Have you ever tried to think about nothing? My first experience was in a high school English class when the teacher invited us to try, for one minute, to think about nothing. Hardly ten seconds had passed before my mind was wandering off in all kinds of directions. Distractions abounded.
It was some years later that I discovered the practice of contemplative prayer, in which the point is not so much to think about nothing but to pray without words. The pray-er sits in silence, and when the distracting thoughts come—and they always will—one does not engage or judge the thoughts. The pray-er returns to a prayer word, a holy word that can be uttered gently as an invitation into silence. This silence is God’s first language, according to St. John of the Cross. And it was John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and other mystics of the Church who knew the rigors of contemplative prayer. Such prayer strips the pray-er down to the studs, so to speak, where nothing is left but a naked reliance on God alone. In that land of uncertainty, which can’t be controlled by our efforts, all that we have suppressed in our attempts to hide from God rises to the surface. Tears often well up, too. There is nowhere to hide, and in discovering that painful reality, the pray-er also discovers God in the depths of the heart.
It is to this deepest place of the heart that Jesus takes us in the apocalyptic passage towards the end of Luke’s Gospel. This is not, however, the usual way of reading the passage. But if we read it spiritually, we can imagine Jesus leading us through the practice of prayer, way down into the depths of our being, where God speaks and, where we can only listen to God after being reduced to silence.
The usual way of reading Jesus’s apocalyptic discourse is with anxiety and fear as an obsession with the end times. All the talk of wars and insurrections, of nations rising against nations, of earthquakes, persecutions, famines, and plagues is, frankly, terrifying. But even before such horrors, Jesus’s disciples will be arrested, persecuted, and thrown into prison. Those who love Jesus will be hated, even by their blood relatives. Hearing this passage provokes many distractions, like trying to think about nothing.
And this is why the typical way of reading the passage becomes a quest for certainty and specifics. It asks the same question that Jesus was asked when he predicted the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. When will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place? To this Jesus responds, “do not be led astray.” Jesus, it seems, is inviting us to navigate these very real, worldly distractions not with fear or anxiety, but with confident silence and a focused journey into the deepest regions of the heart.
The destruction of the Temple was indeed a real event. One can see the remains of that event even today in Jerusalem. But there is something more going on in Jesus’s dramatic discourse. The destruction of the Temple is also a spiritual image for us. In Christ, allegiances to places, things, and ways of being are reoriented around him. Jesus becomes the temple. Jesus becomes our focus. Jesus becomes our worship. And now, through the power of the Spirit, the temple can be found everywhere, especially in our hearts.
Beware that you are not led astray, Jesus says, for many will come in my name and say, I am. They will hijack the divine name for their illicit purposes. From the moment Jesus uttered those words even until the present day, many will lure us into idolatry claiming to be I am. Earthly rulers will come, saying, I am the one who will look out for you. But do not go after them, Jesus says. The allure of money will come saying, I am the security of your future and the certainty of your prosperity. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Anxiety will come saying, I am the one to worship because I will help you prepare for what lies ahead. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Succes and power will come saying, I am the way to fame and recognition that you have always longed for. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Many false idols will come, masquerading as angels of light, blasphemously laying claim to the divine name and urging us to worship them. But we should not go after them.
All these false idols and shallow promises are the root of so much of the evil that reigns in our own day. They are real, but they are distractions from our true calling. And Jesus invites us not to fall under their sway but to follow his summons into the depths of our hearts, into silence, where something else is to be found.
And if we make it far enough through this apocalyptic passage despite our fear and anxiety of what is to come, Jesus leads us to a place of great comfort. It is a place that is found in the very midst of troubles and distractions. In that place, suffering cannot be divorced from glory. Life cannot be separated from death. Sacrifice cannot be pulled apart from gain. And in that confounding truth, the pearl of the Gospel shines, even as the world is turned upside down.
In our perseverance through wars, unrest, natural disasters, and persecutions, we journey to the depths of the heart, to the place of silence. And from out of that place of silence and godly focus in the midst of chaos rises an opportunity to testify. For too long, we have assumed that prosperity and success are signs of God’s favor. But in the cross-shaped life of following our Lord, things are not quite so simple. In the places where all chaos is breaking loose, we have an opportunity to testify to the good news in Christ. Jesus calls us into that forbidden country, and we must be brave enough to go there.
But what shall we say? What can we say to a world hostile to the Gospel because it has lost trust in the Church? What can we say from ground zero of war, societal injustice, and biting division? How can we speak a Gospel whose very nature is humble suffering in the face of Christian triumphalism?
In the face of this gaping question, we are left with silence. We can only learn what we are to say when we are brought to the land of no words and have relinquished all our attempts to control what we say and do. It is there in that lonely, silent place that we are given the best news imaginable. It is there that Jesus himself will give us the words to say and a wisdom that none of our opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. It is there in that deep place of the heart, where all our idols have been razed to the ground and we are left with nothing but a pure, unrelenting love of God, that we can truly understand that not a hair of our heads will perish because by our endurance, we have gained our souls. We have gained true life, not by our own efforts but by letting God speak within us.
Today’s Gospel passage would not be the most obvious choice for Commitment Sunday. Thankfully, the passages have been chosen by the community of the Church. But nevertheless, we have been given an extraordinary gift from Luke’s Gospel. We are reminded of Jesus’s call not to follow the distractions and false idols of this age. We are invited to journey, with great endurance, through the tempting lures toward earthly success, fame, wealth, power, and security. In giving sacrificially of ourselves to God, we are letting God strip us down to the studs, where every false pretense, worry, anxiety, and unholy desire is refined in the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit so that nothing is left but a single-minded loyalty to the One who will give us true life.
Whether we like it or not, all the visible distractions of our own lives, all our human conceit, all our desire for control, and all the projects of our hubris will come crumbling down at some point. Not one stone of them will be left upon another. But in the silence of their destruction, a new sound is heard. It is the murmuring of God doing a new thing. And in the painful loss of all that we have worshipped and held dear, something new rises. From the tomb emerges a prayerful patience and a silent waiting for a word from God, who will equip us with the right words to speak in this age of desolation. In the place of all our fears, anxieties, and earthly hopes dashed to the ground will rise a total trust that each of our hairs are counted by God. And through such enduring trust, one day, we will find our souls.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
November 16, 2025