Change from the Inside Out

Last Sunday, two of our parishioners stood at the lectern and spoke movingly about their commitment to this parish. Then they explained their process for deciding how to make a sacrificial gift of money to support ministry at Good Shepherd. They told us that when they prayed about what pledge offering God was asking them to make for next year, they asked to be challenged. They didn’t determine what they could give after prioritizing other needs. They approached things the other way around. They asked for God to challenge them so that his will might be done.

Perhaps you were as touched by those words as I was. How often do we begin prayer by asking God to challenge us? The more tempting approach is to come to prayer with the intention of changing God. We want God to make us well or help us find that new job or redirect the hurricane so that it misses our hometown, which, of course, means that it will likely hit someone else’s hometown. It also means that if someone stays sick or the new job doesn’t pan out, then God is asleep at the switch. There’s an unspoken assumption that the answer to prayer usually involves some kind of change on God’s part.

Our forebears in the faith thought this way from time to time, just as we might be prone to do. They asked for God to spare them from their enemies, which frequently translated into the slaughter of those same enemies. They begged God to change his mind about the wrath they were sure he would swiftly inflict upon them because of their sin. But how many times can you recall anyone in the Bible asking for God to change them, much less challenge them?

I can’t think of many, but one is the tax collector in today’s parable. Let’s refrain from demonizing the Pharisee, though. He’s rightly doing what the law requires of him, and of course, he certainly should be doing those good things, like tithing and fasting. We should all be doing them. The Pharisee is simply a stock character that represents the most visibly religious, those of us who sometimes think that we have no need to change or that we have our spiritual lives sewn up nicely.

But the tax collector is the pariah of ancient times, who is in cahoots with the oppressive Roman government, skimming some for himself from the top of what the people owe to Rome. And yet, he is praying to be changed and challenged. Unlike the Pharisee, who is standing by himself, the tax collector is standing far off. Physically, by his posture in prayer, with eyes downcast and beating his breast, the tax collector pleads for God to change him. Only by calling upon God’s mercy will he be brought closer to God. And in standing far off and asking for mercy, the tax collector is implicitly standing not alone but with his neighbors. Visibly, this tax collector doesn’t seem to be close to God, but that’s only because he hopes he will be changed from the inside out.

The Pharisee, on the other hand, starts in the place of self-righteousness, telling God just how dutiful he is, which is hardly a prayer at all. Does he really want to change? Does he really want to be challenged? Does he have any need or concern for the neighbors who are “other” to him? If he considers them to be sinners, does his heart break over their sins? Does he long for their restoration to communion with God? He seems to scorn the visibly sinful, whom he readily names. But whether he wants it or not, he, too, will be changed, except unlike the tax collector, he will be changed from the outside in. After all, those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.

The truth is that all of us will be changed by God in some way or other, and it will either be from the inside out or from the outside in. If we live oriented to the things of this world, we will need to be changed from the outside in. Everything about our culture tells us that we have little need to change ourselves unless it involves climbing to the top of a social ladder. And even that usually involves changing others.

We must convince others that we are worthy of the coveted job or of entering the ranks of the elite university. We must argue our academic theses by proving that we are right and convincing others to change their minds. If others disagree with our opinions and convictions, we must get them to agree with us. Even in the Church, we can easily imagine standing by ourselves, looking down on the visible sinners, those “others.” We can laud ourselves over our tithe or faithful attendance at Mass, but meanwhile, lurking within our hearts are the poisons of pride, envy, lust, and wrath, things that might not visibly express themselves but that turn us away from our neighbors and inwards on ourselves.

It all has to do with our starting place. If we stand far off like the tax collector, we’re able to be changed and challenged and to orient our lives around the fixed point of God’s unchanging mercy and compassion. The more we understand that God never changes in his love and mercy, the less we tend to feel judgmental and resentful of others.

This is no easy task, but the Church, in her gracious wisdom, has given us the spiritual practice of confession that can help us shape our prayer so that we may be changed from the inside out, rather than the outside in. The tax collector represents one making a good confession, because he’s not asking for God’s mind to change; he’s asking for God to change him. There’s an unspoken protective mechanism in our longing to change God’s mind in that we hope we won’t have to change ourselves. Amid our cries for justice when asking God to bring condemnation on the visibly guilty, we duplicitously shield ourselves from God’s invisible demands on us. We ask not to be challenged but to be vindicated, and as such, we long for immunity from forgiving and showing compassion to our neighbors.

But in the sacrament of reconciliation, in which we confess our sins to God in the presence of a priest, the Church invites us to start in the position of the tax collector. The starting place in confession is the same, regardless of whether you tithe or don’t tithe to the church. It’s the same whether you are a CEO or a plumber. The starting place means that all of us are sinners and need to be changed and challenged.

In a good confession, we don’t make excuses for our behavior, nor do we grovel before God in recounting our sins. And we certainly shouldn’t feel a perverse pride in shocking the confessor. We simply kneel before God and the Church, which is represented by the priest. We come to confession without anyone but the priest knowing about it. It’s a private affair that protects us from pride. We objectively name our sins, without justification for why we did it and without blaming anyone else.

This regular practice keeps us humble. But for the confessor, there’s an extra temptation to pride as one who pronounces God’s forgiveness for others. And that’s why regular confession is necessary for confessors, too. Indeed, to be a confessor is to be brought low, because one realizes the astounding honesty of others in their own confessions. The truth is that in confession, both priest and penitent start in the same place, as sinners in need of God’s mercy.

Perhaps our simple and objective prayers might be the truest. God, have mercy upon me a sinner! They make space for the Spirit to pray within us. Although sacramental confession is ostensibly the most private act of the Church, it also draws us closer to our neighbors. The deepest prayer comes from our own recognition of how lost we are. We must become poor to pray well.[1] In that poverty, we find communion with our neighbors, who are fallible and broken, just like we are.

The heart of prayer is not trying to get God to change his mind; it’s in asking for God to change our minds and our hearts, to challenge us. In confession, we orient our lives around the fixed reality of God’s immovable mercy and compassion. God has no need to change nor is he capable of change. But we need all the change we can get to grow more into the likeness of God.

To be changed from the inside out, we don’t seek to be justified; rather, we start from far off, kneeling, with head bowed, to hear gentle but powerful words of forgiveness so that God can draw us closer and make us whole again. When we begin our prayer in asking to be changed, we gaze upon Jesus, giving his life willingly upon the cross and forgiving his enemies at the same time. On the cross, everything gets turned upside down and inside out.[2] The unexpected glory of the cross means that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. When face to face with the glory of the cross, each of us will be changed. There’s no escaping that. The only question is this: will it be from the outside in or the inside out?

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 26, 2025

[1] See Mark A. McIntosh and Frank T. Griswold, Seeds of Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2022), 140.

[2] This is inspired by an image from the Godly Play Curriculum by Jerome Berryman.

Praying in the Gap

If you are watching this Mass via the livestream, you may be surprised to know that what you are seeing on your screen is about thirty seconds behind live time. Let me stop so you can catch up to those words. There is a discernible lag in time between what I am presently saying and what you are hearing.

I saw this in action a couple of years ago when I brought Communion to a parishioner who, because of health issues, was viewing the livestream next door in our retreat house while the rest of us worshipped in the church. An acolyte accompanied me with a candle as I brought the Blessed Sacrament across the Lady Chapel garden to the retreat house. Our beloved parishioner was praying in the parlor with the livestream on the television, and as I arrived to administer Communion to him, I saw myself on the television just leaving the altar!

It was an odd sensation, as if I had been whisked back in time. Our parishioner was praying as if it were thirty seconds prior to live time. But, despite that time lag, were his prayers any less valid or relevant to the worshippers in the church? Of course not. His prayers had joined with those in the church as I, the priest, offered on their behalf the sacrifice of the Mass.

We are so often caught up in our linear thinking that we struggle to imagine God’s time, what we often call kairos time. According to the chronos, linear time of our Mass livestream, the prayers of those in the church are slightly ahead of those viewing the livestream. But to God, is there really any lag? To suggest a lag could imply two disturbing things. It could intimate that God is always two steps—or thirty seconds—behind whatever our prayers are. And as a result, God is someone we must plead with to change his mind. And if we don’t plead or beg in the right way, then maybe God never catches up to our live time. This sends the message that our prayer is never quite enough.

On the other hand, to suggest a lag between our time and God’s time could foster a sense that our prayers are unnecessary. If we pray for things and we never see them, then God is not just thirty seconds behind us. He might not be listening at all. Or, if God already knows what is going to happen anyway, why even bother to pray? And all of this is to miss the point of prayer.

There seems to be a significant time lag between the widow and the unjust judge in today’s parable. The widow represents the most vulnerable of ancient society, one who has no husband, possibly no family, and therefore, no support network. She is a woman after all in a male-dominated world. If she is poor, she will only become poorer. And if we were to comb through the Old Testament, we would see numerous exhortations to care for the widow and poor. That’s not an option; it’s God’s command.

We must assume that the widow in Jesus’s parable is experiencing some kind of injustice brought on by an unspecified accuser. She has every right, according to Jewish tradition, to beg for justice from the judge. The judge, unfortunately, is a scoundrel—immoral or amoral, apathetic, and one who clearly ignores the Old Testament injunction to care for the vulnerable. He has delayed long in granting justice to the widow. The time lag between experiencing injustice and realizing justice is long, far more than thirty seconds—probably more like many years.

But the widow is persistent. And, as Jesus says, even a corrupt, careless judge will eventually acquiesce to the widow’s demands, not because he is just but because she has been relentlessly persistent. So, how much more, Jesus says, will God grant justice to his children?

And yet, what are we to do as we continue to live in a time lag in this present day? We may very well believe that God will grant justice, but what comfort is that to those who are out of work with no job prospects or to the hungry with no food in sight? What good news is there for the immigrant on the verge of deportation or the ailing person with no financial recourse to decent health care?

Indeed, we could broaden the sense of impatience to expand beyond justice and injustice. What do Jesus’s words mean to us when we send up prayer after prayer in the face of anxiety? What are we to when we ask but don’t receive, seek but don’t find, and knock on a perpetually closed door? What do we do with the time lag between our petitions and God’s response?

The obvious temptation is what we have earlier named. We can imagine that we are simply not praying enough or praying well enough for God to heed our request. We need to be more like the widow, tenacious and relentless in banging on the door to heaven. Or we can give up altogether, wondering what good prayer is at all.

But the point of Jesus’s parable seems to be neither of those things. The point appears to be that we shouldn’t worry so much about the time lag. And if God’s time is different from ours, that would make a great deal of sense. This parable doesn’t offer neat answers. There’s no attempt to explain the time lag between our dissatisfaction with the present state of reality and the advent of God’s justice. Nor does the parable explain the perceived gap between our fervent prayers and God’s clear answer. And the parable certainly doesn’t condone tolerating injustice. The parable only offers a rhetorical question with a kernel of good news for us. Will God delay long in helping his chosen ones? I tell you, Jesus says, God will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

The point, Jesus suggests, is to live in the gap. In our chronos time, injustice lingers, prayers appear to go unanswered, and we frequently seem to lack what we need to fulfill God’s vision for us. All we can do and all we are meant to do is pray. Showing up to pray in such times as these, in the gap and in the time lag, is the visible demonstration of our faith.

But there’s more. We live in an age where we are often told that we should dispense with thoughts and prayers and move to action. But is not this a straw man? Isn’t prayer faith in action? And aren’t all our works in the name of Christ rooted in prayer?

Somehow in the mystery of God, our present prayers are never far removed from the realization of God’s justice. There is no time lag between our prayers and God’s justice. This may be small comfort to those one step away from losing their homes or who are watching the interminable suffering of a loved one, but it’s no reason not to pray. It is, in fact, even more of a reason to pray, because if there’s no time lag in God’s kairos time, then our prayers have everything to do with the justice and healing that God will ultimately bring and indeed is already bringing into fruition. For God will quickly grant justice. The real question is, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

There may be no timelier parable for us in this parish right now than the one Jesus gives us today. We are living in a time lag right now, with transitions ahead of us. In this pledge season, we’re addressing a lag between the vision God has called us to and the financial reality needed to sustain that vision. The Christian life is never static, never complete, never completely realized. It’s always in via, in motion. We’re always on the way as followers of Christ, and that means that, in some sense, we always live in that lag between injustice and justice, between hope and glory, between doubt and trust, between vision and reality.

If we were living solely as citizens of the world outside the Church, we might very well throw up our hands in defeat. The lag is too great. The gap is too wide. But this can never be the case in the Christian life. And at the end of the day, this brings us back to prayer.

We have over two millennia of Christian witnesses behind us who have lived in the time lag between injustice and justice and nevertheless persevered in prayer. Christians in the face of war, famine, persecution, and hideous disaster have hunkered down in prayer. They have made prayer as natural to themselves as their very breath.

Right now, in the time lag, we are like the widow in Jesus’s parable, but our accuser is perhaps more specific than the stock character of a parable. In the time lag of the Christian life, our accuser is the one whom Scripture itself calls the accuser. He’s the one who will try to convince us that the time lag between injustice and justice is insurmountable. He will try to tell us that the gap between scarcity and abundance is too wide. He will make a case against God’s vision for us, citing evidence that we don’t have the stamina, people, gifts, or money to realize that vision.

We shouldn’t believe it, and we shouldn’t fight it either. There’s only one thing we can do, and it’s what our Lord commands us to do. Pray always. Do not lose heart. Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Of course, he will quickly grant justice. The real question is, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

The Whole Story

I wish I had thought of today’s Gospel reading ten years ago when I was sitting at the bedside of a very sick woman in a Washington, DC, hospital. I was in the middle of a summer internship after my first year of seminary, and each day, I would make the rounds in particular departments of the hospital providing pastoral care. A woman wanted to talk with someone, and so I visited her.

I could tell she was tormented inside. In my role as an intern, I had to thread a very careful needle with patients. They came from all religious backgrounds, and sometimes none at all, and this meant that I often encountered theological understandings that chafed against my own core beliefs. But I wasn’t supposed to fix or correct anything I perceived to be bad theology.

The woman in the bed before me was a perfect example of someone wrestling with such a punitive theology. She was suffering and seemed to think it was because her faith wasn’t strong enough. She was certain that her lingering illness was due to some deficiency on her part. Does this sound familiar? It’s what we saw in last week’s Gospel reading when Jesus’s disciples asked for more faith after considering the challenging obligations of discipleship.

As I sat at the bedside of this woman, I knew that she came from a religious tradition that probably encouraged her to think that her sickness was the result of something she had done wrong or, at the very least, due to inadequate faith in God. If only her faith were stronger, she wouldn’t be suffering. I myself had grown up with such an understanding, and maybe that’s why I wanted to comfort her so badly.

I could hardly stand it. I tried every trick in the book to get around the prohibition against correcting anyone’s theology in my pastoral work in the hospital. In hindsight, I wish I could have told her about the story of Jesus cleansing ten men with a skin disease. I could have told it simply as a Bible study and let her draw her own conclusions. I wish I could have shared this story—which she might have already known—and then explained that the point of this story is not so much that the ten men are cleansed and healed. The point is, rather, that only one of the healed men returns to Jesus with thanks. I wish I could have told her that Jesus’s words at the end of this story get misinterpreted in translation. I could have said to her that Jesus’s words to the one thankful man who was healed could be rendered “arise, go your way: your faith has made you whole.”[1]

I would have liked to talk to that woman about the real meaning of faith and its relation to salvation and wholeness. I would have told her that there is so much more than physical healing in this story and that healing and salvation are tied up because God’s wonderful works are oriented towards wholeness and being restored to relationship with God and one another.

I would have explained to that sick woman that this story of Jesus’s healing is complex and contextual. I could have told her that in this part of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is on the way to the cross, and that means that we, his disciples—all of us—are always on the way to the cross as we follow him. And this means that we all suffer, and we all get sick, and it’s not because we’ve sinned but because sickness and brokenness and discomfort are simply a part of life on this side of heaven.

I could have told that hospitalized woman that the real clincher in this story is that the one man who returns to thank Jesus is a Samaritan. A Samaritan! He’s the outsider—you fill in the blanks here—who, like the Good Samaritan back in chapter ten, demonstrates what it really means to follow Jesus. I could have gone on to say that the one man who gave thanks was considered unclean by Jewish ritual standards and therefore needed to keep his physical distance from Jesus and others. He wasn’t allowed in the Temple until a priest determined he was once again clean. And he was a foreigner, an outsider, an enemy of the Jewish people.

And so, I would have explained, when this man is healed and returns to Jesus and Jesus tells him that his faith has made him whole, God has restored him to the community. He is no longer an outcast. He is no longer anathema. And because he has the awareness to recognize what God has done for him and to give thanks for it, he is made whole. His faith is not the reason for his healing. His faith is demonstrated in first seeing that Jesus can heal him, in seeking Jesus’s mercy, in knowing that he has been healed, and then in closing the circle by returning to thank the Giver of the gift.

If I could go back in time to the bedside of that distraught woman, I would have liked to tell her all those things. I might have told her that in Jesus’s ministry, he frequently had to correct misunderstandings that we can see over the course of the Bible itself. That’s why Jesus obliterated a causal relationship between sin and suffering. I would have said that Jesus himself said that his mission was not to seek out the righteous but sinners. I would have told her that we are all sinners. I would have said that if she felt that she needed to keep her distance from Jesus because she felt unclean or unworthy, then all of us, as sinners and fallible human beings, should keep our distance, too.

But then, I would have said that Jesus can heal us over any physical distance, just as he healed those ten men without even laying hands on them. I would have said that what Jesus wants is for every one of us to come closer to him, not just to get something from him but to witness to our faith in thanksgiving for all that we trust he is doing for us. And sometimes—perhaps often—Jesus heals us in ways that we can’t understand. He heals us even when the sickness lingers and death comes. And our salvation is not about escape from torment or avoidance of hell but in being made whole, in being restored to God and one another. And to experience this salvation and wholeness, we must be prepared to return to God again and again in gratitude.

More than anything, if I could go back in time to that woman’s bedside, against the admonitions of my hospital supervisor, I would have wanted to tell her about the Eucharist. I could have explained how the Eucharist ritually acts out the pattern of that story of Jesus and the ten men with a skin disease. If we could have been there on that road between Samaria and Galilee and closed our eyes, we wouldn’t have necessarily known that the ten men had a skin disease. We would only have heard their cry for mercy. That’s all they ask for. And if we closed our eyes in this church, we would hear at the very beginning of the Mass a similar cry for mercy. Lord, have mercy, because we’re all sinners. We’re all broken. We’re all sick and lost in some way. But what we cry out for is mercy. That’s what we need so that God can tend to us and heal us in the mystery of his grace. Our faith, which we profess every week in the Nicene Creed, is nothing less than a corporate belief in a God who will make us whole again.

And if we had been on that road with Jesus and the ten sick men, with eyes still closed, we would have heard one lone voice, minutes after the healing, cry out in praise of almighty God. We do the same here in this church. After a cry of mercy, God calls us to come closer so that he can feed us with the Body and Blood of his Son to make us whole again. We cry out in thanksgiving, and then, we hear a command for all of us to go into the world to proclaim the wonderful works of God.

Just as I wish I could have told that sick woman that her illness was no sign of her estrangement from God, I would like to tell all those who stay far from the Eucharist because of their suffering, that whatever their situation, they are not separated from God, that in their anxiety, loneliness, inner torment, and even anger with the reality of their lives, they can always come closer to God. Indeed, in those times of deep pain and uncertainty, they need the Eucharist the most. They can and should come close to God in the Eucharist, crying for mercy, and then let God do the rest. But I could also tell them that even though, for whatever reason, they choose to remain far off like ten men with a skin disease, Jesus can still heal them.

In the Eucharist, we receive a foretaste of the kingdom of God, where there are no outsiders or foreigners or strangers or untouchables. As a demonstration of our faith and like that one Samaritan man who was healed, we return to the feet of our Lord. We prostrate ourselves before him, week after week, crying out in praise of God, and we give thanks for all that God has done for us, trusting that what God has done is far more than we can ever imagine. God takes the divisions, rancor, and brokenness expressed in our cries of mercy, and God heals us. And then we arise and go on our way, showing the entire world that the God we worship in faith has made us whole.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 12, 2025

[1] Variant of the King James Version translation

A Gift to be Received

Some years ago, when I first encountered the Episcopal Church and its Book of Common Prayer, I also discovered a prayer called A General Thanksgiving. This isn’t The General Thanksgiving we recite at Morning Prayer. It’s A General Thanksgiving, located at the end of the prayer book.

I was in my mid-20s at the time and would often thumb through the prayers and thanksgivings in the prayer book before I went to sleep at night. There was a line in A General Thanksgiving that stirred something deep within my heart. In this prayer of thanks, we offer gratitude to God for many things: “for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love,” among others. And then, we thank God “for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on [God] alone.”

That line was unspeakably beautiful to me. In my nightly prayers, I kept returning to this curious expression of thanks. The possibility of thanking God for disappointments and failures was a seismic shift in my own understanding of the nature of human beings. In my mid-20s, I was moving away from a religious understanding that often seemed to emphasize what was wrong with humanity before God. It could, at times, suggest an easy connection between our misfortune and God’s wrath. But in A General Thanksgiving, I sensed a more optimistic and hopeful perspective on humanity’s relationship with God. There was a mystery of goodness hiding beneath the experience of adversity.

Rather than a dour appraisal of disappointments and failures, this thanksgiving pressed for more meaning. Disappointments and failures, in the providence of God, are not the end of the story, and they are more than an indication of God’s condemnation of human sinfulness, as we often find in the Bible. In that unsettling theology, God’s people fall prey to their enemies because they have sinned—or at least that was the flawed understanding of God’s people as they wrestled with their own disappointments and failures.

This still persists among us today. Hurricane Katrina was God’s vengeance on a sinful city. My cancer is the result of my lack of faith. The Church’s decline is the punishment of God on a rejection of orthodoxy. We do not have to search very hard to find this theology very much alive.

When things aren’t going our way, it’s all too easy to blame God or ourselves. When something is wrong, then we must have done something wrong. Rather than viewing humanity as intrinsically good, even if it’s prone to sin, or creation as ordered towards flourishing even if it’s marred by abuse, we view everything as spiraling downwards into despair. Disappointments and failures, inadequacies and challenges are simply what they are and quite possibly the effects of God’s vengeance upon us. If so, then how could they ever be thankful for opportunities to recognize our dependence on God alone?

When Jesus’s apostles ask him to increase their faith, they are overwhelmed by their disappointments and failures. The ministry field has not been perfect bliss, and they don’t believe that they have enough faith to accomplish what they’ve been asked to do. It’s a bit difficult to determine this from today’s Gospel passage. With no context, the first thing we hear is a desperate request from the apostles. But immediately before their request, Jesus has told them that if any of them should cause another to sin, it would be better for a millstone to be hung around their necks and that they be cast into the sea. And if someone sins against them, even as much as seven times a day, and then repents seven times, they should forgive that person. Before these warnings, our Lord has made it abundantly clear that the cost of discipleship will be very steep. It all seems like a hopeless, impossible task.

No wonder the apostles ask for an increase of faith. They are feeling wholly inadequate and unfit for discipleship. Quite simply, something is missing in their lives. Something is wrong. Their feelings of unworthiness pitted against God’s demands must seem like a disappointment or failure on their part. And for them, that seems to be the end of the story.

What’s needed is a divine intervention. God must add something to what they perceive they don’t have. They don’t have enough, and without that increase of faith they won’t have enough to flourish as apostles. And now, the disappointments and failures of the apostles are prompting them to rely on God alone. So far, so good.

But I think there’s more. The apostles want Jesus to be at their beck and call. We’re in a crisis, they say. We’re ill-equipped for the task. So, now, Jesus, give us more faith. Only chapters before in Luke’s Gospel, when confronted with a ravenous crowd of 5,000 people, the disciples throw up their hands and ask Jesus to fix the situation. Jesus volleys their request back to them. You give them something to eat, he says.

  And yet, a moment of spiritual insecurity for the apostles must require more than relying on God simply so that God will fix the problem. As Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” And the apostles’ frustration can’t be neatly ascribed to a lack of faith. The answer is more complicated. The apostles already have what they need to do what God is asking them to do, Jesus seems to say. They just can’t see it.

No special reward is due because of their service. They don’t need some extraordinary booster shot of faith, nor do they need a divine intervention. Look around, Jesus urges them. Look within your hearts. See that God has already given you enough. God is always supplying you with sufficient grace to follow me.

In asking Jesus for more faith, the apostles hint that they don’t believe they have enough. It should remind us that a scarcity mindset has infected Jesus’s followers even before his resurrection from the dead. The danger, though, with such a mindset is that our perceived inadequacy becomes the occasion for us to make demands on God. If God would only do that for us, we could be better disciples. And before too long, we have become the master, and God has become our slave. Our relationship with God is now one of needy manipulation. If our success in life is tied to the strength of our faith, then our misfortune is tied to our lack of faith. Every illness becomes God’s punishment. Every challenge becomes some cruel test from God to see if we have the mettle to make it through.

But this is all wrong. When our disappointments and failures are occasions for thanksgiving, then they are gifts, not punishments, because in them, we learn to be fully human. We learn that God has called us not to superhuman strength or to be God, but rather to grow more into the likeness of God, to be exactly who God is calling us to be by his grace, which is fully human and fully alive. And in this mindset of abundance, we can recognize that God is always supporting us lavishly with grace. Our disappointments and failures simply invite us to see the magnanimity of God’s provision.

Perhaps the modern Church has received a profound gift in the humility of our present moment. Plenty of people are adept at judging the decline of the Church as a just comeuppance for watered-down morals and glaring heterodoxy, or alternatively, for ruthless exclusiveness and disgusting hypocrisy. But maybe this present moment of disappointments and failures, of emptier pews and leaner budgets, is a moment to rely solely on God. We turn to God not to fix our problems but for God to open our eyes to the abundance that is already before us. In this, we begin to see that in and of ourselves, we have no ability to control our moment of crisis. If we refuse to accept our present condition as God’s wrathful condemnation, then we must return to the small things.

Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to work wonders. Faith is not something to be added to what we lack but a gift to be accepted because it has already been given by God. Only in our humility can we recognize that everything we need for Gospel ministry is right before our eyes. In relinquishing our desire for control, superhuman status, and eternal rewards, we as God’s servants bow humbly before our Master, who calls us not slaves but friends. And whatever our disappointments and failures may be, that is surely cause for thanksgiving.

Sermon by Father Kyle
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 5, 2025

Closing the Gap

There is a well-known trope present in feel-good movies. Small-town boy or girl graduates from high school and moves to the big city, usually New York City. They want to see the world and break the limits of their narrow childhood perspective.

And invariably, as the trope goes, the person who moves from small town to big city becomes a bit puffed up and snobbish. It’s what we Southerners call gettin’ above your raisin’. But as the movie trope continues, there is usually a moment of crisis that brings the small-town person up short. Often, it’s the illness or death of a family member, and so the big shot from the small town must either travel back home for a while or move there permanently. And, as you have probably guessed, the tension of the drama is resolved when the one who has gotten above their raisin’ usually falls in love with a childhood friend and decides to make the small town their home forever.

Of course, the point is that the main character has a moment of existential transformation. They realize that the big city isn’t necessarily better than the small town. The big city, for all its riches, has its negative side and poverty: anonymity, loneliness, lack of community, and little sense of being at home. In returning home, the characters of these rather trite stories rediscover their origins and finally see that the small town is richer than they initially thought.

It seems that aging keeps us connected to our origins. Aging is its own kind of poverty, of losing things we thought we would always have. Having moved from small town to big city myself, the older I get, the more I appreciate where I came from. When I remember my family’s heritage, I see more of myself in it, and I learn more about who I am. I remember the struggles of my hardworking ancestors and how they persevered. I remember where I came from.

But the rich man in today’s parable has forgotten his story. This isn’t something that is immediately apparent on the surface of the text. But the rich man has forgotten where he came from. And that convenient amnesia is the cause of his judgment in the next life.

The rich man’s story is much bigger than small town boy moves to big village and gets rich. We certainly don’t know if this is the case with the rich man, but his story goes back centuries. It starts when Abraham heeds God’s call to leave the security of his homeland to travel to the Promised Land. Abraham leaves everything, except for his family, and changes the course of his life. Abraham, in a spiritual sense, becomes poor.

And the rich man’s story continues when Abraham and his family temporarily flee to Egypt to escape a famine in the land of Canaan. Real suffering, genuine need, and poverty are all a part of the rich man’s story, although he doesn’t remember it.

The story that began with Abraham and Sarah is a long one, though. Well after the death of the first ancestors, the people of Israel escape yet another famine by going to Egypt, and they become slaves of a ruthless Pharaoh who doesn’t remember the favor shown to Joseph by the previous Pharaoh. The people of Israel are caught in a vicious cycle of amnesia, and forgetting is so often the root of evil.

That same group of people is brought into freedom by Moses, a former baby abandoned in a basket. And the story proceeds in the wilderness wanderings of God’s people on the other side of the Red Sea, when they hunger for food and thirst for water and are forced to rely upon God alone as they question whether they will ever reach the Promised Land. And then, on the cusp of that land, in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses offers an extended sermon in which the main point is to remember. Remember, he says, what God has done for you. When you get to the big city of the Promised Land, amnesia will strike again. You will forget how poor you once were. You will forget that you were slaves. So, remember. Always remember.

And we all know that they did not remember. They became tribal and hostile to their enemies. They turned to other gods. They became greedy, forgetting to leave the edges of their harvested land for the needy. Another exile, this time in Babylon, humbled the people of God for a time, but they still forgot, despite the cries of the prophets calling them to justice and peace.

Finally, God became poor in Jesus, choosing a manger rather than a palace for birth, fleeing as a refugee to Egypt while running from a cruel tyrant leader, and giving himself up freely on the cross. And even those to whom Jesus preached the Gospel and came to save forgot their stories. They couldn’t see that the One who became poor for their sake was one of them. In Jesus, we see the perfect remembrance of the story of God’s people. And this story is our story, too.

But the rich man has conveniently forgotten his story, perhaps because it’s too painful and challenges his comfort. His exquisite apparel is merely a symbol of his amnesia. He has put many layers of fine clothing and decadent living between himself and the living God. We don’t even know if he deliberately refuses aid to Lazarus. The problem is that he just doesn’t see him because he has forgotten his story and what it means to be like the poor. He can’t see his own poverty.

But Lazarus, at the gate of the rich man’s abode, is an open, raw wound. He is laid bare before humanity and God there at the gate. In his gory wound is the story of all humanity, the rich man’s and ours. In that open wound are times of famine, times of homelessness, times of grief, and times of suffering. It’s all there in that wound, with no purple robes to cover it up.

This Eucharist is an open wound, too. Before five minutes have transpired in this Mass, we are reminded that we have come before the God unto whom all hearts are hope, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hid. No amount of fine clothing, pretension, education, and status can cover the wound of our lives. Nor should this wound be hastily dressed. In remembering our own story and our own woundedness and vulnerability before God, we move closer to seeing God face to face.

And this is why we, as the Church, are judged when we fail to go to the poor. As the physical gap between us and the poor narrows, so does the chasm narrow between us and the bosom of God the Father. But as the gap widens, we find ourselves thirsty for the living God, in agony because that same God seems so far beyond our reach. We would long for even one drop of water to cool the fiery pain of that separation from God.

But being close to the poor is a dangerous thing, too. The first step, of course, is to see them, really see them. Because the rich man could not see them, even in the next life, Lazarus is simply another thing to use for his own comfort. And we must be wary of this, too. Getting close to the poor is not intended to alleviate our feelings of guilt. It’s not an act of charity to be used to gain heaven. It’s not something we do to feel better about ourselves. In going to the poor and getting close to their gaping wounds, we remember our own story. We remember that, once, we were poor and, in some sense, we are still poor. And when we can recognize that we have always been poor, we also discover that we have always been loved, too. In this, we begin to see the face of Christ.

If we are not convinced by Jesus, the One who has already come close to us, then nothing will convince us. No warning from the dead will provoke our repentance. Jesus has already come as one of the poor to be among us, and if we move close to him, there will be no gaping chasm in the next life. If we can’t see Jesus now, in the poor and those the world dismisses as refuse, then we will not recognize Jesus in the next life.

The chasm in today’s parable is the chasm of judgment, which is, oddly enough, a gift to us. This chasm of judgment is the gaping, anguished hole that is revealed when our own human insensitivity, cruelty, and irresponsibility are pitted against God’s infinite love, mercy, and compassion for all of humanity. It’s the gap created when the amnesia of our own story of poverty is placed next to the eternal remembrance of God’s provision for humankind in their poverty and suffering. In the recognition of our spiritual amnesia, that gaping chasm will seem rigidly fixed, incapable of being traversed. But with God’s mercy, with our prayers for the dead, and their prayers for us, anything is possible.

In the open wound of the Christian story, we part with all those things that keep us from seeing the stranger at the gate as part of our own story, too. And this is why truly to live with Christ, we must die to self. This is why the first must be last and the last first. This is why the humble must be exalted and the exalted ones humbled. This is why in the poverty of the cross we are given the life that is really life. And through the One who showed us how to be poor and then rose from the dead, that life is available to the whole world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 28, 2025

Whom Will We Serve?

It is possible to learn something useful from a negative example, which is why we should stop trying to redeem the dishonest manager. Because he features in a parable told by Jesus, we instinctively want him to be a morally upstanding fellow. He’s not, but can’t we still learn something from him?

When the dishonest manager tells his master’s debtors to quickly reduce their bill of debt, he isn’t telling them to eliminate his own commission in some kind of sacrificial act. He is quite literally manipulating his master’s debtors so that he will earn favor with them. And he is cheating his master because he is in a desperate situation. Knowing his own limitations and with no options, he tries to make the most out of a moment of crisis.[1] If he is already going to lose his job, he might as well build a safety net by befriending his master’s debtors, even if it means doing so dishonestly.

And in a confounding move, his master commends his actions. So, the second thing we must get into our heads is that the manager’s master—the rich man—is not supposed to be like God. If this parable is nothing more than an injunction to shrewdness for its own sake, then we’ve missed the point. And it’s certainly not an approval of dishonesty.

So, let’s stop trying to make the dishonest manager into an honest one. Only then can we feel the heat of Jesus’s real point. Jesus knew that the best way for humans to be taught by God was to put things into their own terms, especially when those terms bring us up short.

Jesus sets up a comparison between the children of this age and the children of light—or, in other words, between those whose lives and senses are directed only to the things of this world and those who are seeking the kingdom of God. Jesus knows that he must use worldly examples to shift our minds and hearts into the paradigm of the kingdom of God. He must speak our language to nudge us out of our laziness and complacency.

If the children of this age are cunning, resourceful, and shrewd with the wealth of this world, then why shouldn’t God’s children by adoption be even more resourceful with what God has given them for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? That should bring us up short. If the children of this age can brilliantly turn lemons into lemonade, then why can’t the children of God exercise their own ingenuity to further the proclamation of the Gospel? Are we listening now? Jesus’s parable is a biting indictment of our own failure of creativity and motivation for the sake of the Gospel.

But Jesus’s words are never a mere indictment. They are always intended to move us from compunction to change, from a sense of impossibility to possibility. His words disturb our inertia and awaken our senses to the infinite possibilities available through the power of God. Our Lord’s words take us back to the beginning of creation, when from nothing, God created everything. There is only anything because God in pure generosity wills it to be. We exist only because God exists. And this is the meaning of the resurrection, that from death and nothingness new life springs.

It is also possible to make the most out of a bad situation, like the dishonest manager. We are told that the Church is in crisis. Buildings must be maintained and bills paid, while the pews are far too empty. Some Christians promulgate messages of hate, prompting people to flee the Church to preserve their moral integrity. How do those who are left in the Church redeem the message? Rather than going down on their knees in prayer and then rolling up their sleeves and getting to work, too often the faithful slash their budgets and put padlocks on their endowments. They give less time to the Church and more time to everything else. They twiddle their thumbs while spinning narratives of despair. They live out of fear rather than out of creativity. But contrary to popular opinion, the present-day Church is not dying. It is simply suffering from a lack of gumption and resourcefulness because the situation seems so dire.

Meanwhile, outside the Church, people are getting to work. They may be anxious all the time, but they’re still getting to work. In a busy world, people are ingeniously carving out time in their schedules for earthly things. They are investing their energy and money in fallible people to whom they entrust their security and flourishing. They are tweaking the numbers on their 401(k)s and preparing with great resourcefulness for their futures. They are bending over backwards to get their ducks in a row so their kids can be accepted into the best schools and colleges.

Why is it, then, that those who still have hope in the future of the Church fail to be as motivated for the sake of the Gospel as they are in their earthly lives? Why do we check our shrewdness at the door of the church? Why do we struggle with seeing infinite possibilities in situations of ecclesial crisis? Why does our anxiety in the Church prompt us to inertia, while outside the Church, it moves us to action?

Perhaps in pondering these questions we should once again remember that the dishonest manager is not a good guy. And if he’s not a good guy, then Jesus is not telling us to view the dishonest manager as a moral role model. He’s urging us to reclaim resourcefulness and creativity for the sake of the Gospel. We can still learn something from a bad example.

If the children of this age are shrewd, the Church should be even more so. But the Church’s shrewdness is quite different from the shrewdness of the children of this age. The children of this age measure everything in quantities and numbers. They strategize and predict, and what you see is what you get. But the children of light are called to a different, more excellent way. In the kingdom of God, faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, and what has grown old can be made new. Nothing is irredeemable. Money is not for hoarding but for investing in possibilities, because giving is more important than saving, and trust is more important than skepticism. Faithfulness lies in our ability to make much of the small things in life.

Our modern crisis in the Church is not a crisis of possibility; it is a crisis of hope. When we are driven to despair, we can be certain that we are serving wealth and earthly things rather than God. And we can’t serve two masters, for we will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other.

To serve wealth means seeing the world as ill-equipped for our own flourishing and for the flourishing of the Gospel. But when we serve God, we see through the eyes of abundance, which Jesus showed us how to do. He fed the multitudes from scant resources. He healed those who could not be cured by anyone else. He demonstrated that death has no power over life.

And although the dishonest manager is not a good guy, we can always learn from a bad example. If he, relying on the world of wealth, could be resourceful in a time of crisis, how much more can we, who rely on God, be resourceful for the Gospel’s sake? The dishonest manager knows something that we often struggle to see. All is not lost when we are up against a crisis, and so he redeems the situation through his shrewdness. But we, as children of the light, have it far better than he does. When we’re up against a crisis of seeming scarcity, we know that any shrewdness we can rely on comes not from ourselves but from God. And our hope lies in the power of a God in whose infinite creativity we’re called to participate.

At Good Shepherd, we know quite a lot about being industrious for the sake of the Gospel. In a time of crisis, this parish hunkered down in prayer, and fueled by God’s endless generosity, parishioners rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They unlocked the padlocks on the meager endowment. They dug deep into their pockets to find what God had given them to use for the building of his kingdom on earth. And while others from outside looked on and counted down the days until closure, they were ultimately humbled when God gave the growth. This parish didn’t do business on the world’s terms; it did business on God’s terms. And that’s the best way of doing business.

Before us this day and always are two possibilities: we can serve wealth with its anxious narrative of scarcity, or we can serve the living God, who brings everything out of nothing and life out of death. And because no slave can serve two masters, we must choose. But if we choose the living Lord, the God of love, we will no longer be slaves. We will be adopted children of God, and the living Lord who calls us not servants but friends will show us that when we are at the valley of the shadow of death, he will bring us safely to the other side.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 21, 2025

[1] In his commentary on Luke’s Gospel, Luke Timothy Johnson describes the dishonest manager’s predicament as a “crisis.” See The Gospel of Luke, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991, p. 245.

The Love that Never Changes

It was about a year ago, as I was driving to the grocery store, when I learned from an NPR episode that Richard Hays, the late Biblical scholar, had changed his mind. Hays was perhaps most famous for his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, a faithful and thoughtful effort to relate Christian ethics to Biblical theology. In that book, Hays argued that the Church should be welcoming of gay and lesbian people while consigning them to lives of celibacy. It was a more eloquent version of “hate the sin, love the sinner.”

But sometime between 1996 and 2024, Richard Hays changed his mind. He and his son, Christopher Hays, an Old Testament scholar, co-authored a book in 2024, The Widening of God’s Mercy, and this was the topic of the radio broadcast I happened upon last year. In their 2024 book, father and son presented a heartfelt testimony, backed up by Biblical scholarship and theology, of how they had come to believe that sexual minorities in the Church should be offered the fullness of the sacraments, including ordination and marriage. Richard Hays had been struggling for years with cancer, from which he would eventually die last January. That book was both an end-of-life personal apology for his previous stance on issues of human sexuality and a theological apology for a Biblically based call to greater inclusivity in the Church. It was an act of repentance, of what Scripture calls metanoia.

The argument offered by Richard and Christopher Hays for their change of mind is that over the course of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, God could be seen to have changed his mind. As noted in the title of their book, God’s mercy is ever widening, and the story of Scripture shows this quite clearly.

In a touching passage of the book, Richard Hays admitted that he was ashamed of how Christians had used his prior reasoning to oppress and exclude others in the Church. And then he offered a moving confession, saying, “I was more concerned about my own intellectual project than about the pain of gay and lesbian people inside and outside the church, including those driven out of the church by unloving condemnation.”[1] If you ask me, that is not just a change of mind; it’s a change of heart that takes my breath away.

While I deeply admire Hays’s change of heart and certainly agree with where it led him, I think there is a problem with how he gets there. For centuries, the Christian tradition has upheld the notion of God’s impassibility, that God is not capable of change and therefore cannot change his mind. On one level, Hays’s position seems to agree with what we are told in the Book of Exodus today. God does seem to change his mind about the favor shown to the people of Israel. Although God has brought them out of Egypt into freedom, they have substituted worship of a golden calf for proper worship of God. God is angry, and God wants to punish them. But Moses pleads with God to change his mind. Moses reminds God of his mercy and compassion. And then, God changes his mind because of Moses’s pleading.

But is it really that transactional? Surely, God’s mercy isn’t contingent on our begging. Isn’t it more accurate to say that Scripture details how humanity’s image of God is ever shifting and evolving? Isn’t it humanity’s mind that needs to change about God, and not God’s mind that must change? This is certainly what St. Augustine once said about this very passage in the Book of Exodus. What seems like God changing his mind is merely our imperfect human perception of God’s nature.[2]

God does not change his mind. God can’t, because God is not a variable, fickle, mortal creature like one of us, and thank goodness for that. It is, in fact, precisely in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus, that we see the perfect, visible expression of God’s unchanging nature. And in the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin in Luke’s Gospel, we see the constancy of God’s boundless love.

The posture of the scribes and Pharisees when they see Jesus in the company of tax collectors and sinners is an apt image for all of humanity. In our human nature and in our limited compassion, we are unlike God. Just as we ourselves might do secretly, the scribes and Pharisees grumble against Jesus and judge his openness to all people. We could very well imagine hardened faces and arms rigidly folded across our chests. This is our posture when we can’t admit that we are wrong. It’s our posture when we resent the conversion of a criminal on death row. It’s our posture when we want to see our enemies burning in eternal torment. It’s our posture when we say we are seeking justice but are really shaped by our world’s eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth economy. It’s our posture when we don’t want God to forgive those who commit heinous offenses.

There is a deep irony here because when we grumble against God’s mercy and compassion for all sorts and conditions of people, we invert the way things should be. We, in our sinful resentment and hard-heartedness, become immovably so, an unchangeable, sinful foil to the perfect unchangeability of God. We become unchanging in our judgment and mean-spiritedness. And we make God in our own fallible image, rather than the other way around, and so in this distortion of the truth, God becomes the one who is changing, not in mercy but in wrath. God is the one we want to change from love to hate, from patience to anger so that God can smite our worst opponents, while we remain steadfastly vengeful.

But if we truly believe that Jesus is the perfect image of God and therefore the perfect image of love, the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are really about who God is and about the kind of people we are called to become by walking in the way of Christ. In these parables, God is like a shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep. God is the one who is always seeking the lost ones of his own accord. God is the one who wants no one to be lost, not even the vilest sinner.

God is like a woman turning her house upside down to find one lost coin. Her pursuit for her missing treasure is single-mindedly diligent. It’s the same with God. God pursues us in love with a persistence that we can hardly imagine, because each of us is a lost treasure to God.

These parables correct the distorted image of God that still circulates among people who call themselves Christians but are perversely energized by invoking God’s wrath against their foes. Jesus’s parables of the lost sheep and coin put God back into the position of the one who is unchangeable, and they invite us to recognize our humanity and sinful disposition to be unchanging in resentment. Above all, these parables invite us to be the ones who change. We are the ones who, like Richard and Christopher Hays, can have the courage to say that we have changed our minds and our hearts.

This is true metanoia and repentance, the about-face required of everyone in the Christian life. It’s not just a change of mind. It’s a change of heart that can only be prompted by turning from our sinful resentments and anger to face the God who is always, and has always, been eternally moving towards us in love. The defining feature of God is that he doesn’t change his mind. The defining hope of humanity is that it will always be capable of changing its mind.

When we admit that we’re lost, we will learn that we are found, always and everywhere by God. A God whose mind changes is not a God to whom we can turn. But a God who remains the same in perfect love, is a God who is always facing towards us when we turn from our hard-heartedness and sin to gaze upon his face of love.

The call of the Church in a deeply intolerant and unforgiving age is to be a community that rejoices in the discovery and homecoming of the lost, not in the punishment of the wicked. When we can rejoice that the most craven human being repents and receives God’s forgiveness, we are truly being the Church. St. Gregory the Great said it most eloquently: “true justice feels compassion, false justice scorn.”[3] We are seeking not our own justice, but the justice of God. And the justice of God shows nothing less than the indiscriminate tenacity of love.

So, rejoice, fellow sinners, with me. Rejoice that no matter how often we’re lost, we will always be found. Rejoice that there is no sheep too unimportant or insignificant for the persistent love of the Good Shepherd. Rejoice and be glad that it is never too late to change your mind. Because when it comes to love, God never changes his.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 14, 2025

[1] The Widening of God’s Mercy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2024), p. 224

[2] Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, vol. III, ed. Joseph T. Lienhard (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2001), p. 142.

[3] Quoted in David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2012), p. 192

Sit Down for Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resting in Christ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down the Ladder and into Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Jeremiah 23:29

[2] St. Luke 24:32.

The Song that Never Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticking with the Lord of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Will We Choose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Colossians 2:13.

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

The Direct Path to Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] King James Version translation

Sermon for Corpus Christi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering the Raw Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignited by Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting for the Incredible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ascension Day
May 29, 2025

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