complete opposite of how I had imagined it to be. That was the road to Emmaus. In my mind, before I visited the Holy Land, I saw a long, straight road in the desert. On this flat plain, the two disciples in our gospel story are walking when they are joined by the resurrected Jesus. In reality, the road to Emmaus, which is about seven miles from Jerusalem, is in a small valley, with lush vegetation on either side. The road itself is uneven and sloping.

It is an abiding mystery of the resurrection appearances of Jesus that he is so often, at first anyway, not recognized by those who were once closest to him. This is a question for us to ponder. Another question is, who were the two disciples? One of them, we know, is Cleopas. Who was the other? And how and why did Jesus vanish from their sight?

Let’s stop and think about what happened. We know that the Jesus who appears before the disciples is the same Jesus they knew before. Why, then, does he seem a stranger to them? In the gospel it says that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” That raises another question: why were their eyes kept from recognizing him? Happily, they eventually do recognize him, when he sits at table and breaks bread with them.

Let’s go back to the road to Emmaus. The paving stones are uneven, and you have to look down when you walk. Whenever you stop and look around, all you see are the sides of the valley. There is no horizon in view, but that is not important because of what happens next: Jesus is walking alongside you.

In their grief, Jesus’ words are strangely warming. Jesus lights a fire within the disciples’ hearts. He explains to them how the Messiah had to undergo suffering and enter into his glory. How all of this was foretold and pre-figured in the story of Moses and the Prophets. At one point Jesus berates them for being “foolish” and “slow of heart”. That’s an intriguing phrase for us to ponder - what does it mean to be “slow of heart”? I think it explains their failure to recognize Jesus - in their heart they had lost confidence in God, because the one whom they thought had come to redeem Israel was now dead. Reports of his sighting after death have left them confused.

It’s easy to lose confidence in God, especially when things are going wrong, or when you are called to bear heavy burdens or afflictions, or when you feel that God has forsaken you. The good news is that, even when you lose sight of Jesus, he never loses sight of you.

Along the road to Emmaus, Jesus gives the disciples a kind of divine history lesson. The events and actions and people which Jesus interprets are not random events in history, but chapters in God’s story, which also happens to be our story. You cannot see or recognize Jesus without first knowing where he came from. And the Old Testament is our best guide to understanding Jesus, and why he was the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

As the three of them stop at a fork in the road, Jesus “walked ahead as if he were going on.” By the way, what about the question, who was the other disciple? We know that Cleopas was one. Tradition has it that the other disciple was St. James and, in the painting by Caravaggio in the National Gallery in London, it is St James who is at table. However, it is also possible to surmise that the other disciple is not male but female, since the two of them invite Jesus to a meal, which would suggest they were married. If Cleopas is the same as Clopas in John’s gospel, then his wife Mary had been one of the women at the cross.

In any case, the important thing is that they are not dumb when the stranger begins to go a different way. They call out to him, “stay with us.” Thank God they did! I wonder how many people, by saying or doing nothing, have let an opportunity to welcome Jesus pass by. The disciples make a direct and personal appeal: “stay with us”. The turning in the road has become a kind of turning point for the disciples. Soon the identity of the stranger will be revealed.

The gospel continues: “When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then were their eyes opened, and they recognized him.” Jesus is revealed in the breaking of the bread. This returns us to the Upper Room, to the Last Supper, where Jesus instituted the Holy Eucharist. Jesus is finally recognized in the taking, and blessing, and breaking, and offering of the bread. It is, for the disciples, the final teaching in their divine history lesson.

We are learning too. Jesus is present today sacramentally in the elements of bread and wine. In this sacrament he is recognized as one who shares himself with all, who feeds and nourishes his faithful people, and unites them in the one act of worship.

One theologian described the Eucharist as the living process through which, time and again, the Church becomes the Church. I wonder if the two disciples realized that? Their reaction serves as a model for churchgoers everywhere. The gospel records “That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.” Note this well: the disciples don’t wait until morning, but at that hour get up to tell their friends in Jerusalem all that has happened. It is the urgency of their evangelism which is impressive. Like Mary Magdalen before them, they hasten to spread the good news. How exciting it must have been for them to return along that same road where, only hours before, the risen Lord had walked alongside them.

Each of you will have walked your own Emmaus Road, and will have had your own experience of sadness, of feeling bereft and without direction. At such times, remember the words of the disciples: “stay with us.” Imagine Jesus drawing near to you, so that your heart is warmed and the knowledge of God is kindled inside you. You may still be walking; today the road leads to the altar where we, like the disciples, will soon share in the bread of heaven.

This is our health and our hope, to be united to Christ, in one body. This is our life, to proclaim, with all urgency, that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. This is our joy, to share in his resurrection life, as we walk together in faith and love as his holy Church.

The Third Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2026

Beyond Closed Doors

I have long been inclined to defend two people who are bullied and unfairly maligned. One is St. Paul. We might not agree with everything Paul said or wrote, and we might take issue with some of his views. But let’s face it: Paul was a brilliant theologian. He was faithful, and our understanding of Christ would be impoverished without his voice. So, can we cut him a little slack?

The other person I’m quick to defend is Thomas, poor old “doubting Thomas.” Let’s get one thing straight. The original Greek of today’s Gospel reading never says that Thomas doubts. Thomas may want to see proof of Jesus’s risen body, but having doubts is not at odds with choosing to believe. Let’s cut Thomas a bit of slack, too.

The truth is that Thomas is more accurately a prototype of all of us at some stage or another in our spiritual lives. Each of us is a Thomas at some point, because each of us will doubt, and yet, like Thomas, we will hopefully choose to believe. We should be wary of those who assure us that they have no doubts and have everything wrapped up nicely and tied with a bow.

If Thomas is a prototype of one who needs to see something before believing, then I can honestly say that I was a Thomas six years ago. Six years ago, the doors of this church were shut, just like the doors of that upper room in Jerusalem so many years ago. The doors of this building were closed by mandate because there was a pandemic. But there were a handful of people inside this church who knew the wounds of their history. If they had not witnessed firsthand the conflict, the demonizing, and the fractious spirit during the parish’s most tumultuous years, they had at least laid eyes on the aftereffects of it. The wounds on the risen body of Christ were still present.

I, on the other hand, was not on the inside. I was serving in another parish and flirting with the idea of coming to Good Shepherd, but I didn’t know whether I could yet believe that life persisted on the other side of these church doors. In my most skeptical moments, I was like many others who were fixated on the parish’s troubled past. I was more skeptical than Thomas because I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to enter the locked-up room to see the wounds. I was told by scoffers that I should stay away from this parish. I was told that I would only be entering a morass of trouble. And in my weaker moments, I wondered whether God could do anything new here. I questioned whether life was possible, especially when there seemed to be so much death.

But there were a faithful few on the inside who testified that they had seen the risen Christ, even despite the wounds. The scars were still visible on the body, but the body was alive. The body had a future. Unbeknownst to many, God had breathed upon the dry bones so that they could live. Like Thomas, I needed to see it to believe it. I decided to come into the sealed room to see for myself. And I’m so glad that I did.

It didn’t take long after I came into this upper room to see that the naysayers were all wrong. They had all forgotten a non-negotiable tenet of the Gospel. The risen Christ can’t be shut out by sealed doors. The risen Christ, alive and glorified, appears despite those closed doors. The risen Christ is always present in our midst, and his first words to us are words of peace. No amount of fear or demonizing of other groups can keep the risen Christ out. He will get in. He will always get in.

Christ was already here, alive and well, active among a faithful remnant. He had, of course, already breathed his Spirit upon the body gathered in this place, and once the body began to recognize that they had already received this Spirit, anything was possible. With this life-giving Spirit, old grudges and resentments could be released and forgiven. Old wounds could be healed, even if the scars remained. This is the heart of the Easter message. The risen Christ is alive even though the wounds persist. Our past histories can’t be erased, nor should they. And yet, they shouldn’t define our future either. In resurrection light, the future is always being written by God, with whom anything is possible.

Most of us in this room today are Thomases. We were not here when the risen Christ first manifested himself, wounds and all, to announce his peace. But we came anyway. We came to see for ourselves. Maybe our first thoughts were like Thomas. Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. And yet, we showed up, and we stayed. We made a choice to believe.

When we arrived, the risen Christ was already in our midst. He would not let any doors keep him out. He, unlike us, is never afraid of past histories and of difficult situations. And when we came here to see for ourselves, the risen Christ offered us his peace and then said something startling. Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Remember the wounds of past hurt but see that the body is risen, is still alive and flourishing. Remember the past divisions but see the current unity and fellowship. Remember the past anger but see the present love. Remember the past conflict but see the present unified spirit. Know of the past exclusion but see the present inclusion. Do not be faithless about what God can do, but be faithful, trusting that with God, anything is possible!

If we had doubts before coming to the upper room, we should not berate ourselves, just as we shouldn’t berate poor Thomas. If we needed to see before believing, we shouldn’t be ashamed either. Thomas knew something the other disciples may not have known. He knew that the wounds of Jesus’s body were the real proof of his resurrected presence. The wounds testify to a body that survived death, a body that remained alive even though death has done its worst. We can only announce the truth of the resurrection after we see the evidence of a body that still carries its scars and yet lives.

Being a Thomas is far different from being a modern-day skeptic. There are many in our own day, even in the Church, who view the wounds as a sign of decay and death because they have succumbed to the fateful despair of a secular age. They don’t believe that dying parishes should have a second chance. They can’t see that the wounds of declining membership and myriad challenges are not the mark of an inevitable fate but rather opportunities for a body to be raised by God and live again.

Because Christ was raised from the dead and still lives despite the wounds, the Gospel is full of non-negotiables. It’s non-negotiable that Jesus will show up even when the doors are shut. It’s non-negotiable that a body gathered in Christ’s name should testify to peace and unity, not violence and division. It’s non-negotiable that if we profess to be Christian, then we must believe that sins are forgiven and new life is always possible. In just a few minutes, when Charlie goes into the waters of the font, he will rise to new life in this hope. His future is not consigned to fate. His future will be given by God in all its newness, and he will be embraced by a new family defined by a fullness of life that persists despite the lingering wounds.

But there is still more to the story of this parish. The close of chapter 20 of John’s Gospel is open-ended. It was written for all of us, who were not there when the risen Christ showed up within the shut doors of that upper room. Because of John’s invitation, we have come to believe. We have chosen to show up even with our doubts to see the evidence of the wounded but risen body for ourselves. And we have chosen to believe.

But there are still others who are part of the ongoing story of this parish. They are not yet here, but God knows about them. The Holy Spirit will implant a desire in their hearts, a nudge to walk through the doors to see for themselves. For those of you who have seen for yourselves, you must issue the invitation. Come and see the body that still bears its wounds and yet is alive. Come and see that love is stronger than death. Come and see that the accusing voices of despair and hopelessness in the world and in the Church are not the end of the story. Come and see that no closed doors can inhibit the risen Christ. And because his wounded body has been raised from the dead, he will always find his way in.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Easter
April 12, 2026

A Change of Colors

There’s an iconic scene in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The movie begins in black and white on the plains of Kansas. After the opening drama, the main character, Dorothy, and her dog, Toto, are whisked away by a tornado while in their house. Once the dust settles from the storm, and all is quiet, Dorothy tentatively approaches the door, opens it, and suddenly, the film shifts into vivid color. She’s in a magical land, Munchkinland. She’s in a different world.

 In a time when most movies were filmed in black and white, this brilliant stroke of cinematography captivated film audiences for its technological marvel and its symbolic depth. The black and white of Dorothy’s humdrum past on the Kansas plains shifts into a world of vibrant color in a land of shining newness.

Dorothy, of course, eventually returns home after her adventures along the Yellow Brick Road and confrontation with the Wicked Witch of the West. She clicks her heels three times, saying, “There’s no place like home.” When Dorothy returns home, the black and white of the film returns, but Dorothy is not the same. She will never be the same. She can no longer see home in the same way either. Although the movie ends in black and white, the dazzling color of Munchkinland has transformed Dorothy’s perception of life back in Kansas forever.

On this first day of the week, it’s as if we have opened a door onto a world shining with dazzling color. And if we were to portray St. John’s Gospel in film, we could use that same innovative technique mastered by The Wizard of Oz. In his Gospel, John plays with light and darkness with ingenious theological and literary depth. In its opening lines, light emerges from darkness, just as God created all that exists out of chaotic nothingness in the beginning of time, and just as light was created out of darkness. For St. John, Jesus is the true light coming into the world, creative, colorful light in a world that is black and white.

In some sense, the radiant, eclectic colors of creation as first seen in the Garden of Eden were dulled into black and white with Adam and Eve’s act of defiance in the garden. They were banished from that same garden, and though the rest of salvation story had plenty of moments of color, humanity seemed stuck in dullness, a dullness that could not or refused to see the kaleidoscopic goodness of God’s hand and saving works.

And so, in John’s Gospel, true, perfect light emerges in full color from the shadows of a world mired in sin, decay, and waywardness. The Son of God’s bright light reveals healing where there is illness, truth where there are lies, goodness where there is evil, hope where there is despair. In Jesus’s earthly life, it’s as if the movie shifts from dull black and white into full color.

But on Good Friday, we saw the darkness creep back into the picture in an overwhelming way. According to St. John, Jesus’s moment of glory is on the cross. But to the bystanders like the Blessed Mother, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, it must have been hard to see the glory from the cross. Their world must have been cast into shadows. As Jesus breathed his last on the cross, to them, the film must have shifted abruptly into black and white again.

And this is where we pick up the story today. It’s early in the morning. We’re in a garden, just like we were at the beginning of creation. It’s still dark. The movie is still in black and white, and Mary comes to the tomb to discover that it’s empty. There’s a dim haze of confusion about the events of the past few days. Even though Mary sees two angels where Jesus’s body had been, she doesn’t know what has happened. She can only attribute Jesus’s absence to theft.

When Jesus first appears to Mary, the movie is still in black and white. He calls her “Woman,” and she thinks he is the gardener. She doesn’t yet recognize him. But then, like Dorothy emerging from the house into Munchkinland, the film morphs into full color. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, calls one of his sheep by name. Mary! And now she knows who he is. He is her Lord. He is risen. The one she has been seeking is still alive. Everything has changed!

Mary runs from the tomb a different person. Her world is in color. Jesus tells her not to touch him or cling to him because that will simply turn the film back into black and white. Jesus can no longer be enshrined in the same way he was while walking the earth. He will, in fact, ascend to his Father in heaven, so that his body will become Mary and the other disciples, the Church, us.

In an ironic way, although Mary mistakenly thinks Jesus is a gardener, he is a gardener of sorts. He is the one tilling the soil of a new creation, preparing it to bear much fruit. When Mary runs from the garden on Easter morning, the color has been recovered from a film that had regressed into black and white. It’s not that the color of the world and its inherent goodness went away after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the beginning of time. It’s that humanity had simply forgotten creation’s radiant color through ingratitude, sin, and stubbornness.

When Jesus utters Mary’s name in the garden, he speaks into existence a truth that she must begin to realize in a new way. God’s raising of Jesus from the dead is the visible sign in our finite world that any dullness we perceive in creation is not the final word. With God, anything is possible. With God, all things are made new. In resurrection truth and light, the color in God’s world is ready to shine in all times and places.

As a child, I remember asking my mother why some movies were in black and white. It was one of fifty million nagging questions I asked as a little boy, curious as a cat. My mother said it was because those films were old. But I mistakenly thought that those movies, languishing in some dusty, dark room, had simply lost an original color. They once were in color, but that color faded over time with age. The truth, of course, was that those movies lacked the technology to show the color that was really there.

But suppose for a minute, as in my naïve childhood assessment, that our world has let its natural, innate vibrancy become dulled. Because it has become worn, tired, and old, it has lost its color. If you are weary and exhausted by these disturbing, trying times, on this day, the first day of the week, the beginning of a new creation, there’s another story to tell.

This past week, we have waited and waited and waited with Christ through suffering, despair, and death. And because we have waited, we are able to celebrate on this day that the black and white of our existence has never been purged of its natural color and goodness. And it never will be.

The world’s natural color can’t be stamped out by any forces of darkness or even by a Church that allies itself with secular forces of brutality. The world’s natural color can only shine as it did from the tragedy of the cross, showing that earthly violence couldn’t quench the radiant power of love, a love that gave itself willing to death and forgave in spite of sin and death.

Because the tomb was empty on the third day, because God raised Jesus from the dead, because Jesus has ascended to his Father and breathed his Spirit upon us, we can never return to a black and white world. We are perpetually in the Oz of a new creation, not a magic land but a land full of possible impossibles. As Jesus said to Mary, so he says to us. Do not touch me. Do not cling to me. Release your fears, anxieties, and despair, and run from the empty tomb in hope. We’re not in Kansas anymore. We are the inhabitants of a new creation. And this new creation is sparkling with color that will never fade away.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Easter Day
April 5, 2026

To See the Tomb

I will never forget Easter Eve in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was serving in another parish, and because of pandemic, the liturgies of Holy Week and Easter were closed to the public. Thankfully, my parish had multiple clergy on staff, as well as some young adults living in community so that at least we could gather for the Holy Week and Easter liturgies in person. They were all livestreamed to Facebook, broadcast from a locked up church, sealed like a tomb.

Things could not take place as usual that year. There was no congregation, and so we decided to observe only the first part of the Great Vigil of Easter without celebrating Mass at the end. That needed to wait for Easter Day. In the isolation and fear of the pandemic, it just didn’t seem right for us to celebrate Communion that night. Before we shared in the Lord’s Body and Blood on Easter Day, we needed to wait. We needed to spend some time in our sorrow, sitting in the darkness, in sympathy with a hurting world.

We were gathered in the shadows at the back of the large nave, near the font. It felt as if we were in a tomb. We were in a tomb, to some extent. We had all come to see the tomb. Jesus had been resting in the grave for two days, and we, like the two Mary’s in Matthew’s Gospel, had come to the tomb to see it. That year, with hospitals inundated with the sick and dying, it was spiritually necessary to look at the tomb.

Gathering around the font—its own kind of tomb—that night was filled with uncertainty. All around us people were perishing. We didn’t know how long the pandemic would last. Even the handful of us who were there in person were not immune from risk. We didn’t all share the same house. What if one of us was carrying the virus? There was a deep tinge of suffering that night as we gathered around the tomb of the font. Even after the new fire was kindled, we sat and waited in the darkness, longing for the next day’s Easter Communion, knowing that that year, Easter glory couldn’t be separated from suffering and death. It never can be.

This is the night when we have come to see the tomb like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. We have no other purpose for being here than to see the tomb. Unlike some of the other Gospels, in Matthew’s account, the two Mary’s didn’t go to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body. They simply went to see it. Something within them must have felt compelled to sit with death. These women had stuck with Jesus through his excruciating journey to the cross. They stayed there, watching him take his last breaths on the cross. We have done the same this week. We have waited with Jesus, trying to stay with him, just as he—Emmanuel, God with us—always stays with us.

The Easter Vigil is an exercise in patient waiting, of fumbling around in the dark, of trying to see a leaflet, of not knowing who is next to you in the pew. It’s a long marking of time, hearing, as we do each year, the story of God’s saving purposes in the history of the people of Israel. It’s our story, too. The light of the Paschal candle keeps our hope alive, but this night, we come face to face with the overwhelming reality of darkness. We ignore this darkness at our peril.

Because all around us, people are stumbling their way through the night. Light is absent for those cowering in fallout shelters as bombs scream in the air, for those innocents caught in the power games of world leaders, and for those fearing deportation and the loss of their families. Evil continually insinuates itself within our daily lives, often unnoticed but always destructive. Some of us, surely, have our own sorrows and troubles—the darkness within—that we have brought to the tomb this night. The honest path spends some time with that, not relishing it but acknowledging its existence. Like that small group of people gathered around the font during a pandemic six years ago, we can’t yet rush to Easter so quickly.

One among us this night, who is newly baptized, has waited for six months through preparation and spiritual discipline to go into the waters of the tomb of the font, to be buried with Christ in his death and to rise again with him in his resurrection. Tonight, all of us do the same. We die to self and rise to new life in Christ. Each year at this time, we experience a spiritual rebirth. It can only happen by going to the tomb to see it, to sit with it, and then to behold what happens next.

And what happens next—what has already happened this night—is something spectacular. For the two Mary’s at Jesus’s tomb, the boldness to go and confront the cold emptiness of death prompted an earthquake. An angel of the Lord descends from heaven, rolls back the stone, and announces the Easter proclamation. Do not be afraid of what you see. He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come see the place where he lay.

Without the patient, sorrowful waiting of the two Mary’s, the earthquake would simply be a cheap trick. It would turn Easter into a grand spectacle rather than a miraculous entry into present time of a completely new order. Because the women have waited through the final agony of Jesus, seen the bloody execution, gone to see the tomb, and found it empty, they genuinely announce the Easter proclamation. The earthquake is not a theatrical event intended to prove the resurrection to them. These women know of their own accord what has happened by God’s mighty hand. They saw death, but now, they see life. The earthquake is simply the visible sign of a glorious parting of the veil between this world and the next.

As if to emphasize just how marvelous this seismic shift is, the story doesn’t end at the tomb. There’s no emotional letdown after the joy of Easter. This story is only beginning. It’s gaining momentum like it never has before, because these women must run from the tomb—run, not walk—and tell the other disciples what they have seen.

What they have seen over the past week is cruelty, lies, violence, torture, and death. They have seen humanity at its worst. They have seen two kingdoms in conflict. This is the night when we, too, see two kingdoms in conflict. But now, because the two Mary’s have seen the empty tomb, they know what kingdom truly reigns. And this is the night that we know what kingdom still reigns. The two Mary’s know that a love that dies without retributive violence is true love, perfect love, and this love never dies. Indeed, this man who loved them so, although he has died, yet still lives. And this must be told to the entire world. This story will go on to Galilee, for there, the women and the disciples will see Jesus again. Even though death has occurred, he, Emmanuel, is still with them. And he is with us, too.

This is the night. The light has come. Easter is here. But that doesn’t mean that the darkness has vanished. In this life, it will, in fact, never perish. And yet, although we will inevitably fumble through the darkness as long as we live, the one whom God raised from the dead will forever go before us. He is always many steps before us, preparing a new future for us, calling us to become little Christs to the world. This is the night when his message is the same for us as it was for the two Mary’s. Do not be afraid. Go and tell all you meet to go out into the world, into its darkness bearing the light of Christ. He has already gone before us. And if we run from the tomb with joyful fear, there, we will see him. Alleluia!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Great Vigil and First Mass of Easter
Sunday, April 4, 2026 

Beginning at the End

It was the great poet T.S. Eliot who said, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”[1] Good Friday is ostensibly the end. It is the end of the long, torturous walk to the cross. It is the end of a Lenten journey. It is the end of Jesus’s earthly life.

But today is also the beginning. Eliot understood the circularity of liturgical time, the non-linear trajectory of God’s time. Our sense of time was utterly confused on Palm Sunday after we acclaimed Jesus as king and then called for him to be crucified. We waited through the long, painful hours of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, a bit ashamed, perhaps, to find Christ washing our feet last night on Maundy Thursday. Despite our fickleness and penchant for betrayal, Christ nevertheless washed our feet and fed us with his Body and Blood, and he commanded us to love as he loves. Which is why we have come to this day.

Today is the end, but it is also the beginning. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” For some, Good Friday is just an end. It was an end for the soldiers and religious authorities who consigned Jesus to a brutal state execution. Today is only an end for contemporary purveyors of violence in authoritarian governments and modern-day religious figures who claim a monopoly on truth. It is an end for them because in controlling regimes, violence is how order is maintained. Violence is how truth is suppressed. Violence is how power is wielded. A mandated execution is an easy way to make the problem go away. Death is the end.

This strand of brutal violence has been consistently threaded throughout this Holy Week, looming underneath every act of love, lurking in every dark corner, away from the light. But for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear, the end—today—is also the beginning. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” And that’s precisely what happens on Good Friday.

This is why St. John’s account of Jesus’s Passion is essential for this day. John tells a story that is artistically subtle, literarily complex, and theologically profound. John knows that the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. John also knows that only those who are seeking truth and are open to Jesus as Truth itself will understand this.

Do we understand it? After waiting with Jesus in his trial and passion this week, can we finally see on this day how God in Christ has waited patiently and lovingly with us all these many years? Through betrayals and spiritual amnesia and ungratefulness, God has always been with us, never forsaking us, never taking away God’s eternal love.

In case we missed it, John reminds us. After praying a long prayer to God the Father on behalf of his disciples, Jesus the Great High Priest goes to his death. And across the Kidron valley from the holy city of Jerusalem, in a garden, Jesus starts his final journey to the cross. As Eliot said, “to make an end is to make a beginning.” God in Christ returns to the garden, that place of primordial betrayal when Adam and Eve refused to accept the limitations of their humanity and went their own way. For those who can only speak the language of violence, the garden is a place of doom. It is the end. But for those of us who have waited with Christ and learned something of God’s patience, the garden is the appropriate place for the end to make a beginning.

Christ continues to show us that his end is the beginning of something new. He refuses to return violence for violence. He doesn’t shirk his fate. He goes willingly to his death, carrying his own cross, completely in control of his destiny as it accords with the will of the Father. His trial is a sham because it’s based on deception and falsehood. But Love incarnate goes steadily and confidently to the cross to show that “to make an end is to make a beginning.”

Even in that last searing moment of human sin and evil, as Jesus is mocked as a king, even as the religious authorities and Pilate argue back and forth about Jesus’s fate, even as soldiers at the foot of the cross divide up Jesus’s seamless garment, God speaks truth plainly, quietly, and boldly, if we have ears to hear.

Throughout the many centuries leading up to this point, God’s saving acts have been evident but so often interpreted through the lens of human constructs of violence and retribution. But now, in Christ, God shows the perfect image of truth and love. Before he breathes his last, and as pure chaos happens at the foot of the cross among those who have crucified him, Jesus reverses it all and makes a beginning from an ending. From out of chaos, a new creation is born.

To the Blessed Mother, Jesus entrusts John the Beloved Disciple. To the Beloved Disciple, Jesus entrusts his dear mother. As an earthly life nears its end, eternal life continues. As Jesus is handed over to death, Jesus hands over his mission and his Spirit to the Church, formed there at the foot of the cross. And only after this has been done is Jesus able to announce the consummation of God’s saving work. It is finished. It is complete. It is perfected. The ending has become a beginning.

Just as when God began to create the heavens and the earth from out of pure chaos, God in Christ unleashes a new creation as the cross shines forth in glory. What is divided becomes united in the beginning of the Church, and death becomes the means to new life. A breath taken away by death becomes a life-giving Spirit to animate the Church to be Christ for the world.

And that is where we stand right now. We are at the foot of the cross. Christ has given us his Spirit. Christ has given us a command last night as he washed our feet, and perhaps we can begin to understand something of what this means. We must go and wash the feet of all—the dispossessed, the lonely the suffering, the forsaken. We must love them all, even our enemies, just as Christ loved us.

But before we can do that, there is something we must do. Christ has taught us how. Just as he, the Great High Priest, interceded for the salvation and wholeness of the world, we, too, must now move into the place he has prepared for us, as we pray, first, selflessly, for the whole world and its inhabitants whom Christ came to love and save. And only then do we pray for ourselves, “for the grace of a holy life,” that “we may be accounted worthy to enter into the fullness of the joy of our Lord.”[2]

Even on this somber day, we can now begin to taste the joy of our Lord. T.S. Eliot said it so well: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” And today is when we start.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 3, 2026

[1] From “Little Gidding’ in Four Quartets

[2] Book of Common Prayer, p. 280

Past the Point of No Return

If you have ever taken a transatlantic voyage by ship, you will know that there comes a point, about two days into the trip, when you tip over into the land of no return. For the first couple of days, the ship is close enough to land so that in the event of a medical emergency, a helicopter can reach the ship to transport an ill passenger to a hospital. But after passing the point of no return, all bets are off. For the passenger on the ship, moving past the point of no return is disconcerting, even frightening. Having stuck with the voyage this long, passengers are now in it for the long haul.

Tonight, we will tip over into the land of no return. Each year during Holy Week, we must come back to these sacred, saving rituals and relive the discomfort and the glory. We begin on Palm Sunday with excruciating moments of betrayal, where we are the crowds acclaiming Jesus as King in one moment and then yelling “crucify him!” in the next. Palm Sunday reminds us that words are cheap. And ever since Palm Sunday, through the first part of this Holy Week, we have been waiting, waiting uncomfortably with the knowledge that there is a palpable dissonance between what we say and how we live.

Our rather superficial culture has two approaches to words. Words are either taken so literally or seriously that one can never be offered forgiveness for an instance of ill-chosen words. Or on the other hand, words are bandied about flippantly with little meaning whatsoever. We profess our undying love for something but do little to put that love into action. We say how much God and the Church mean to us, but we are unwilling to live as if it is so. We say “Amen” to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and then we live on the other side of the church doors as if the gift we have received has no bearing on our lives, as if Christ isn’t present in the stranger and in the enemy.

But we are fast approaching the point of no return. We are fast approaching a highly uncomfortable moment in both the Gospel story and in our shared ritual life together. St. John tells us that on the night before Jesus’s passion and death, he gathers with his disciples, having stuck with them through their fickleness and inability to understand who he truly is. Jesus loves them to the end, completely, fully, perfectly. He loves them so even as Judas goes out to betray him. He loves them so even as Peter refuses his gift, knowing that Peter will also betray him. The disciples, to their credit have waited with Christ, up to this point of no return. But more importantly, Jesus has waited with them, not moving on to do his own thing but loving them past the point of no return.

Jesus will stoop to ground level and wash their feet. He, their Master, Teacher, and Lord, will do something that is incomprehensible. But in doing so, he will invite the disciples past the point of no return. Having washed their feet and bidden them to do the same to one another, even to their enemies, there will be no going back for the disciples. This is a dangerous place into which Christ has called them. No longer can they avoid suffering and death. No longer can they flee hastily from their enemies as God’s people did when leaving Egypt in the Exodus. Now, past the point of no return, words are cheap. Words say very little about love. Past the point of no return, the disciples must move from words to action.

And so must we. As our feet are washed this evening, we will all move past the point of no return. This footwashing is far more than an embarrassing moment of exposing our calloused and worn feet. It’s a moment that pulls us firmly into the land of no return. This is the land where words mean little and actions say everything. It’s the land where we can’t profess Christ as our Savior without following him in deed, too. It’s the land where we can’t refuse to forgive our enemies. We must love them, and we must wash their feet, too.

As Jesus invites us to let him wash our feet, he also invites us to step into the place where he has been. As he has loved us and washed our feet, we must do the same. There is no going back. And we know what following Jesus demands, because we know where he will go after he washes the disciples’ feet. And there, we must go as well, to the cross. We must wait with him in his suffering, just as he waits with us in ours. We must love and not demonize those who hate us and persecute us and treat us horribly, because Jesus himself loved those who nailed him to a cross and mocked him. Once we are past the point of no return, we must love like we’ve never loved before.

And yet, despite waiting this long, despite letting Jesus wash our feet and love us, we, like Peter, do not yet understand what he has done for us. We must continue to wait for that. We must wait through this night’s celebration of the Eucharist, when we will no longer be the same people who last celebrated the Eucharist together. Tonight, that celebration is marred by the knowledge of deceit, of our own easy betrayals of Jesus, and of our cheap and careless words. And yet, we are taking one step closer to be like Christ, to become Christ for the world. We are moving past the point of no return.

We can’t yet go where Jesus has gone because it is not yet our hour. One day later in this voyage that moment will come. Past the point of no return, we are not only in a dangerous place, we are in a hopeful place, because our Lord tells us that one day, we will go to the place where he has gone, the place he has eternally prepared for us.

But for now, we must simply wait. We must wait up to and past the point of no return. We must wait with our doubts, despair, suffering, and discomfort knowing that on the other side of the point of no return, words are cheap. And because words are cheap, we have no choice as we move forward. As Jesus has commanded us, now, this night and forward, we must love like we’ve never loved before.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2026

A Truth Worth Waiting For

We know much about how early Christians in the Holy Land commemorated the final days of Jesus’s earthly life from the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria. She wrote movingly about her experience there. And from her, we also get a glimpse of the patience and stamina of early Christians, who only recently could practice their religion openly and who had not yet lost the rigor of spiritual discipline.

Egeria tells us that over the course of Holy Week, they fasted and prayed, traveling to various sites that were associated with Jesus’s last days. Children and adults journeyed together, along with the bishop. They walked up and down hills. They waited and listened to readings from Scripture. And by Maundy Thursday, as Egeria recounts, the crowd was exhausted from keeping vigil and weak from fasting each day. They went “very slowly with hymns to Gethsemane,” and when the passage about Jesus’s arrest in the garden was read, there was “such groaning and moaning from all the people, with weeping, that the lamentation of all the people [was] heard about as far away as the city.”[1] The crowd was not yet finished. They would continue to fast and pray and walk until Easter Day.

This must seem like a strange thing to us who live in an age of immediacy, who are unwilling to wait for answers, who are uncomfortable waiting with those who suffer, who would prefer to avoid any talk of death. It must seem strange to those of us who would prefer not to wait through Palm Sunday and certainly not through the rest of Holy Week, who would rather skip ahead to the egg hunt and festivities of Easter Day.

I have recently been reminded of the impatience of our culture as I grieved the death of my mother. Well-meaning people have been quick to assure me that my mom is in a better place. I do believe that is true, but some people have also been unable to wait with me in my grief and suffering. On the other side of her death, some people treated me differently but were at the same time uncomfortable acknowledging my mother’s death. Nevertheless, a week that I will never forget because of its difficulty and many blessings was the week between my mother’s death and her funeral. I waited with my father, sharing in the joys of remembering my mother’s beautiful smile but also mourning her death far too young and sitting with the painful realization of her suffering before her death. My dad and I waited together, knowing that we could not rush to her funeral, and that at the end of the week, we would come face to face with the real loss that death brings.

On this first day of Holy Week, we are forced to wait. We wait through the charade of the Palm procession, knowing that the acclamations will soon morph into jeers. We wait through the long chanting of the Passion Gospel. We end the liturgy knowing that we will need to wait through the pain, silence, and discomfort of this week before Easter arrives.

Perhaps because of my own impatience, I had never noticed a detail in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s passion. After Judas has betrayed Jesus and after Jesus has been condemned, Judas is apparently cut to the heart. He repents and returns the thirty pieces of silver with which he had betrayed his Lord to the chief priests and elders. He acknowledges his sin. Somehow, I hadn’t paid much attention to Judas’s repentance. But even though he repents, something utterly tragic happens. He hangs himself. He gives up. He is too ashamed to wait through Jesus’s passion and death to see how forgiveness emerges from the grave.

Judas like us, is the product of an impatient and unforgiving society. This impatience plays out vividly on the pages of the Passion Gospel. The disciples can’t stay awake with Jesus in the garden because they are too bored to pray. Those who put Jesus on trial are impatient, too, impatient with Jesus’s challenges to the political and religious systems of his day. Peter is impatient with the discomfort of being associated with Jesus and denies him three times. Those who confront Jesus as he is tried want quick and easy answers to their questions. But Jesus remains silent, refusing to stoop to their superficial requests and demanding patience from those who are willing to learn what his kingship really means. Even those cruel words as Jesus hangs on the cross are impatient. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross. They want Jesus to prove his divinity in that moment. But the perfectly patient one will not do so. He will linger patiently until death, uttering the words of suffering and abandonment from Psalm 22.

The whole trial is a charade, just like our Palm procession is. The people who supposedly want justice, but only want it on their own terms, put Jesus through a sham trial. The release of Barabbas is no real act of mercy but simply a way to ensure that Jesus dies. And surely this impatience resonates with us as we see hasty entries into violence and war, of superficial gestures at justice, at an intolerance with mercy and forgiveness.

Maybe I never noticed that Judas repented because it is an amazingly easy detail to ignore. Do any of us really want to accept that Judas was genuinely sorry for what he had done? Would we prefer quick retribution by knowing that he ended his life, deprived of God’s mercy? But is that really true? What if we sat with the painful tragedy of Judas’s despair and of waiting for a final answer from God?

If we take anything away from this day, it’s the undeniable tension of two stubborn strands in the Passion story: the violence of humanity and the mercy of God. On Palm Sunday, it appears that the violence of humanity wins out, the vengefulness of humanity wins out, the despair of humanity wins out. But patience defies that simple conclusion. Even today, as we enter into a week that demands our patience, we already see hints of that other strand, which can’t be separated from the sinfulness of humanity. Humanity’s stubbornness is matched by God’s merciful stubbornness. At the conclusion of Matthew’s passion, the graves are opened and the dead are raised, a foreshadowing of what is to come. Judas repents without waiting long enough to understand that God will forgive him. But patience proves that the stubbornness of God’s mercy really means something because God doesn’t flippantly forgive from afar but forgives even after enduring the depths of hell.

And it is so with those who keep watch with Jesus on the cross through his agony and who at the bitter end see what God is doing. After Jesus has given up his spirit, the earth shakes and the rocks are split and the tombs are opened and the dead are raised. It’s the patient centurion and those with him who understand just what is taking place, who see a vivid glimpse of God’s love and mercy. Truly this man was the Son of God. This is no mockery or charade. This is the stone-cold truth, a truth that could only come by waiting.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
March 29, 2026

[1] Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw, The Pilgrimage of Egeria, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), p. 174.

Worthy of Exclamation

In one of my favorite episodes of the television show Seinfeld, the character Elaine decides to break up with her boyfriend because he fails to use an exclamation point in a written note to her. One of Elaine’s friends had called while Elaine was out to say that she had her baby, and Elaine’s boyfriend jotted down a note, along with other things he needed to relate to her. With typical, quirky Seinfeld humor, Elaine obsesses with this failure of her boyfriend to see an exclamation point in a piece of good news. Elaine is an editor after all, and in her opinion, someone having a baby is more than worthy of an exclamation point. Now, whether it’s worth ending a relationship is another matter altogether, but that’s for you to decide.

If you think about it, an exclamation point is a curious punctuation mark. We can tell a lot about a person’s character or emotional state by how many exclamation points they use when communicating. An ordinary, dry sentence can be enlivened by just one exclamation point. Someone who uses far too many of them might be seen as hyperactive or overly dramatic. Or maybe they just seem like they care.

Exclamation points are not rampant within the pages of holy Scripture, but they are there. And every single one of them is editorial. They don’t exist in the ancient Biblical languages. You may have noticed that one exclamation point sneaks its way into tonight’s Gospel reading, at least in the translation we heard. The angel Gabriel’s words to Mary are exclamation-point-worthy in the eyes of the translator. That is fair enough. But after reviewing some other translations, I found that not all the translations include an exclamation point after Gabriel’s words. And yet, there is one translation that has a grand total of four exclamation points. Not only is Gabriel’s initial address to Mary considered worthy of heightened emotion. So, too, is his later announcement that Mary’s cousin Elizabeth has conceived a son in her old age. This must be so surprising that it warrants an exclamation point.

Gabriel’s astounding words to Mary encapsulate the astonishing theme of this entire story, and they are worthy of an exclamation point as well. “For nothing will be impossible with God!” How can we not say those words with enthusiasm and excitement of voice? How can those words not deserve an exclamation point, even if one is editorial? How can those words not take our breath away?

The Blessed Virgin Mary’s response to the unexpected visit of Gabriel carries no exclamation point in any translation I encountered. But we could certainly imagine one there, too. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word!”

It’s understated, but of all the characters in Scripture, Mary undoubtedly understands the power of Gabriel’s words. Nothing is impossible with God! Mary certainly must be shocked, confused, even mildly afraid, but her incredible words and actions from thenceforth reveal that she knows the power of an exclamation point. Her question to Gabriel, “how can this be, since I am a virgin?” is a question of awe. It, too, is worthy of an editorial exclamation point.

How, indeed, can an unmarried virgin conceive a son? Why, indeed, is she, an extremely young peasant girl, chosen to be the Mother of God? How, indeed, can God be so humble as to be born as a human being, nurtured and nourished within a human womb?

Over the years, the Church has struggled to make sense of the exclamation point of the virgin birth. Rightly, the Church has insisted on believing in Mary’s virginity because it truly shows that God can do what is impossible to mere mortals. And that is the point; that is the exclamation point, we might say. But in some ways, the Church has undermined the spectacular response of Mary by making her virginity a purity test or a sign of extraordinary holiness. Mary is holy, but she is holy because of how she responds when visited by the angel Gabriel. Mary responds with humble, self-emptying, stunning words, demonstrating that she knows that Gabriel’s words are worthy of an exclamation point. She knows and trusts that God can do the impossible. Her job is not to understand, but to believe and then to live as if it’s true.

The truth is that God’s people in the centuries preceding Mary’s life frequently lived as if the impossible was not possible. They lived in a world of anxious exclamation points, of cries for help, but with amnesia of all the exclamation points of God’s saving involvement in their lives. True, they may have been delivered from Egypt into freedom, but the exclamation point of this even lost its fervor as soon as hunger and thirst appeared in the wilderness. True, misfortune happened to the people of Israel—assaults from neighboring enemies and exile into a lonely land—but, nevertheless, there was always an exclamation point of God’s care and provision. God consistently stuck with the people of Israel, to provide and nourish and bring them back ultimately into the Promised Land. In the throes of despair and forsakenness, mustn’t this have been an exclamation point?

And with Mary’s unconditional yes to God’s involvement in her own life, the seemingly impossible promise of God never to abandon the ancestors of David and to love them and care for them unconditionally is realized and fulfilled. Mary’s yes is an exclamation point of hope and of firm belief that with God, nothing is impossible. Nothing.

In our own day of social media emojis and superficial words, exclamation points have perhaps become meaningless. Or exclamation points are used only to heighten anxiety. Every news headline is an exclamation point that can make us despair over the state of the world or, at least, make us lose any hope that goodness can prevail.

But in times of spiritual malaise, when the Church needs to be restored in her faith in God’s possibilities, Mary’s yes to God, in her full humanity and full humility, is a resounding gesture of hope. With God, anything is possible. Anything! The God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will always raise us to new life. This God constantly creates out of nothing and remakes the world to be a surprising exclamation point of goodness and wholeness. This God brings forth fruit out of barrenness and life out of death. And because Mary knew this, we should know it, too. May her witness be an inspiration to us as we navigate apathy and anxiety. May her words become ours, too, with an exclamation point of unwavering belief that we, like Mary, can be the servants of the Lord. Let it be to us according to the word of the one, true living God, for whom there is no end to possibilities. And that is worthy of an exclamation point!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Annunciation
March 25, 2026

Confused by the Facts

My first reaction was anger, but it shouldn’t have been. It should have been sadness. Two students were snickering with each other as they eyed my exhibit at a campus ministry fair at a local college. On the table were flyers for our campus ministry Bible study. Those flyers made it clear whom we welcome at that Bible study, which is everyone, regardless of whether certain corners of the Church would do the same. Those flyers were intended to send an unequivocal message to those who had previously been hurt by the Church that they, too, could encounter Christ in the pages of Scripture, that Christ loves them unconditionally.

But those two students laughed because our campus ministry’s message of welcome surprised them. I suspect it shocked them. I suspect it unnerved them. But rather than become irritated, I should have felt compassion, because I remember what it was like to be young and arrogantly confident of own beliefs. I once was certain I knew what God condoned and what God judged, what was wrong and what was right. In my youthful immaturity, I, too, might have laughed like those students.

I don’t know the real story of those two college-aged scoffers, but I’m guessing that they entered college shaped by churches founded on easy answers to difficult questions. They had only known one version of theological clarity, and it must have brought them up short to enter a world where other Christians might think differently. When faced with that uncomfortable reality, the easiest kneejerk reaction is to laugh or to judge or to hunker down in one’s beliefs or to diligently seek out others who will confirm their own views, no matter what the facts are. Don’t confuse me with the facts, they might say.

And yet, there is a venerable and ancient tradition within Christianity that is deeply suspicious of certain knowledge of God. St. Augustine of Hippo said it incisively when he noted that if a person can comprehend something, then it is not God.[1] The Christian mystics over the ages have offered us an alternative way of coming to know God, encouraging us to empty ourselves of all pretensions about God, all definite knowledge of God, even all feelings about God so that we might truly find God. For the mystics, the most honest and crucial question might be, I don’t know.

Did you notice how often in today’s Gospel reading the man born blind says that he doesn’t know? The Pharisees repeatedly press him, trying to solicit knowledge from him. Where is Jesus? I don’t know, he says. I don’t know whether he is a sinner, he says. The Pharisees, on the other hand, know for certain that Jesus is not from God. They know, too, that the man born blind was born in sin, and so he has no authority to speak.

 Time after time, the Pharisees are unwilling to confront the evidence before them, which the man born blind consistently lays out. The man tells them exactly what happened to him, even though he doesn’t yet understand what it means. The Pharisees are convinced that one who heals on the Sabbath must be a sinner. And like Jesus’s disciples, they’re convinced that a man who is born blind must have been born blind because he or his parents sinned. God works in a cause-and-effect world, right?

The Pharisees don’t want to be confused with the facts because the facts are not comforting. The facts show that the man before them was born blind, and his parents confirm it. The facts reveal that Jesus found this man born blind, mixed his saliva with mud, put it on the man’s eyes, told him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam, and then the man gained his sight after obeying Jesus. Those are the facts, but they will confuse those whose mind is already made up. It’s much easier to turn the one who is healed into a scapegoat. It’s much easier to laugh at a few flyers advertising a Bible study that disturbs one’s understanding of who’s in and who’s out.

The convoluted questioning of the Pharisees is countered by the humble simplicity of the man who can now see. That man doesn’t question what Jesus is doing when he puts a muddy mixture on his eyes. He doesn’t question why he should go to wash in the pool of Siloam rather than be healed on the spot. He doesn’t demand Jesus’s credentials before agreeing to be healed. The man simply does what Jesus says. No more, no less.

The truth is that the man born blind doesn’t yet know who Jesus is, and he doesn’t claim to know. He thinks that he is just a prophet, which is more than others think of him. The man doesn’t know where Jesus is from or where he goes after he heals him. There is so much he doesn’t know, and he is quite comfortable admitting it. But what he does know is crystal clear, and he is unashamed of stating it: once he was blind, but now he sees! Once when he was sitting by the road, begging, this man found him, put mud on his eyes, told him to wash, and after he obeyed, he was healed. That’s what he knows, no more, no less. He knows what he has encountered. He knows how he was before, and he knows that now he can see.

For the blind man, his lack of knowledge is a gift. He meets Jesus with no preconceived notions. And this helps him encounter the beautiful simplicity of the Gospel message. But for the opponents of Jesus, what they don’t know is a stumbling block. It makes them become more entrenched in their stubborn refusal to acknowledge who Jesus is. They don’t want to be confused with the facts.

There is a blessed relief in accepting our lack of knowledge about God. We don’t have to police an understanding of God. We don’t have to decide who is in and who is out. We don’t have to determine what Christians have access to the full truth and which ones don’t. We don’t need to pronounce what denominations possess validity and which ones don’t or use fear to buttress our control of the truth. This is exactly what Jesus’s opponents do to the blind man’s parents. Scared of being ostracized by the community, they refuse to stand up for their son. Ask him, they say. He will speak for himself.

And thankfully, the son does. The son simply states the facts. Once I was blind, but now I see! I don’t know who the man was who healed me, but what I do know is that he found me and made me whole. And when even this man, the vulnerable scapegoat, has been cast out of the local community, Jesus, the Good Shepherd of the sheep, finds him once again and reveals exactly who he is, and this man who didn’t know who Jesus was, now believes that he is the Son of God. He now believes because he didn’t claim to know. His confession is simple and profound. Lord, I believe. And then he worships the Lord.

Jesus has come so that those who claim to know everything about him can lose their sight for a time. And Jesus comes to give true sight to those who claim to have no real knowledge. But our Lord doesn’t want the world to be divided between those who have spiritual sight and those who don’t. Our Lord always acts in love, and so sometimes, he darkens our eyes precisely so that we can really see who he is. Paradoxically, it’s in our willingness not to know that we come to know God most fully.

It may that some of us will be maligned and cast out because we are brave enough to state the facts, to say with real simplicity and conviction that Christ has transformed our lives. This is a lonely place when others don’t want to be confused with the facts. But amid all the things we don’t know, we do know this: when we are cast out and reviled because of the name of Jesus, the Good Shepherd himself will find us of his own accord since he knows us each by name. And in that moment, our only response will be to state the facts. Lord, I believe. And then, we fall down and worship.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2026

[1] “Si comprehendis non est deus.”

Waiting at the Well

A few years ago, in my previous parish, I oversaw a young adult ministry that met in an abandoned church building in south Philadelphia. The building was in a dire state, and members of the group and I spent hours cleaning up the space, preparing it for ministry. We put on respiratory masks and cleaned up the sacristy, which looked like it had been ransacked. Drawers were left open, and the entire room was covered with dust from a damaged ceiling. We painted the adjoining fellowship space to use for meetings. It was hard work.

But one day, when we ventured into an upstairs room, I saw the strangest, most pitiful site. The room was nearly empty except for a bucket of dried paint, with a paintbrush stuck in it. It was like a piece of Dada art. As I stared at that half-used bucket of paint and abandoned paintbrush, I knew there was a story behind it. I didn’t know what had really happened, but I could imagine it. Some well-meaning group of people had decided to help that flailing parish by painting a room, but halfway through the project, they suddenly realized that this church wasn’t going to survive. Why waste their efforts? So, they left the paintbrush in the bucket and fled the scene.

My mind wanted to press the imagined story further. What was so desperate and hopeless about that church’s situation? Why would a painter simply give up halfway through the job and not even take the painting materials with them? I had a theological suspicion, too. Whoever was helping at that church thought that a few coats of paint would do the trick. Then, one day, they realized the problems were far deeper. That’s when the anxiety and scarcity mindset took over, because in the skeptical eyes of those well-meaning helpers, the parish had no future. Coats of paint would do nothing. So, they vanished into the night. The image of that abandoned paintbrush and bucket have stayed with me over the years as a reminder of how easily we can give up on God’s promises, of how easily the modern Church can persist in seeing the world through eyes of scarcity rather than through eyes of abundance.

But there is a powerful image in today’s Gospel reading that acts as a lovely foil to the abandoned paintbrush and bucket in that abandoned south Philadelphia church. I’m thinking of the Samaritan woman’s water jar. Chancing upon the scene after the woman’s encounter with Jesus, one would have seen a water jar left on the ground by a well under the blazing sun. Through the lens of our anxious world, we could conjecture that the owner of the jar had to flee the scene because something horrible had happened. Maybe someone in her family was ill, and she had to return home in haste. Maybe the well was simply dry, and there was no water.

But St. John gives us one of the most beautiful scenes in all the Bible, and we know the real story behind the abandoned water jar. We know that the Samaritan woman brings her jar to the well in the middle of the day to draw water. She is physically thirsty, but she is also spiritually thirsty, too. We know that, at first, the woman seems to be a product of a world that doesn’t yet know the full power of Christ’s love. She is possessed, as we so often are, of a scarcity mindset. She is skeptical of why Jesus, a Jew, would request a drink from her, a Samaritan, an enemy of the Jews. She questions how Jesus would receive the water he asks for, since he has no bucket with him. And the well is deep, too. The conditions are not auspicious for quenching Jesus’s thirst. But Jesus has met her where she is. She is thirsty, and he is, too.

As the woman talks with Jesus, as she stays with him and responds to his questions, as she takes him seriously, she is drawn into relationship. She moves from thinking about literal water to spiritual water. The longer she stays at the well, the more vulnerable she becomes, because Jesus knows everything about her, just as he knows everything about us, too. It’s only when the disciples come back and intrude on the intimate conversation between Jesus and the woman that she leaves, dropping her water jar. She doesn’t leave in fear. She leaves as an evangelist, to go and proclaim to the whole city that she has met the Messiah. She must be the first evangelist.

This is the story behind the water jar. The water jar, left by the well in the hot Middle Eastern sun, signifies so much. The jar is a symbol for the Samaritan woman’s longing. She is physically thirst, but she is thirsty for so much more. What is it? Is it an escape from loneliness? Is it a desire to be seen as something more than a chattel or piece of property in a world run by men? Is it a hope that her life in all its complexity and sadness can be taken seriously and seen as worthy of respect?

We, like that Samaritan woman, have our own water jars. And day after day, we bring them to the wells of life, hoping to fill them to the brim. What do our jars signify? Perhaps an aching loneliness that we try to quell through human companionship? Or an insatiable need for recognition? Maybe a ravenous desire for fame or success? Or painful memories that we try to ignore through mindless chatter? Or feelings of worthlessness that we paper over by overscheduling our lives with busy activities? These days, there are far too many heavy jars being lugged around, filled with things that will continue to leave us thirsty and wanting more. And that is the sadness of our age.

But there is such hope in this story of the Samaritan woman, who reminds us that our empty water jars can only be filled by God, who meets us in Christ and invites us into relationship. We would all benefit from meditating on that poignant image of an empty water jar abandoned by a well. It was never really about the water, was it?

And yet, along with the hope in this story, there is a challenge, because our Lord demands something from us. He invites us to emerge from our hiding places of fear, since we are prone to retreat into the shadows. We are afraid that what we long for really can’t be found. We gloss over the rocky histories of our lives, our painful moments, our losses, and our wounds. But Jesus is always waiting by the well in the middle of the day. There, we must go, in full view of everyone, in full vulnerability, in full humility, to bring our lives with all their brokenness to the One who loves us unconditionally and freely despite our past.

This is what the Samaritan woman learned. Jesus knew everything about her. We have no reason to judge her marital history, and we have no proof that she led a sordid life. But we can glean that her marital life must have been heavy, complicated, and constantly in flux. It wasn’t easy. Jesus knew whatever he knew about the woman at the well, and still, rather than judging her, he simply invited her to know and love him as Messiah. Jesus knew she was a Samaritan, and nevertheless, he stayed with her by the well in full view of the entire village so that he could draw her into the love he shared with the Father and the Spirit.

Only this recognition could have caused the Samaritan woman to leave her empty jar and tell the whole city about the man she met, the man who is perfect abundance, the man who loves and forgives perfectly. And only this recognition can cause us to abandon our empty jars and do the same. We must know the joy of Christ forgiving us in love by bringing our full humanity, warts and all, to the well to meet him.

I often wonder why more people in our day—why more people in the Church—aren’t able to speak of Christ to those they meet. Maybe they aren’t coming to the well. Maybe they come to the well by night rather than by day. Maybe they aren’t honest enough in their relationship with God to know the full extent of his forgiveness. Maybe they haven’t yet learned to trust that no matter what they’ve done, Christ will forgive them. Instead of staying in conversation with Christ at the well, they run away when life gets hard, they keep their distance because it’s safer that way.

But a full and honest relationship with Christ will prompt us to drop our water jars and run to tell the good news. We must meet Christ at the well in the heat of mid-day, unashamed of who sees us there, and trusting that no matter what we have done and no matter how disordered our lives may seem, Christ loves us unconditionally. Christ forgives. Christ longs to be in relationship. This is the living water we have longed for. And even a taste of this water will send us into the cities of our day with a timeless message of hope. Come and see the one who is always waiting for us at the well. Come and see the one who will quench our thirst forever. Come and see the one who loves us unconditionally, no matter who we are and what we’ve done, and this one will never walk away.

Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 8, 2026

The In-Between Times

In C.S. Lewis’s novel The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is an older, more experienced devil in the so-called Lowerarchy of hell, who writes correspondence to his younger, less experienced nephew, Wormwood. Screwtape wants to teach Wormwood how to be a more effective demon. In one of Screwtape’s letters, he coaches him on how to tempt what he calls Wormwood’s patient. The patient, as it turns out, is a new Christian.

In a chilling moment, Screwtape urges Wormwood to take advantage of the patient’s inexperience as a Christian. Screwtape notes that this new Christian will initially be caught up in the honeymoon phase of his spiritual life. The patient will be zealous and passionate, expecting to feel something satisfying in being a pious person. He will bask in the emotional highs of prayer. Accordingly, he will be more vulnerable when the honeymoon is over, when a dry spell of spiritual ennui enters the picture, when he is appalled by the behavior of other Christians, and when the mere presence of other fallible humans during worship becomes a source of irritation. Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to take advantage of this vulnerability, for he knows that if the patient survives a period of spiritual malaise and discontent, all bets are off for evil to win the day.

There is a real tendency to vulnerability in the extremes of life, those places on the border between emotionalism and the ordinary constancy of daily existence. As Screwtape sees it, Wormwood’s patient is traveling through such a borderland, transitioning from being a novice Christian to a more experienced one. It’s a risky moment for the maturing follower of Christ, a moment beyond which many people never persevere. The Screwtape Letters is a clever novel because it shows the nuance of evil. Demonic activity and temptations are rarely of the sort epitomized in horror movies or the modern imagination. Temptation is far more subtle.

The extremes of life are exactly where the devil finds Jesus in order to tempt him. At one extreme, Jesus has just been baptized and proclaimed as God’s Beloved Son. Immediately after this holy moment, he is thrust into the wilderness and tested. But did you notice how the devil didn’t approach Jesus at the beginning of his time in the wilderness but at the end? The end is an entirely different sort of extreme. The forty days and forty nights that our Lord spent fasting in the wilderness were more akin to the regularity of life. Those days must have been boring and tiresome. They must have been ponderous in their banality. But as those days and nights drew to a close, Jesus found himself at another extreme.

Then, he was famished, and certainly he must have been emotionally vulnerable, too. If you’ve ever tried fasting, you will know that all kinds of feelings well up from inside. Fasting has a way of bringing to the surface all that dwells within. In such an extremity of life, the devil approaches Jesus and attempts to prey on his emotions and full humanity.

If Jesus is desperate for food, in a state of high emotion, wouldn’t he be inclined to resort to a quick supply of food by abusing his power? If he felt lonely and abandoned after so much time in the wilderness, wouldn’t he want to test God, to throw himself recklessly from a pinnacle to see if God really is with him after all? If Jesus is tired of seeing injustice in his own day and fully aware of his vocation to bring justice to God’s people, couldn’t he justify a way to gain full authority over all earthly kingdoms, even if at the devil’s hands?

But Jesus doesn’t take the bait. The devil has underestimated Jesus, who is so fortified by prayer and endurance in the desert that he passes the test. He is so intimately bound in love and prayer with the Father and the Spirit that he refuses to accept the devil’s false portrayal of God, because that is exactly what the devil presents: a distorted image of the living God.

The creepy thing about the devil is that he knows Jesus is the Son of God, and he seems to know quite a lot about the nature of God, too. When the devil tempts Jesus by saying “if you are the Son of God,” he doesn’t question Jesus’s divinity, he assumes it. He uses Jesus’s special status to try to lure him into sin. And the devil does so by slandering the reputation of God.

The Slanderer is one of the Scriptural names for Satan. If the Slanderer knows something about the nature of God, then he is trying to convince Jesus and will try to convince us, too, that God is something other than the true God. In this spiritual libel, God is portrayed as a bartering agent, who demands emotional dependency on us. The relationship is distorted from free gift to supply and demand and co-dependence. If we are in desperate circumstances, then we will test God to seek protection, because according to the Slanderer, God simply preys on our extreme emotional state. If our relationship with God is simply an unending series of transactions, then we will only worship God to gain power or success or whatever else we desire.

The devil is a slanderer because he tries to dupe us into believing in a false god who is not like the one, true, living God. Our worst temptations will find us when we are in the extremes of life: when we are anxious about an uncertain future, when we are hungry for food, when we are impatient with injustice, and when we are tired of trying to make ends meet. The temptations assault us in all the extremities of life with one bogus, slanderous message: God has abandoned you. So, the devil says, worship me. Believe me.

But even as the devil knows who Jesus is, we know how the devil operates. The devil only functions in a conditional world, and this is antithetical to the nature of God. Since God is the Giver of all good gifts, God gives freely, not conditionally. In the devil’s world, everything is transaction, everything is conditional. Perhaps we can learn a lot about who God is by what the devil does. God is not like those things. God is not impatient, nor does God rely on our impatience to foster a relationship. God doesn’t dole out gifts to receive worship.

Instead, God gives us what we need, which is not always what we want. Instead, God protects us as is best for us, not as a backup plan of rescue for our recklessness. Instead, God is to be worshipped simply because of who God is, eternal Love and perfect Giver. We don’t worship God to get something. We worship God because God is God.

And this is why perseverance through the in-between times of life is so important. These are the times between extremes of emotions. These are the ordinary times. These are the long stretches of spiritual dryness where prayer doesn’t seem to be answered and God seems silent. The devil hates nothing more than a Christian who can survive in these in-between times. That’s why Screwtape told Wormwood to press hard on the patient in the times of extremity when emotions run high. If the patient can’t survive the extreme times, he will never make it to the in-between ones.

In the in-between times, we learn that God is always with us, and so when the anxiety or the hunger or the severe impatience come, we will know that God is still with us. When the suffering comes and the misfortunes find us, we will still know that God is with us. No wonder Jesus rebuked Peter when he tried to deny his prediction of suffering and death. Jesus called Peter Satan, for it’s the Slanderer himself who will always try to convince us of a Savior who can’t bear suffering or death and who only appears to be with us in the human condition.

But we know this is false. We know, as we begin this Lenten journey, that before we arrive at Easter, we must take up our crosses and follow our Savior, who took up his own cross for our sake and that of the whole world. We know that salvation is found not only on the mountaintops but especially in the valleys. We know that our Savior’s name, Emmanuel, is true. He is God with us. And no amount of slander or libel can ever take that away.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2026

As wide as the east is from the west

The summer before I entered ninth grade, I was given a list of books to read. This was nothing new. I typically spent my summers devouring books while the rest of the neighborhood played out in the southeast Texas sun. But that summer, I had to read a litany of books I didn’t really want to read, and one of them was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I didn’t like that book. My innate joy of reading books was sullied by having to take notes in the margins and highlight passages for the first time in my life. One of the main reasons I didn’t care for Mythology was that I didn’t like the characters. I simply couldn’t relate to them at all.

I found the behavior of the gods and goddesses to be appalling. They were immoral. They flitted to and fro between the heavens and the earth, usually interacting with the earthly realm only to wreak vengeance or to produce half-gods. There was too much violence. I had an instinctive distaste for those characters, and I found reading about them to be an exercise in irritation.

Perhaps this is why I have always been mystified by the tendency, if unrecognized, to make the one, true, living God like those mythological gods and goddesses, who spoke not and saw not, who heard not and smelled not, who felt not and walked not, who made no sound with their throats as Psalm 115 tells us. For those who make such gods are simply like them, and what an incisive observation that is.

Indeed, the picture of God with which we are often confronted from the lips of so-called Christians is a god—lower-case “g”—who is very much like the humans who have fashioned a deity in the image of fallible humankind. This god is perpetually angry and wrathful. This god is fickle and vindictive. This god holds grudges and doles out rewards and punishments according to the disposition of humanity. This god also flies to and fro between the heavens on a whim, obviously present sometimes and painfully absent at others. This god is impatient and intemperate. This god looks remarkably like a sinful, frail human person.

In an ironic twist, such a god—who is, of course, no god at all—could give us permission to excuse our own sinful proclivities. If the presumed god is like that, then we can still cling to our grudges and hope that there is an eternal hell and sit under our booths and pout like Jonah when the death row prisoner finds Jesus and all those other self-satisfying human emotions that we sometimes revel in. Such a god might look the other way from our sinfulness because that god is no more than a reflection of ourselves.

The psalmist renders a stroke of genius, then, when penning Psalm 103. Here, we come face to face with the true God, the living God, the God who fashioned us from dust and breathed life into that same dust and will one day raise that same dust from the grave. The psalmist can only speak of God in fallible human language, but in doing so, the psalmist daringly portrays God as One who is not like so many negative human qualities.

God is not quick to become angry. God is, in fact, not capable of anger at all, at least in the sense that we humans become angry. God does not chide us or accuse us, for that is the work of the Accuser, the Devil, the one who is God’s enemy. God does not cling to anger and carry resentments for all the ways in which we have sinned. God does not deal with us according to our sinful ways or consort with us as if we are wicked. It’s as if the psalmist can only speak about God in terms of what God is not. The psalmist understands that by exploring how small we humans are in our sinfulness, pettiness, and fickleness we can, in turn, recognize how vast the goodness of God is.

God is therefore full of compassion and mercy. In the goodness of God, these are not weaknesses, as they are so often interpreted in our tough world. Maybe this is why Christians sometimes resist a God who is perfectly compassionate and merciful. Such a God seems weak, even though Scripture tells us that God’s weakness is God’s power.

As high as the heaven is in comparison of the earth, so great is God’s mercy. As wide as the east is from the west, so far has God set our sins from us. Although a father may pity his own children, God is merciful a trillion times more so. And why is God so? Because God remembers how we were made. God remembers that we are the product of God’s hands. God remembers that we are but dust, not because we are lowly insects groveling on the face of the earth, but because as dust, we are God’s creation. And as dust, we can yet be shaped more into the likeness of God.

The irony of Ash Wednesday is that we look as if through a spiritual microscope at the smallness of our lives so that we can begin to grasp the staggering vastness of God. We examine carefully the minute ways in which we nurse our grievances, pour out our wrath at our enemies, withhold forgiveness to obtain power, are neglectful in our care of the earth, and in general fail to be like God in so many ways. We pore over those ways in which we have eschewed compassion, mercy, patience, forgiveness, and kindness, in which we have been lazy, slothful, greedy, lustful, proud, envious, and angry. We do all this not as a means of self-torture but as a way of trying to comprehend who God is so that we can become more like God. God is not any of those characteristics of sinful humanity, and if we see any of those things in an image of God, we can be sure that it is not God.

The psalmist’s language becomes small so that we might know just how large God is. We reflect on how tiny and constricted we have become in our sinfulness to ask for God’s grace in becoming large like God. The smallness of human ways is pitted against the vastness of God’s perfection, not as a means of putting us down but as a means of lifting us up.

The infuriating thing about the gods and goddesses of mythology is their impatience and inconstancy. They never stayed with the humans with which they interacted in a love/hate relationship. But in Christ, we see in the detail of a human life the immensity of God’s goodness. We see a God who doesn’t visit earth on a whim but comes and abides and stays with us forever.

In the smallness of our imaginations, confined in this unstable world, we may very well mistake self-examination, repentance, and penitence for ends, but of course, they are means to an end. The moment in which the smallness of our human ways is acknowledged and mourned is precisely the moment of the turn back to God, the about-face, the epiphany in which we can give thanks that God is unlike us even as God calls us to be like God.

This moment of recognition leaves no room for excusing ourselves. It doesn’t allow us to continue to be angry, wrathful, unforgiving, vengeful, negligent, or judgmental. It tells us that the dust from which we were made is the same dust that becomes a new creation in the loving hands of God. For as far as the east is from the west, so vastly different from our ways are the perfectly loving, merciful, and compassionate ways of God. But as near as Christ has come to us and as we are to the dust, so close is the God who formed us from that same dust, renews us, and will make us to be big like him.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ash Wednesday
February 18, 2026 

With Uncovered Faces

I might as well pose the question that I’m sure is puzzling at least some of you: why did Jesus command Peter, James, and John not to tell anyone of the vision they saw on the mountain until he was raised from the dead? How was that compatible with a Gospel meant to be proclaimed to the ends of the earth? Why was the illuminating vision of Jesus as the Son of God now placed under a bushel basket of secrecy?

These are all very good questions. As I reflected on this, I spent some time before a beloved icon of mine. In this icon, Jesus stands on a rocky pinnacle, with Moses on his right and Elijah on his left. Jesus is clothed in white, and rays of light spread from him in all directions. At the foot of the stony outcrop on which Jesus stands are Peter, James, and John. Peter is the only one of the three who is left upright. Isn’t this hasty confidence typical of Peter, who only previously rebuked Jesus for predicting his suffering and death? In this icon, Peter kneels with hand outstretched as if in blessing. The Gospel tells us that he wanted to enshrine the moment of Jesus’s transfiguration for posterity. Not so fast, the voice of God the Father says from the cloud.

Meanwhile, John has fallen to the ground directly below Jesus. A ray of light beams down from Jesus to John, who is prostrate on the rocky earth. His back is toward Jesus, and he’s covering his eyes with his hand. One of his sandals has fallen almost completely off his foot. It’s holy ground after all. And then, there’s James off to the side. He has tumbled backwards. He’s facing Christ’s glory, but he, like John, is also covering his face with his hands.

According to Matthew, the disciples didn’t fall to the ground in fear until the voice from the cloud spoke to them. What was it about the voice that caused them to fall away in fear? What had they really seen? And is what they saw and heard directly related to Jesus’s command to say nothing of this vision until he had been raised from the dead?

There must have been more to the transfiguration than Jesus shining with bright light, surrounded by Moses and Elijah. There must have been something both unbelievably astounding and utterly frightening to this theophany. Why else would they cover their eyes? Why else would they collapse so abruptly on the ground? Why else would they have to withhold the luminosity of this vision until after Jesus had been raised from the dead?

It has been said by some who have had near-death experiences, that there’s a moment in which the entirety of one’s life passes before one’s eyes. This is a bridge between two worlds—between the world of the living and the world of those who have died and continue living in God. For some, it’s described as an instant of judgment. One sees everything that was good and wrong about one’s life. In this liminal experience, one experiences the pain of past sin. The past sin is felt as a sorrow because the soul is being held within the light of God. And when God’s perfect goodness and truth shine into the cold darkness of our lives, at first, it’s extraordinarily painful. But then this moment of pain passes, and the soul begins to see God face to face. And the journey of sharpening vision continues from there.

Could it be that the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain is something like this for the disciples? Could it be a moment when the veil parts between this world and the next and the inner group of disciples are given a staggeringly beautiful and yet painful view of the face of God shining in Christ? At the beginning of this vision, the disciples are still standing upright, so much so that Peter wants to make three tents to encapsulate what he beholds. Maybe the disciples are in a state of initial shock, seeing the glory of the vision and nothing else. But something about the voice of God throws them to the ground. Listen to him, the voice says. Maybe then, they are reminded of the rigors of listening to Jesus. Maybe then, they are reminded of what the Messiah has only recently said to them but which they conveniently ignored through selective hearing. He would go to Jerusalem and experience great suffering in Jerusalem. He would be killed. And then he would be raised on the third day.

Listen to him, the voice says. Remember how the Lord said to love your enemies, to avoid retaliation, to be salt of the earth and light to the world, and to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Remember that he said the road that leads to life is hard, that you can’t serve God and wealth, that you will be sent out as sheep among wolves, that following him will mean forsaking all loyalties except the love of God, that a tree will be known by its fruit, and so many other things, things that must have been be intimidating and terrifying in their own right.

What the disciples saw on that mountain was not only the glory of Christ as the beloved Son of God, but also the Christ who would suffer and die. They somehow must have sensed that they couldn’t have one without the other. They couldn’t comprehend the glory without the cross. They couldn’t receive the gift of Christ’s own self-gift without giving of themselves, too. And perhaps this is precisely what shocked them and knocked them to the ground, causing James and John to cover their faces.

The Transfiguration focuses our eyes on who Jesus is as the unique Son of God, true man and true God. And it also harnesses our sight to who we are called to be as humans created in God’s image with the potential to be like God, to be divinized, to one day see with uncovered faces the perfect light of God in all its full glory.

But the life in which we presently journey, riddled with darkness and sin, beckons us to cover our faces. We often respond by hiding them from each other and from God. When the glory of Christ’s light breaks into this world, we can’t withstand it. It’s too glorious, too luminous, too full of judgment when our own waywardness is pitted against the luminous glory of heaven.

It’s no coincidence that we hear the story of Jesus’s transfiguration each year on the cusp of Lent. Before us is the way of the cross, a way that demands nothing less than putting God at the center of our lives. It demands nothing less than trying to see with the eyes of Christ by removing the masks from our faces before all of humanity and especially before God. Lent demands that when we come to the Eucharist, we unmask our hearts before God, from whom no secrets are hid. We can’t receive the full glory of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist without also giving of ourselves. The glory of the face of God is revealed in the Eucharist, but unless we have learned to look at the faces of others in the fullness of their being, God’s glory will be too much for us to take.

And my guess is that this is why Jesus commanded the disciples not to tell anyone of the vision until he had been raised from the dead. Before the passion and before the cross, people who were not there on the mountain would only have heard about a distorted, incomplete vision from the confused minds of the maturing disciples. They would only have been awed by an epiphany of glory, which would soon fade into the ether when the sky darkened on Good Friday and only a hearty few were left standing at a distance from Jesus as he took his last breaths.

But after that earth-shattering moment, when the body had been taken down from the cross and then when the body was not found in the tomb on the third day, then, the vision could be told with honesty and conviction. On the other side of the cross and the tomb is where we live, unlike Peter, James, and John as they descended the mountain. And Jesus’s command to us is to proclaim this vision to the whole world.

The vision is this: the one who was transfigured on the mountain is our Lord, Savior, and Messiah, and he’s one who never hides his face from us, whose face is perpetually uncovered in both glory and suffering. In the shadow of the cross, we see him when we unveil our faces before all of humanity and look into the eyes of the vulnerable, the dispossessed, the suffering, and the lonely. This vision hurts our eyes, because it demands that we respond in love. This vision stings because for too long we have concealed our faces and our eyes and turned away from those in need.

But on the other side of Easter Day, this vision is the only one that gives hope and light to our troubled world. This vision assures us that the God before whom we reveal our faces, always stands with face revealed before us, showing us that whether in feast or famine, the light of God shines through the darkness. And although we may have fallen to the ground in fear with faces covered, today and always, our Lord comes to us, touches us, and tells us to rise, and not be afraid. And then he bids us not to keep silence about the vision but to go to the ends of the earth to make it known.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 15, 2026

A Little Goes a Long Way

A few years ago, on a trip to Savannah, Georgia, I picked up a cookbook that has become one of my favorites: Mrs. Wilkes’s Boarding House Cookbook. The cookbook I purchased features some of Mrs. Wilkes’s staple recipes. The cover shows a smiling Southern matron holding out a dish full of perfectly browned, plump biscuits. Even the pickiest eater would be hard-pressed not to be won over by Mrs. Wilkes’s smile and sweet demeanor. Her recipes are, quite simply, marvelous.

But as I first started to explore the cookbook, I was struck by how simple the recipes are. If one were to examine the list of ingredients, one might be skeptical about how the food would taste. They involve very few seasonings, often just salt and pepper. I admit that, upon eyeing the ingredients, I initially thought the dishes would be rather bland. For instance, Mrs. Wilkes’s pot roast recipe has only a handful of ingredients: the roast itself, water, soy sauce, carrots, potatoes, black pepper, and flour. No wine, no broth, no onions, no salt. But I’m here to tell you that it is some kind of good.

After spending a while with this gem of a cookbook, I finally realized the underlying principle of Mrs. Wilkes’s cooking. Her recipes rely primarily on the natural taste of the food. A good pot roast doesn’t demand a battery of spices; it simply requires a fine piece of meat and a little saltiness to bring out the natural flavor of the meat. Mrs. Wilkes’s style of cooking is close to the ground, and this often seems foreign to those of us whose food is loaded with preservatives and chock full of spices. Cooking with Mrs. Wilkes’s recipes has reminded me of an essential part of good cooking, which is letting the ingredients themselves shine. And to do so, sometimes all we need is a little saltiness and some loving care.

Salt does have this mysterious quality, doesn’t it? A bland green bean comes to life with a bit of salt. Even some caramel or chocolate pops a bit more with salt thrown in. Salt, among its many properties, brings out the intrinsic flavor in food, and as such, it’s a perfect image for our vocation as the body of Christ. But in a Church that has become rather insipid, we may have forgotten just how effective a bit of salt can be.

Jesus tells us in his Sermon on the Mount that, because we are his disciples, we are the salt of the earth. We have the potential to bring out the best flavors in the world around us. But salt is no good if it sits on a shelf and isn’t used. Salt is ineffective if too little is thrown in or if too much is carelessly tossed on a dish. To be salt to the world requires awareness, intention, even artistic nuance. To be salt requires passion, care, and initiative. To be salt requires letting God do the work. We are the salt, but God will do the salting.

I suspect our Lord would chuckle at the theatrics that are sometimes employed in worship to rally the congregation into action. Jesus would lament our penchant for being endlessly innovative or spectacular in ministry. Jesus, I think, would gently point out that who we are is enough if used wisely, fully, and with a sense of hope. God has made us to be salt, and salt we are to be. No more, no less.

After all, the images Jesus uses in teaching are small things like mustard seeds and yeast and, of course, salt. Small things matter. Small things make a profound difference. And in a Church that is anxious about survival and is furiously grasping at straws of relevance, Jesus’s words should inspire great confidence within us.

But these days, it feels as if we have become adept at dismissing the power of these small things. A slow whittling away of spiritual practices, discipline, and commitment is a long, slippery slope to becoming salt that has lost its saltiness. And this is why Jesus’s teaching about the Law and the Prophets is so important and so incisively convicting. For all the careless Christian attempts to think that the Law and the Prophets are irrelevant to those of us who follow Christ, Jesus’s words offer a sharp rejoinder. For until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Our past is our present. The teaching of ages past and of the Church over the centuries is vital to our existence and to the life of the world. The small things matter, just like tiny grains of salt.

 There are countless ways in which the modern Church can be like aged salt sitting uselessly on a shelf. In our quest to be welcoming and inviting, we have relaxed many of the commandments of old. These days, because the Church has lowered her standards, it’s all too easy to relax our commitment to worship on the Lord’s Day. Or we give ourselves permission not to get involved in ministry because we are already present for worship. Or we remain quiet in the face of injustice and wrong because it seems too political. Or we coddle one another in rather bland spiritual lives because our lives are simply too busy. Or we hide our Christianity and refrain from evangelism because we want to keep our faith private.

But the small things matter. Showing up on Sundays does matter. Participating in ministry does matter. Speaking out when cruelty is alive on our nation’s streets does matter. Letting our light shine to the world does matter, especially in a dark, troubled world. Like a little salt that enhances the natural flavor of a delicious piece of meat or delectable vegetable, the call of the Christian is nothing less than to be ubiquitous salt to a world that needs its natural goodness to shine. These days, it may seem like the world has no natural goodness, that it’s spoiled food, which is why the Church must let her saltiness bring out the flavors of a world that still retains its goodness underneath all the mess.

Perhaps the most chilling and heartbreaking aspect of the modern Church is her tendency towards malaise and apathy in some quarters. Thankfully, there are still pockets that shine vibrantly, giving hope to the wastelands. But we should all lament when the Church has lost her nerve and her bite. We should mourn that a Gospel meant for the farthest corners of the earth has been hidden under a bushel basket, that her saltiness has wasted away on a pantry shelf. We should bemoan spiritual gifts lying dormant and unused.

And yet, we should rejoice exceedingly that an answer to the Church’s present conundrum is right before our eyes. For a minute, we need to relinquish our fondness for flashiness and big schemes and corporate-style solutions. For a minute, let’s just sit with what Jesus tells us, because it’s true. We are the salt of the earth. And as such, we are not being asked to go into seclusion in fear of a world that is sinful and contaminated. We, as simple salt, are asked to go into the world, to be sprinkled in so that the world’s God-given goodness might rise to the fore. Some in our day are remarkably proficient at bringing out the worst in human nature. We as Christ’s disciples must be masters are bringing out the best.

Perhaps the most acute threat we face in these evil times is despair and hopelessness. They go along with bland food and chilling apathy and rigid complacency. In a world of gargantuan problems and systemic injustice as insidious as poison, we may be led to believe that there is nothing we can do.

But Jesus tells us that the only thing we can do is be ourselves as Christ’s living body. And as ourselves, we are salt to the earth. In a world of big problems, we are a small solution, but that smallness can make a world of difference. It’s surely true that a world into which our Lord and Savior came must be brimming with latent goodness. It’s surely true that where there seems to be nothing but darkness, light is waiting to be released. It’s surely true that even a Church that has become tasteless salt for a time, can be useful salt once again. For with God, the faithful remnant of a smaller Church is not an occasion for despair. Such a remnant is all the salt that is needed to draw out the world’s goodness, which thanks be to God, shall never perish.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 8, 2026

A View from the Other Side

As a priest and pastor, it’s unsettling to be the recipient of pastoral care. I have been considering this reversal of roles over the past week. The instinct of the pastor is, of course, to care for others: to proactively reach out to those undergoing surgery, to check in on the sick, and to comfort those who mourn. It’s a complicated task, too. What does a grieving person need? What will bring them comfort? Would they like a phone call, or would they prefer a text message and a little space? Is a Facebook message too impersonal, or is it exactly the right gesture?

One cannot know the answers to these questions with any degree of certainty until one is in the position of the mourner. One must catch a glimpse from the other side, where one mourns rather than comforts the mourner, where one receives mercy rather than offers it, where one experiences poverty rather than provides relief.

Over the past week, all my previous assumptions as a provider of pastoral care have been scrambled. A text message in the face of grief is not too impersonal; it’s a genuine gift. An unexpected voicemail message of condolences from a colleague is a balm of comfort. When someone has lost something—when they have become poor in some way—mercy stands out in relief. The discounted rate to renew a widower’s apartment lease is extended because of the sad circumstances. The salesman in a clothing store goes out of his way to pick up a suit coat at another branch location so that the grieving one doesn’t have to do it. Rules are loosened. Flexibility takes over. When one is blessed with a view from the other side, one inhabits a different world.

In such a time as ours, hearing Jesus’s Beatitudes is both comforting and disconcerting. These days, the qualities of those who are considered blessed seem to be the exception rather than the rule. The poor are blamed for their own poverty, which is thought to be a character fault. Those mourning the unjust deaths of loved ones receive little comfort in a society that all too easily scapegoats the victim. Meekness is a negative quality, not something to be cherished. Our culture values toughness and machismo, not the gentler spirit of meekness. Most people don’t even know what meekness means.

Mercy is a rare commodity these days. To forgive someone who has wronged you is weak. To give someone the benefit of a doubt means you’re gullible. To generously offer compassion to someone is to be reckoned a fool. Purity of heart is overshadowed by mixed motives and self-preservation. Righteousness is eschewed to avoid persecution. People lose their courage and their mettle in the worst of times because they fear for their reputation or lives.

And perhaps this is why, over the centuries Jesus’s Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel have seemed much too vague. To be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect appears unrealistic. Surely Matthew couldn’t have meant what he said, which is why we have tended to spiritualize Jesus’s Beatitudes, turning them into impossible ideals that we can dream about but never realize.

 In the past few days, I, too, have struggled with these Beatitudes. What is one to say about them in such a time as this? They seem straightforward enough and yet distantly out of reach. Are we to inhabit each one of the Beatitudes, as if they are a list of eight ethical action items? Or are the Beatitudes something else? If the Beatitudes are not just ethical prescriptions, then they must be a glorious view from the other side. Jesus parts the veil between this world and the next, showing us what the kingdom of heaven is like. As such, encountering even one Beatitude is enough to teach us something about the blessed state of life with God. Perhaps Jesus is giving us encouragement to persevere by letting us know that when all seems lost, the kingdom of heaven is still close at hand. All we need is a view from the other side.

Over the past week, watching world news in a state of grief from my father’s apartment, I have heard far more bad news than good news. I have seen chaos on the streets of our nation. I have seen violence play out and listened to hatred and vitriolic speech. I have heard lies uttered as truth, and I have sensed much despair. I have been aware of just how easy it is to give up on goodness, to assume the Beatitudes are just pie in the sky theology from a Messiah who has left us to our own devices on earth while he reigns in heaven.

But because grief has found me this week, because I have traded places to be in the place of one who mourns rather than gives comfort, God has offered me a blessed view from the other side. And I have been assured that even in an upside-down world, the Beatitudes are still alive and real. The kingdom of heaven is still blessedly near.

On the mountaintop where Jesus preaches his Sermon on the Mount, the air is thinner. Mountains are always holy places, more porous to God’s kingdom. On the mountaintop the veil between this world and the next is diaphanous, and fleetingly we catch glimpses of the kingdom of heaven. It’s tempting to think we must wait for our eternal reward to come in the distant future. It’s tempting to think we must simply try harder to exhibit those beatific qualities that Jesus enumerates. But the mode of Jesus’s speech when he proclaims the Beatitudes assures us that the kingdom of heaven has already come close. It’s already, in some sense, present among us. We can’t grasp at the Beatitudes and will them into existence. We can only have the courage to wait with patience for a view from the other side, even as we mourn and sigh in this valley of tears.

In the thin places of life we come face to face with the Beatitudes. When we become like the poor, when we mourn, when we find ourselves in need of mercy and compassion and food and comfort, then suddenly we realize that all those good things of the kingdom of heaven do exist, although they visit us in fits and starts in this earthly life. The Beatitudes are not ephemeral words preached by a long-dead Messiah. They’re truthful realities spoken into existence by a living Messiah, who reigns in heaven and still comes among us. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

It’s as if on the mountain, Jesus is speaking a new creation into existence, delineating the boundaries of the kingdom of heaven. He is telling us what our values are in the household of God. Like God speaking creation into existence in the beginning, Jesus speaks into being a way of life that in this troubled world seems impossibly remote, but which is closer to us than we can imagine.

And to get a taste of it and to receive a view from the other side, we must trade places. We must know sorrow ourselves. We must give up our lust for power and control and become meek and humble. We must forsake all claims to violence and, instead, long for the peace that passes all understanding. We must let go of our tendency to judge and show mercy in its place. We must know grief and receive the comfort of others. We must value righteousness and justice over any personal security. All of this is to become poor, and when we do so, we shall receive a glorious view from the other side, even if only for a moment.

We can only know this state of blessedness when it finds us in life, when we have traded places and are in the place of the one in need. But when it comes to us, then we can see everything from the perspective of the cross, where death is the entrance into life, weakness is strength, and foolishness is wisdom. When even one Beatitude is shown to us by an unsuspecting stranger, there we see the face of Christ himself.

Over the past week, I have had a privileged view from the other side. I will never be the same, because what I have lost cannot be reclaimed in this life. But what I have gained is a treasure. I can rejoice because I have caught a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. I can rejoice because I have seen that Jesus’s words are true, that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand. For each of us, it may be that only one Beatitude is enough to assure us that God’s kingdom is drawing nigh, is indeed already nigh. While we can’t bring this kingdom into being by our own efforts, we can wait for its glorious appearance in bursts of light. And when we have traded places with those in need, the kingdom will find us. Although the cruel and merciless world rages around us and vies for our attention, one brief view from the other side will change us forever. For even in this upside-down world, the kingdom of heaven is always close at hand.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
February 1, 2026

The Day When Everything Changed

Surely each of us remembers a day in our lives where things changed forever. Before that day, our world was different. Afterwards, nothing was the same. We couldn’t look at the world in the same way. Our perspective on life changed. We became older, maybe wiser, but perhaps even more troubled.

I remember the day I came home from school to the news that the Challenger space shuttle had exploded. It may have been my first awareness of a national tragedy that affected everyone, an awareness that life could change in the blink of an eye. For some of you, maybe it was the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. Dallas, Texas, will forever have a pall cast over it. Or was it September 11, 2001? I will never forget watching, in horror, the smoking towers on my college dorm room TV. Who can look at the New York City skyline without lamenting its sparseness? Or maybe it was mid-March 2020, when this nation began to lock down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Will any of us ever hear a cough again without some measure of anxiety?

The day that changed things forever for the first disciples was a seemingly ordinary day on a lakeside in Galilee. It was business as usual at first. Simon and his brother Andrew were engaged in their usual occupation of casting nets and hoping for a decent catch. All was at it should have been until Jesus walked by and said a handful of words that would change their lives—and the world’s destiny—forever. Follow me. And without so much as a word or second thought, those two brothers followed him.

A little farther down the seashore, James and John and their father Zebedee were mending their nets, like they always did. It was just another day in Galilee until Jesus walked by and called them. And their response was as prompt and undeliberated as Simon’s and Andrew’s.

Jesus’s words, follow me, were both so simple and so profound. The lives of James, John, Simon, and Andrew would never be the same again. The world itself would never be the same again. And our own revisiting of the call of those first disciples is tinged with poignancy, even heartbreak, because we know how those disciples’ lives would change forever. We know that James would be the first to lose his life because he accepted that call. We know that Simon would be crucified, but upside down. We know that Andrew would also be nailed to a cross in the shape of an X. Neither Simon Peter nor Andrew felt worthy enough to be crucified in the same manner as their Lord. John alone of those first four disciples would die of old age, but I imagine he must have been haunted by that fact. Why me? How did I escape martyrdom, he must have asked?

We can, if we wish, get stuck on the tragic endings of those four disciples, just as we can get stuck on tragedies that have changed our own world. Those disciples’ lives changed forever because their decision to follow Jesus would upend their reality. But there is so much more. Their lives changed forever because the moment they dropped their nets and left their families to follow Christ, they had already died.

The abandoned nets on the seashore represent Simon’s and Andrew’s entire livelihood. They left their normal existence, the comfort of their ordinary lives, their means of earning a living to follow a man they had never met until then. James and John left their father because their love for a man who had just entered their lives was the primary love of their own lives.

And the world would never be the same again for them and for us because those men would be a part of that initial apostolic thrust into the far corners of the earth, witnessing to the visible signs of another kind of kingdom breaking in to right the wrongs of sinful earthly kingdoms. The sick were healed. Those enslaved by disease found freedom. Wrongs were righted even as the conveyors of wrong reacted in fury. The world would never be the same again because in a world full of bad news, good news came as a person. Good news came not just through words, but in actions.

Something about this person was different from any cultic figure or guru that had ever preceded him. This teacher and healer did not wait for his disciples to grovel before him obsequiously to establish his devoted following. This teacher and healer called them. He called them and chose them before they ever knew who he was. He called them and chose them not to bow before him or buoy his reputation. He called them and chose them to put themselves behind him, to attach themselves to himself in relationship so that they would learn just how wonderful the world could be. In following behind him, their world and our world would never be the same again.

Although the story of the call of those first disciples is poignant, there is perhaps a sadder story to my mind. Let me tell it to you. On the shores of countless lakes in our own day, people are busy. They are going about their ordinary business, laboring hard to earn their livings. Some are the recipients of a massive catch. They are making a great living for themselves. Life is good. Life is comfortable. They have their families. They have their routines. They have the comfort of financial security and a future of bliss.

And by the shores of these lakes, the Messiah still walks. With only a few words, he issues a call. Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. It might be that he pauses for a time, to wait for a response. But in the end, he encounters cold silence. Those complacent folk along the lakesides, if they even bother to turn their heads, return to their work and their families and their amassed fortunes and their future comfort and go on with business as usual. They do not follow the one who has called them, and their worlds never change for the better.

On the shores of our lives, this one who lived, died, and was raised again still calls. Follow me. He calls us to a way that is more difficult than we would like, but he calls us so that we might die and rise to a new life, a better life, a life that is intended for our flourishing and that of the whole world. And still, we ignore him.

The sad truth of this story, the tragic reality that breaks my own heart, is that in our own day, far too many of us have found plenty of excuses not to follow the one who will change our world. We have found every reason not to give ourselves completely to him. We have thoroughly justified clinging to our material possessions and paychecks rather than liberally giving it all back to the Giver of all good things. We have been stingy with our time so that we give what benefits us and our comfort rather than the proclamation of a Gospel that the world sorely needs to hear. We have withdrawn from risking our lives to help those whose own lives are threatened by savage governments. We have smothered ourselves in our biological families without opening ourselves up to the human family that needs our care. This is a sad story precisely because we know that one has come and still comes and walks along the lakeshore of our lives to call us to something far more glorious. He calls us from our passive sitting in darkness to an active movement out of our comfort zone to follow him into a marvelous light.

What keeps you from following him? What prevents you from leaving everything behind to put yourself close to him? The call that will change your world forever, and for good, is awaiting your response. What stops you from letting go of your fear of putting yourself behind him, not just in word but also in deed?

More than anything else, this one who has chosen us before we were born and who calls us before we even know who he is, shows us exactly who God is. And God does not arrogantly wait for us to grovel in shame but instead walks before us and invites us to get up and follow. God walks like a Good Shepherd leading the sheep through danger into a place of safety and nourishment. God asks us to follow behind because God will protect us and lead us. God will show us the way to green pastures, where all will be fed and where righteousness reigns. God invites us to place ourselves behind the Son of God, because he is the one who calls us not servants or slaves but friends. And this Jesus calls us to follow behind him and to get close to him so that we may go where he goes. And although this call to follow means giving everything up for his sake, in doing so, we will find our true lives, because where he goes, we shall go, and wherever he goes, there will be the kingdom of heaven.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 25, 2026 

What Are You Looking For?

When I was in middle school, I loved a good word search. At first, the game looks like nonsense—a jumble of letters, line after line. That’s where the word key—where you’re told what words to look for—comes in handy. With the key, things start looking less messy. Maybe not all at once, maybe not right away: but once you have the key, line by line, within that mess, you start seeing words, you start making some sense of it. Now, the words have always been there; it’s not the key that makes the words. But with the key, you know what you’re looking for; and once you begin to know what you’re looking for, you start to see what you’re looking at: not just letters, but words.

         In today’s Gospel, we encounter people who have begun to know what they’re looking for, and who, as a result, have started to see what—or who— they’re looking at. We meet again with John the Baptist. Last week, we read an account of Jesus’s baptism by John. This week, the focus is less on who John baptized—we aren’t actually told here that John baptizes Jesus—but on why he baptized. John tells us that he baptized so that the Chosen One, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the One who ranked ahead of him because he was before him, “might be revealed to Israel.” John also tells us that, through the baptizing mission, Jesus is revealed to him, John, personally. At first, John tells us, he “did not know” who the man was who ranked ahead of him because He was before him. But then, John is told to look for “He on whom the Spirit descends and remains.” And knowing what he is to look for, and seeing it, John sees, truly sees, who he is looking at in Jesus; Jesus as the Chosen One, the one in whom and through whom heaven and earth are coming together.

We also meet in today’s Gospel with Andrew, Peter, and an unnamed disciple of John’s. These men, like John, have seemingly been on the lookout too; once they hear John say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” they know what to do: Andrew and the other disciple begin following Jesus—literally, they begin walking after him—not wanting to lose sight of Him. And having started to know and see this Lamb of God, Andrew then goes and finds his brother, Peter, and brings him to Jesus. Peter too will come to know and see Jesus for who He really is—a fact that the Church will celebrate tomorrow, on the feast of the Confession of St. Peter. Through the Spirit working through John, and then through the disciples, Jesus is thus revealed to the disciples themselves and beyond. These men have begun to know what they are looking for, and so, seeing Jesus, they have started to see what they are looking at: not just a man like any other, but “the Messiah,” true God and true man.

Now sometimes, these disciples’ vision will get blurry; sometimes, these disciples will lose sight of Jesus—Peter, for example, will deny Jesus on His way to the cross, notwithstanding his having previously confessed Him as the Messiah. But, despite their shortcomings, having seen and known Jesus, these disciples will keep following Him, and they will help others to know, and see, and follow Him too.

Now, do we know what we are looking for? When we look around us, when we look at our own lives, the lives of our families and friends, and the life of the world, what do we think we are looking at? And what do we see? God? If, more often than not, we look around us—or inside of us—and see not God but a mess, nonsense, then this season of Epiphany is full of especially good news for us.

—because our God is not a God of nonsense: our God is a God of revelation. And that is why He has shown us the key, that is, Himself; that is why He Himself has shown Himself to us through Jesus His Son, the “Word made flesh:” so that our eyes may be opened to see the world for what it really is: God’s Kingdom.

In this season of Epiphany, we celebrate that revelation. The word “epiphany” means something like “manifestation.” And so though Epiphany is often associated with the Magi, and their being led by a star to the child born to be King, Epiphany is not just about Jesus being revealed to the Magi, but about God and His purposes being made manifest.

In Epiphany, we celebrate that God chose to reveal Himself to us, in time and space, through the person of Jesus. We celebrate that He did this in the past: being born, living, dying, and then rising again to defeat the powers of sin and death. But we also celebrate that He will reveal Himself to us in the future: as Paul tells us, all we “who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” are yet waiting for His revealing; we are waiting for Him, as we say in the Creed, “to come again in glory;” we are waiting for Him to make final sense of this often messy world.

And in the meantime, we are yet to celebrate that God also reveals Himself to us in the present—though it may not always look this way at first. In this present, this messy present, we, like John, and like the disciples, are called to know what, and who, we are to look for, so that even in the midst of the seeming mess, of what may look like nonsense, we may know and see God.

We are invited to get to know Jesus as He truly is, so that we may truly see Him, truly follow Him, and invite others to do likewise. We are to do this, as today’s Collect prays, “illumined by [God’s] Word and Sacraments,” so that, through us, Jesus “may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.”

Many peddle counterfeit Christs and worship false Messiahs, following and inviting others to follow a Jesus-in-name-only who reflects their own sinfulness. We, however, are to get to know Jesus not by looking to these images—not, say, by to looking a Jesus who sanctions cruelty or rewards greed—but by looking to the image of Jesus as shown to us in Word and Sacrament, to the image of Jesus revealed to us in Scripture, and through the Church.

And who is this Jesus? He is a Jesus, as Paul tells us, of “grace” and “peace;” a Jesus who does not leave us in our sin, but who takes away the sin of the world; a Jesus who works through imperfect people, like Peter; a Jesus who, as Isaiah tells us, reaches His “salvation…to the end of the earth,” not reserving it for a particular people; a Jesus who offers His sanctification to all who seek to follow him, through the waters of baptism and the power of the Holy Spirit; a Jesus who is not just a teacher, but King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and, a Jesus who, thanks be to God, delights not in darkness, but in light, in seeing us, and being seen by us.

And, having come to know Jesus, that Jesus, we are then invited to find others and bring them to Him, that they too may “come and see” that in and through Jesus, God Himself is being revealed. AMEN.

Sermon by Mrs. Lorraine Mahoney, Postulant for Holy Orders
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 18, 2026

By Mutual Consent

If I were a high school English teacher, I would have a bone to pick with some of St. Matthew’s writing. Of course, he was writing in a completely different language, so perhaps my pickiness is not entirely fair. It should be directed at the English language translators of Matthew’s Greek. But then again, they were simply trying to render Matthew’s Greek as carefully as possible in English.

The bone I want to pick with Matthew is that he sometimes uses vague pronoun references. Ambiguous antecedents run rampant. We must sometimes reread a particular passage to understand whom a pronoun refers to. There’s a particularly good example of this in today’s Gospel passage, although its ambiguity makes for an interesting theological discussion. It’s unlikely that St. Matthew deliberately intended this lack of clarity, but in both the English and the Greek, it is possible to read part of the passage in two different ways. Maybe Matthew’s unintended meaning is a gift of the Spirit inviting us deeper into the text.

Jesus comes to John the Baptist at the Jordan and asks John to baptize him. John objects, recognizing that he, John, is not the Messiah. Do you see how I had to clarify my own pronoun usage there lest you think I was saying something heretical about Jesus? John’s objection is that Jesus is the one who should baptize him. But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented.

Who consented? Matthew could have learned a lot from my high school English teachers. I admit that when I first read this passage, I thought that he referred to Jesus. After all, Jesus had just finished speaking, so the he that follows could logically be connected to Jesus as the subject. Jesus consented to be baptized.

But this is most assuredly not what Matthew intended to say. John consented to baptize Jesus. This makes more sense in the original Greek. But we are not reading and hearing Greek, so let’s play a bit more with this possibility of an ambiguous consenter. Who consents? Jesus or John? Or do they both consent? Is it mutual consent?

 In some sense, Jesus does consent to be baptized. He has no need of baptism. He is true God and true man. He is sinless, and he certainly doesn’t need a baptism for repentance, for he has nothing of which to repent. To be baptized, Jesus must consent to be baptized, and he insists on it. On the one hand, Jesus’s baptism is completely unnecessary, and on the other hand, it is absolutely necessary. Jesus makes salvation possible precisely because he assumes human finitude with all its temptations, sorrows, joys, and frustrations. By consenting to be baptized, Jesus says to the whole human race that he will not ask us to do anything he has not already done. He goes first where he is asking us to go.

But what if John had refused to baptize Jesus? We should consider this seriously for just a moment. For the Savior of the world to be baptized, one of the many persons whom he came to save must consent to do it. John must consent to do it. John’s consent is like Mary’s response to the angel at the annunciation: let it be with me according to thy word. And at the Jordan River, Jesus’s Let it be so now must be matched by John’s let it be so. This is the moment of mutual consent. And only after both parties have consented do the heavens open in a theophany, as the visible presence of the Holy Spirit is seen, and God’s voice is heard. Jesus is manifested to the world as God’s Beloved Son.

For ages, scholars have noted St. Matthew’s discomfort with the fact that Jesus was baptized by John. If this baptism had been a mere ritual cleansing it might have been one thing. But the fact that this baptism was a baptism with water for the repentance of sins is a wholly different matter. Matthew must have been concerned with defending Jesus’s sinlessness, and so he goes out of his way to explain how Jesus requested his own baptism. And then he portrays the moment of consent when John allows it to happen and when Jesus himself consents to take on the fullness of our humanity.

But what if we pressed Matthew’s discomfort a bit further? Doesn’t it make all of us a bit uncomfortable to know that our Lord and Savior was baptized by a sinner, however holy he may have been? Put yourself in John’s shoes. Would you have consented to baptize Jesus? Isn’t there some instinctual aversion to recognizing the full humanity of our Lord? Isn’t there some visceral desire on our part to protect him from the human condition, which seems beneath him, or to keep him domesticated in a bubble that is only fully divine?

There is a startling tension that we must recognize on this Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. Every year it recurs and challenges preachers and worshippers in the pews. Is the celebration of Jesus’s baptism about him or about us? For some, it seems blasphemous to recognize our own belovedness in God’s eyes because Jesus was recognized as beloved by his Father. It is, of course, true that only Jesus is the Beloved Son of God in that unique sense. But isn’t it also true that because Jesus went down into the Jordan River and because he identified so fully with our humanity we have the privilege of identifying with him?

This is a scandal of proximity. Jesus comes so close to us so that we might draw as close to him as possible. Jesus humbles himself so fully that we might dare to participate in the divine life. And this shocking possibility makes John the Baptist uneasy, as it may very well make us uneasy.

It's well worth exploring our own spiritual discomfort with Jesus’s baptism. In doing so, we might find that beneath our discomfort is a false humility. Our protests of allowing Christ to stoop so low among us may be more about protecting ourselves from what Jesus’s baptism, life, and death demand from us. If we are humble enough to allow Jesus to get frightfully close to us, then we will be challenged to be like Jesus. As John shows, it’s disconcerting to permit Jesus to be the one who goes into the waters of the Jordan for our sake, because we know that he will soon be thrust into the desert to be tempted by Satan for forty days and nights. We know that Jesus will come to his own people, and they will receive him not. We know that Jesus will eventually suffer and die, and even in his moment of death, he will forgive his enemies.

This is far too close for comfort. Jesus’s consent to come among us as one of us and still live without sin must be met by our own consent to follow him by forsaking sin and evil. And that is a tall order. Are we prepared for the pernicious testings by Satan, which are real and alive in our own world? Are we equipped to face rejection and persecution for following our Lord? Are we willing to love so completely that we would forgive even our most hated enemies? Can we give ourselves to Christ fully and unconditionally? Do we love him enough that we would die rather than forsake him?

On this feast, we rightly celebrate the unique status of Jesus as God’s only begotten Son. But we also must wrestle with our tendency to object to Jesus’s proximity to us. The question before us today is the question before John: will we allow it? Will we let it be? We must come face to face with all that keeps us from letting Jesus get too close to us. We must reckon with our pride, our false humility, our desire for comfort, and our pious adulation of Jesus’s divinity without also embracing his fully humanity. We must let Christ himself break down the defensive walls we build around ourselves and justify through sanctimonious language that excuses us from the mutual consent that is part of our salvation.

But once the walls come down, we will ultimately discover a gift. A door opens to a place of great freedom. We are invited to move into the place where Jesus has been so that we might take our own rightful standing there. Where Christ has interceded for the wholeness of the world, we move to pray for that same wholeness. Where Christ has groaned and sighed, we move and allow the Holy Spirit to pray within us with sighs too deep for words. Where Christ has been praying Abba to his heavenly Father, we dare to take our place as the beloved children of that same Abba. We do so with great humility but also with great joy. For the One who has called his Son Beloved, also looks on us as beloved children. This God invites us to call him Father, knowing that one day, where Christ has gone, we shall go, too. And we can only go there because he has gone there first.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 11, 2026

Somewhere Between Jerusalem and Bethlehem

It was about this time ten years ago that I was walking the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth. We arrived in the Holy Land around the Baptism of Our Lord. Christmastide was officially over, but the streets and churches were bedecked with evergreens and lights. It was still Christmas in the land that Jesus had walked. In some sense, it’s always Christmas.

I couldn’t imagine a more mystical time to be there. Poetry was in the air. The whole land is poetic. I learned after only a handful of visits to sacred sites that the Holy Land is no place for literalists. And yet, ironically, the leader of our tour group was one such literalist. He had an uncanny ability to take the mystery out of almost every site we visited.

It’s true that some of the famous sites of pilgrimage in the Holy Land can’t be verified as the actual sites of the events they commemorate. But the historical veracity of those locations is hardly the point. What is certain is that all those places are deeply holy. They are full of God’s poetry, which transcends mere literalism.

The clash of factual accuracy and poetic mystery came to a head one day on the tour bus. Our guide had just finished a long lecture in which one more sacred site was demystified. I don’t remember what he said, but I will never forget how his words crushed the poetic world of a member of our group. Sitting across the bus aisle from me was the mother of a Presbyterian pastor traveling with my group. Suddenly, this woman burst into tears. Full of heartfelt faith, she had journeyed from her small town to accompany her daughter on the trip. Some may have called her faith a simple faith, but in the end, isn’t all faith simple? And in the tour guide’s quest for factual accuracy, the poetry of her theological world was shattered.

My own heart broke for her, but the irony of hindsight is not lost on me. I do believe that the mother of that Presbyterian pastor understood more truth about the Holy Land than any claim to historical accuracy could assert. After all, as a seminary professor of mine once said, all theology is poetry.[1]

And that may very well be the reason that St. Matthew brings the magi into this story of Jesus’s birth. I’m quite sure that the leader of our tour group ten years ago would have pointed out that we have no historical verification of the magi’s existence. Maybe the wild star was Halley’s comet or something of that order, as some have suggested in their grasping at historical straws. Science tells us that stars don’t behave like that star did.

Well, maybe they don’t, and maybe they do, we might retort. With God anything is possible, and I mean that with full sincerity. If we can’t think like poets, then we will never understand the story of the magi. It’s surely no coincidence that they came from the east with its mystical roots, and it’s surely appropriate that we don’t know the magi’s exact origins. They could have come from Persia, but who knows? I don’t think Matthew wants us to know.

And isn’t it telling that the magi only end up in Jerusalem because they happened to notice an errant star in the sky? What if they hadn’t noticed it? What if they had paid no attention to the epiphany that defies all rational explanation? What if the magi had rationalized a decision to stay put in the east? What would have happened then?

Who knows, because Matthew tells us that they get up and go west, mistaking Jerusalem for their destination. And when they arrive, there’s a significant clash between factual accuracy and poetic imagination. On the side of poetry are Gentile magi who practice astrology and are foreigners to the God of Israel, and on the side of factual accuracy are those who know the Scriptures inside and out. On the side of poetry are pagan star hunters who travel thousands of miles to visit a baby, and on the side of factual accuracy is a ruthless, insecure leader who is so scared of the baby that he cons the magi into diligently finding him.

On the side of poetic imagination are the magi who don’t yet know the king is insincere and who continue to follow a star that could be leading them on a wild goose chase. And on the side of factual accuracy is a paranoid pseudo-king who is so enraged by the birth of a baby that he would order the murder of innocent children.

But somewhere on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, poetic imagination takes over. The star stops over the place where the baby was born, and the astrologers from the East are completely consumed by the poetry that has brought them from so far away. And while Herod stews in fear and unhappiness, the poets from the east are so overtaken with joy that they drop to their knees in worship of a child. They worship a true King of which their own religion knows nothing, and they give him gifts of which he has no need.

The poetry of this moment runs over in excess. While Herod’s excess is his cruelty, paranoia, obsession, fear, and rage, the excess of the magi is the genuineness and joy of their worship and the holy uselessness of the gifts they bring to a newborn child. There’s nothing to calculate here. There’s no datum to verify. There’s only a child—and a king at that—to worship and adore.

Matthew has drawn us into a poetic world because this poetry is the language of God. And the poetry of his account of the magi is duly appropriate for this Feast of the Epiphany because it’s a feast that is all about poetry. We cannot speak of the manifestation of our Lord in the flesh to the entire world without speaking in poetry. This poetry shows us that the manifestation of our Lord to the world must first happen to pagan Gentiles who read signs in the stars and who are bold and generous enough to follow a random star to find a Jewish baby king. This poetry highlights the sad irony that although Jesus came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, the Gentiles were the first recipients of his manifestation. This poetry gently points out the sadness of an insecure man fearing a gentle child. This poetry demonstrates that those whose imagination is generous and open will find the Christ child first, whether in the extraordinariness of the ordinary or in the mystery of the stars above.

This poetry is true not because it can be quantified by data but because it opens us up to the mystery of God, whose truth transcends all ages. In our own day, tyrants still run in fear of the child whose mysterious reign will outlast them. In our own day, ruthless leaders still exact their vengeance with cold calculation. In our own day, some religious still read the Scriptures unpoetically to buttress the image of those whose favor they court. In our own day, worldly affairs are still conducted secretly while the Gospel is preached openly to the ends of the earth.

But in our own day, there are still stars that defy our human knowledge. There are still signs in the natural order from a God with whom anything is possible and whose words are true. There are still people of generous hearts from other lands and other faiths who help us see the mystery of our own faith. There is still a babe born in a manger whom we are called to worship and adore. There is still a God we worship and adore and who makes the impossible possible.

And to worship this God is why we have come here this evening, in the middle of a work week, in all its superfluousness. We have come to worship a King who needs nothing of our worship, who doesn’t need our gifts of money or time and who doesn’t even need our presence. And yet, we must continue to give him those gifts. What else can we do? Our presence here is the most acceptable gift of all, in all its poetry and excess. Our worship is poetic praise of the One before whom earthly rulers cower. Our praise is fitting for One who reigns forever while earthly rulers know their time is short. And following the example of the magi, we worship the King in the manger, and we lavishly offer him the gifts of our lives because in a world of fear and scarcity, we know that by opening our hearts to his poetic mystery, we will be filled to the brim.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Epiphany
January 6, 2026

[1] I’m grateful to the Rev. Dr. James Farwell for this phrase.

The Christmas Story according to the Scriptures

Christmas pageants may do more harm than good. I recognize that this might be an unpopular opinion, but on this eleventh day of Christmas, let’s press the so-called Christmas story beyond the limits of a cute play presented each Christmas Eve to elicit our coos and ahhs.

The first problem with the Christmas pageant story as we know it is that is conflates two very different Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth. The second problem is that I have yet to see a pageant that is brave enough to tackle the darkness of the Christmas story. A Christmas pageant that would dare to mention the massacre of the Holy Innocents would create a riot the likes of which no church has ever seen. In all fairness, not even today’s Gospel reading dares to mention that tragic event. In fact, it jumps right over that passage.

But having been a bit hard on Christmas pageants, I should mention that there may be some value in a pageant, if only we were to rewrite the script. By rewriting the script, we would do everyone a huge favor, if not by coddling their imaginations, at least by being honest. Sometimes the comfort and solace we need the most is found not in papering over uncomfortable stories but in diving deep within them. That’s where the gospel resides.

If we were to write a different, more honest Christmas pageant script for the ages, we could call it “The Christmas Story according to the Scriptures.” The real meat of this pageant script would draw heavily from Matthew’s Gospel. Now, this is slightly difficult because there’s no birth scene in Matthew’s Gospel. There’s just a simple line noting that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea during Herod’s reign. But already we are wading into troubled waters, and we have moved well beyond the cozy stable with its eclectic menagerie. Mentioning the name of Herod is to name the one who shall not be named.

Our pageant according to the Scriptures should start after the birth of Christ, when Herod is seeking the child to destroy him. It would be a bit hard to act out Joseph’s dreams, but they would be necessary, too. In Matthew’s narrative world, dreams are important, because people actually believe that God might speak to them in dreams.

And Joseph certainly believes that God speaks in dreams, which is why he takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt. This is a journey taken in haste and with great urgency. All is not well in the year of Jesus’s birth. Joseph, Mary, and the infant Christ wait things out in Egypt, that land where their ancestors had suffered oppression under Pharaoh, the Herod of his own day. And in the hard-edged world of this Christmas story, the Holy Family isn’t free until the death of Herod. Someone’s death is someone else’s freedom. It’s a harsh, bitter world. Things are not as they should be, and Christmas pageant audiences across the country are asking for their money back.

But before Herod dies, he has flown into a maniacal rage, murdering all the boys who are two years of age and younger in and around Bethlehem. This is a world in which cruel tyrants lose their minds as they lose their power. This is a world where innocent children are slain because a grown man fears a little child. This is a world full of lies and cunning and deceitful manipulation. And still, after Herod is gone, Joseph is warned yet again about the threat of Herod’s son, who has succeeded him as ruler. Only then, after much wandering and fleeing do Mary, Joseph, and Jesus settle in Nazareth.

You can see that we have already stepped beyond the bounds of a Christmas story that is child appropriate. We are well beyond the confines of the manger. There are things in this pageant that we should want to shield our children from until the last possible moment. When they are old enough, they will learn that this is the Christmas story according to the Scriptures. They will learn all this when they finally realize that they live in a bitter world just as full of evil tyrants and savage despotism as the world in which our Lord was born.

In this Christmas story according to the Scriptures, the narrator would have to be an adult, and this adult would know all too well that life is still full of paranoid Herods and hideous atrocities that we can never fully explain. But our narrator would also know that even in a world full of Herods and searing injustice, God still reigns as King, and God is still working his purpose out. Because of this and throughout the pageant, our narrator would give voice to Matthew’s consistent refrain: This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets.

Only an adult who has known grief and read the news headlines and gaped in horror at the way humans treat one another could say Matthew’s words with any credibility. This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets. This, after all, is the pageant according to the Scriptures. And the narrator of this pageant would understand that Matthew isn’t cherry picking verses from the Old Testament to justify his story. Matthew is interpreting the story of our salvation through the lens of the cross. This is the Christmas story according to the Scriptures.

This pageant shows us that Jesus’s story is Israel’s story and our story, too. This is why the Holy Family goes into Egypt from which God delivered the Israelites of old. If the Savior of the world has come, he will deliver the whole world out of Egypt and into freedom. This pageant according to the Scriptures shows that all along, throughout the epic story of God’s people, God has been preparing something wondrous for the whole world, that it might be made whole again. This pageant holds both the realism of a sinful world with the mystery of dreams and surprises. This pageant traces the persistence of a family that will follow God through thick and thin, believing that God is with them the entire time.

This pageant according to the Scriptures demonstrates that God stays with humanity for the long haul. This is a God who has persisted with a stubborn people, who for a time believed God to be angry and fickle. God waited with them until they could see that God was never angry with them. God simply wanted to be in relationship with them. This God sent messages through the prophets, which were not heeded, but God never gave up on this chosen people. This God stuck with humanity all the way into Bethlehem. And this God went with them back into Egypt, and God brought the whole world back into the Promised Land once more. And this God is still with us as we, too, struggle through a world that is unwell. God is with us even when innocent children are massacred and as refugees wander homeless. God is with us all the time, for as evil threatens and misfortune prevails, those who follow God’s dream for the world will get up and go, time and again, just like the Holy Family on the move.

The Christmas story according to the Scriptures does not offer easy answers, nor will it attempt to explain suffering and evil, but it says quite clearly that God is with us in the valley of the shadow of death. As Matthew told us, This was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophets. The Christmas story according to the Scriptures refuses to settle for a simple, romanticized pageant, because ultimately such a plot is not good news at all. Such a plot is bad news for those who can’t summon happiness on a whim. It’s bad news for those who use temporary Christmas cheer to drown out their long-term sorrow. It’s bad news for all who are grieving and who must pretend as if they shouldn’t be sorrowful this time of year.

The good news according to the Scriptures is that God is truly with us in Jesus. God is with us so intensely that God is with us even unto death on the cross. God has been with us for the long haul, and Matthew shows us this. The pageant according to the Scriptures is about a Savior who humbled himself to share our humanity so that we might share in the divine life, and this is a mystery so profound that no ordinary Christmas pageant will suffice. For without a cross, there is no Savior who humbles himself to share our humanity because the cross is what happens when divinity reveals itself in human time.

There may be a time and a place for saccharine, ordinary Christmas pageants. But one day, when our children grow old and tired, they will yearn for a pageant according to the Scriptures. And they will rejoice with us that the story of our salvation has burst the bounds of a manger in Bethlehem. They will rejoice that the God who came to us in Jesus is with us for the long haul. And that is the good news according to the Scriptures.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 4, 2026