How Many Does It Take?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the rather tired jokes about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb. There are versions for every profession and type of person. How many CEOs does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one because the CEO holds the lightbulb, and the universe revolves around him.[1] How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Three. One to change the lightbulb, and two to debate whether they should change the bulb, and if so, whether it follows that they can.[2] How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? Eight. One to call the electrician, and seven to talk about how they preferred the old lightbulb.

But, in all seriousness, how many characters does it take for Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, to be healed? It may seem like a simple answer, but just see if you can keep track of all the characters in this well-known story from the Second Book of the Kings. Is it one character, that is, the prophet Elisha, who appears to be responsible for Naaman’s healing? Or is it actually eight characters?

First, there’s Naaman himself, because to be healed, he must take some responsibility for his own healing. Second, there’s the servant girl of Naaman’s wife, who first proposes a way for Naaman’s skin disease to be cured. Then, there’s Naaman’s lord, the king of Aram. We don’t hear this part of the story in today’s assigned passage, but it occurs in verses four through six. The king of Aram sends a letter with Naaman to the king of Israel, asking him to cure Naaman of his skin disease. The fourth character is the king of Israel, who is miffed when he’s asked to cure Naaman, thinking that he’s being played by the king of Aram. Character number five is the prophet Elisha, who tells the king of Israel to send Naaman to him for healing. The sixth character, perhaps easily overlooked, is the messenger that Elisha sends to Naaman to tell him how to be cured, which involves washing seven times in the Jordan River. The seventh character is a collective character, the group of Naaman’s servants, who finally convince him that Elisha’s instructions are really rather easy, so stop pouting and just do what he tells you. And then, of course, there’s God. There we have it. Eight principal characters are necessary for Naaman to be healed.

We might reasonably ask whether it’s really necessary for eight characters to be involved. Couldn’t it just be two, Naaman and God? Why couldn’t God simply cure Naaman directly? And what’s more, why would the prophet Elisha not even approach Naaman directly to heal him?

We can either write all this complexity off as an interesting story, or we can ask ourselves whether the way this story unfolds is intentionally part of God’s design. And how often do we find ourselves wondering about the nature of healing? Do we really need to ask others to pray for us or request the intercession of saints for prayer to be efficacious? Can’t we go directly to God? Do we need to bother at all with prayer if we can go to a doctor? If there’s holy water in my church’s baptismal font, do I need to trek across the globe to Lourdes or the River Jordan?

These are reasonable questions. Perhaps they are familiar questions to you. They are a bit like the lightbulb jokes, which seem so tired and corny. We laugh at how many people it takes to change a lightbulb because usually it takes more than one person, and our assumption is that it should not take eight Episcopalians to change a light bulb. Only one person who has moderate intelligence can climb on a ladder, unscrew an old bulb, and screw in a new one. We are, after all, an efficient people. Why not take the most direct path to the most obvious solution? Don’t bother with others if you can do something yourself.

But I suspect that there is some unavoidable truth in the lightbulb jokes. Is efficiency and the most direct path to a solution really the best way to go? Is our life’s vocation as simple as finding a way to make the most amount of money with the least effort and investment in schooling? Is stubborn individualism always good for us?

And so, back to Naaman and his quest for healing. What would have happened had Naaman not encountered the seven other characters in this story? We might ask whether Naaman would have been healed at all. After all, it’s not Naaman himself who initially seeks healing. It’s done at the encouragement of his wife’s servant girl, who had been enslaved presumably because of Naaman’s own conquests. She is of a nation that is enemies with Naaman’s people. This servant girl laments Naaman’s condition, and then the circuitous path towards healing begins.

How then would Naaman have sought healing without all those other characters? Naaman didn’t worship the God of Israel. His people did not get along with the people of Israel. Without the servant girl, the king of Aram, the king of Israel, Elisha and his messenger, even Naaman’s own servants, and especially without God, Naaman would probably have lived out his life with a skin disease.

Apart from this odd and complicated series of events, Naaman might not have found the God of Israel. Through the relationships that form in this strange story, Naaman’s healing happens, ironically, through the intervention of those who are other to his own kin. Enemies meet and are implicitly reconciled. Those who are marginalized, enslaved, or looked down upon play an instrumental role in Naaman’s cure. Naaman himself is humbled. It’s not necessary for God to heal him through the extravagant machinations of a prophet. It’s not even necessary, so it seems, for the prophet to mention God’s name directly in the instructions for healing. But have no doubt about it: it is the one, true, living,  God—our God—who is responsible for Naaman’s restoration to health.

I suppose that all of us can find a little Naaman in ourselves. Which of us doesn’t believe that our own specific circumstances are worthy of God’s direct attention? Isn’t our individual suffering worth an obvious and extravagant miracle? Doesn’t our personal relationship with Jesus supplant the need for others to be involved in our healing? But if God chooses to work through others, shouldn’t it be done through the most loyal of Christians or through our parish priest? Can God possibly work through those we think have no faith or religion at all? And besides, why are all those other people needed anyway? Can’t God just do it alone?

The story of Naaman has much to teach us, but perhaps most of all, it has something profound to teach us about how God performs wonders among us. Most of us would prefer for God to wave his hands over the wounds of our world—over the wars, natural disasters, unceasing violence, illnesses, pandemic, societal divisions—and work magic. If God wanted, couldn’t all of it be cured instantly? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler?

But we find, as did Naaman, that God doesn’t choose to do it alone. In the beginning, God brought creation into being because community was always at the heart of God’s vision for existence. And this is how God works wonders and miracles. Strange relationships form. Enemies become friends. Direct paths are twisted into bizarre detours. More than one person is needed to change a lightbulb.

God’s healing is so much more than waving hands to cause direct cures. God’s healing is far more than physical well-being. When Naaman is cured, divisions are healed, animosities are smoothed over, and social inequities are leveled out. The humble are exalted and the proud brought low. God’s healing is physical, emotional, and spiritual. Wholeness is achieved, and this cannot be done narrowly through magic tricks.

The part we don’t hear in today’s story is that when Naaman set out for the king of Israel to be cured, he brought a ridiculous amount of money with him, as if his healing could be bought. But he soon learned otherwise. It is so with us. We cannot buy God’s precious gift of healing.

Each of us is constantly healed by God, even if we’re not aware of it. But this healing is not about just you and God, or me and God. When each of us is healed, a whole host of people, those living and those who have gone before us, are brought along. One person’s healing is another person’s healing. It affects all of creation.

God’s gift of healing is a miracle not because of its visible extravagance but because of how it binds each of us to one another. This healing is so wondrous that it can’t be restricted to our individual relationships with God or private concerns over salvation. When God waves his hands over your wound or my wound, so much more is affected. God’s hands always cover the entire world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 9, 2022        

[1] https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/smart-light-bulb-jokes/

[2] https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/how-many-philosophers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb.html

Always Enough

Several years ago, when I was still in seminary, I was having dinner with some friends at their house. Over the course of the evening, the topic shifted to religion, and being the official theological student at the gathering, I became the dart board for some theological darts.

Two of my friends had become disenchanted with religion, and I secretly suspected that they wanted to find a measure of vindication for their own doubts and skepticism. A death in the family had precipitated a crisis of faith for one of my friends, which resulted in the person giving up on church and, presumably to some extent, on God.

How do you harmonize the presence of grievous sickness with God’s love? How can God be who we say God is and still allow suffering to exist? These were some of the questions lobbed my way, and they were good ones. But my friends’ rational and logical minds couldn’t tolerate any ambiguity in answers.

They were, in turn, surprised at my response to their queries. I had done enough clinical pastoral education to know that the least helpful response is to demean the very real anguish of others by attempting to justify or rationalize it. In the end, it can make those who are suffering feel like worthless people of little faith, and it often makes God seem cold and brutish, none of which is true.

So, I decided to respond with an honest answer. Yes, I could have quoted from the Book of Job or waxed eloquently about God’s love expressed through the bestowal of free will. But I opted for a simple and truthful answer. I don’t know, is what I said.

It's true. As much as I could find theological explanations for the existence of evil and suffering, when sitting at the bedside of someone with an incurable disease, those explanations will do little good. The godly response, I hope, is simply to respect their pain by staying with them and remaining silent.

To my surprise, and with a bit of proud vindication on my part, my friends stopped throwing darts at me in the form of theological questions to challenge God’s existence. I think they were humbled by the fact that I admitted my own limitations. I also admitted that I couldn’t adequately explain the mysteries of God. And this was different from their own quest to prove God’s non-existence or validate their own skepticism.

My friends’ vehement theological questions were tantamount to demanding something of me, as a representative of God in their eyes. Make us understand! Or perhaps, in reverse, prove our belief that God does not exist!

My friends’ demand of me was like the apostles’ demand of Jesus: increase our faith! This request for our Lord to add something to their existing faith, or lack thereof, is bossy at best and deceptive at worst. Based on Jesus’s response, it doesn’t seem that the apostles even have faith the size of a mustard seed, so it may very well be that the apostles were defensively covering for what they knew to be lacking on their part.

Unfortunately, the lectionary doesn’t give us the first four verses of chapter seventeen in Luke’s Gospel. In these verses, we see the reason for the apostles’ impertinent demand of Jesus. Jesus has laid out the rigorous expectations of discipleship. Beware, he says, of being the cause for someone else’s stumbling in the faith. It would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea than to be someone else’s spiritual obstacle. And while you’re at it, you must forgive another person who sins against you seven times a day and asks for repentance as many times.

The apostles are clearly intimidated by these stipulations of discipleship, and so they make their own demand of Jesus: increase our faith! The problem with their request is that faith isn’t a commodity to be doled out. One doesn’t recharge one’s faith battery when it weakens, and God is not the charger. The apostles really don’t seem to understand the nature of faith at all.

It’s easy to mirror the apostles’ response when we feel the weight of discipleship. As we become more aware of our human frailty, and as we feel less equipped for the task of following Jesus, we might be sorely tempted to make demands of God. Increase our faith! The intention is good: we want to follow God. But the response isn’t so good: we want God to do all the work. God has now become the dispenser of favors. We are now in the position of trying to control God. When there’s something we lack, we ask God to give it to us.

The litany of demands we can make is long. If we only had more money, we could do the ministry we are called to do. If we only had more members, more people would want to join our church. If we didn’t have so many other obligations, we could give more time to God. If we weren’t so tired all the time, we could be nicer and more magnanimous to others. If only the Church could give us clearer doctrine, we’d be able to follow Jesus more closely. These are all explicit or implicit demands for God to give us something we don’t think we have. But are all these just excuses for eschewing the responsibilities of being faithful?

The easiest response when things get tough is to give up on God. It’s easier to write God off than it is to admit that we don’t know how to explain some things about God. It’s easier to cling to our anger with God when we’re going through a difficult time than it is to release the anger by searching for where God is in all of it. It’s more comforting to find a religion that will give us all the answers we want rather than assuming personal responsibility for navigating ethical quandaries with grace. It’s easier to blame God for our misfortunes than to trust that even if we can’t see it, God will heal us and help us, somehow, in some way, and especially when we can’t explain it.

But there’s one more problem with treating God as a giant problem solver. Yes, it leads us to manipulate God, and yes, it leads us to manipulate other people to make things easier for us. But it also ignores perhaps the most important thing of all. To demand that God increase our faith assumes that we don’t have enough of what we need to be faithful disciples.

To cry out for God to increase our faith rests on the assumption that there is a dearth of resources, whatever they may be, as we walk the way with Jesus. This was the erroneous assumption of the apostles. Intimidated by the rigorous demands of following Jesus, they incorrectly assumed that he was asking something of them that they couldn’t achieve without needing something more. Jesus, work your magic. Wave your magic wand and give us more faith.

But the truth is that in the kingdom of God, we always have precisely what we need to do what God is asking us to do. The church that cries out to God for more resources to enable ministry can’t see that they might be focusing on the wrong ministry. In God’s kingdom, ministry is shaped and built around the gifts and resources also present. Vision forms from the planted seeds of these gifts from God. The person struggling after a crisis who simply asks for more faith might have unrealistic expectations of herself. Perhaps her faith is witnessed not in overcoming grief but in trusting God in the midst of personal anguish.

Having faith means, above all, truly believing and trusting that God has given us everything we need to complete the work to which he is calling us. Rather than looking around and seeing a scarcity of necessary resources, could we look around and see that something as small as a mustard seed is crucial to life-changing ministry and service? Having faith does not mean we have all the answers. It means that we are willing to be responsible for what God has already bestowed upon us. It means not taking the easy way out.

If I could go back in time to that dinner with friends years ago, I would have added something to my response to their theological questions. I would have told my friends that instead of expecting a foolproof theorem for theological quandaries, they had everything they needed to follow Jesus. God could hold their initial anger and questions, which might be an impetus to deeper relationship with him. Perhaps their questions could be turned into the gift of helping others struggling with doubt. Maybe they weren’t as faithless as they wanted to seem. Because  no matter how many questions we may have, no matter how bleak the picture may look, and no matter what we seem to lack, one thing is sure: God has always given us enough.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 2, 2022

Closer than It Appears

The increasingly litigious spirit of a chronically anxious world and a decline in personal responsibility have bequeathed to us a plethora of disclaimers. Caution: this cup of coffee is very hot! Note: the characters in this movie are fictional and in no way represent actual or historical figures. Beware: objects in your rearview mirror are closer than they appear.

If the parable of Lazarus and the rich man has made you anxious, perhaps we should begin with some disclaimers. Note: the characters in this story are fictional and in no way represent actual or historical figures. Warning: this parable contains graphic imagery. Beware: to find the good news in this story, prepare for your life to be turned upside down.

For starters, this parable, like all parables, is fiction, and the characters, other than Abraham, are, too. This parable does not recount a historical example of someone named Lazarus, not to be mistaken for Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Martha and Mary. And the rich man has no name in Luke’s Gospel, even though history has named him Dives. Nor is this parable intended to be a literal description of the afterlife.

And yet, how tempting it is to look for a model to help us comprehend life after death, perhaps to be assured of our self-righteousness or the deserved condemnation of others. It seems that Lazarus is in heaven with Abraham, and the rich man is in hell. There’s not even the hope of purgatory in this story. The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus is vast, unbridgeable even. Hell is utter torture. And the rich man is deeply alone, fixed in his torment by the eternal flames. He has cooked his own goose, and his justly deserved punishment is everlasting.

But remember our disclaimer: the characters in this story are fictional and in no way represent actual or historical figures. The first thing we should get in our heads is that it’s not certain that Lazarus is in heaven and the rich man in hell. It could be that both are, rather, in the same place, Hades. This is not heaven or hell but a place for souls in the afterlife.

And this brings us to our second disclaimer: this parable contains graphic imagery. Yes, that’s true. And it appears that’s precisely the point of this parable. This parable can’t be reduced to exact parallelism or neat and tidy models. This parable is meant to grasp our imaginations and hearts, because if we’re anything like the rich man and his five brothers, even if in a more moderate way, then we need to awaken from our slumberous complacency.

Which brings us to a third disclaimer: to find the good news in this story, prepare for your life to be turned upside down. This parable will not feed our contented self-righteousness if we are assured of a place in heaven, nor will it exempt us from personal responsibility. This parable’s graphic imagery, which is hard to stomach, is intended to transform hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and to summon compassion.

This story suggests rigid dichotomies, including the unpassable chasm between those who’ve merited the consolation of God’s compassion and those who’ve merited fiery torment. There’s either eternal rejoicing or eternal suffering. But these polarities move us nowhere except to fear. And if our hearts and minds are truly to be changed, we need another motivation. To repent, we must be moved by something other than anxious fear. We must be moved by love. Because this graphic story is contained within the Gospels, our task is to tease out its good news. And this brings us to our final disclaimer: warning, objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. Salvation, is closer than it appears.

But from a literal reading of this story, it appears that salvation is at a distance. If you get it wrong in this life, you’re doomed, eternally in fact. We’re told that the rich man in his torment looks upon Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham from a distance. And Abraham tells him quite clearly that there is a great chasm between him and the rich man that cannot be traversed.

But perhaps we are too focused on looking ahead to gain eternal life when the entrance to eternal life is in our rearview mirror. Behind us in the mirror, if we can shift our eyes from looking only ahead, we see the great oppositions of our own day. Here we see the seemingly uncrossable gulf between rich and poor. We see the vast gap between blue and red. We see the gulf between black and white. We see the glacial crevasse between those with jobs and those who cannot find work. We see the dangerous canyon between those who’ve made up their minds and those whose dignity depends on open-mindedness. We see all manner of chasms that seem to have no bridges across them.

On one side of the chasm are those like the rich man who only see a person as a means to an end, where even in the afterlife, the poor are still servants for the rich. Even beyond the grave, the rich man still expects his privilege to endure. But this parable shatters that illusion with the demand for personal responsibility.

Yes, this story contains graphic imagery, perhaps only suitable for adults. But remember our other disclaimer: the characters in this story are fictional and in no way represent actual or historical figures. The situation portrayed in this story contains truth, but the story itself is not meant to be heard literally. Because when we read this story literally, we become focused only on what lies ahead for our own benefit rather than what lies in our rearview mirror, which just might benefit others. Trying to find a literal model for heaven and hell in this parable will do no more than widen the gap between us and them, rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, the righteous and the unrighteous. Remember: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In this case, salvation and fullness of life are closer than they appear. This is the pearl of good news in this story.

The rich man perceives a chasm between himself and Lazarus precisely because he has lived his entire privileged life structured around the vast chasms of social polarities. He has feasted sumptuously while poor Lazarus lay forlorn, as refuse, by his gate. It’s true for us as well. How easy it is to live inside our gates, whatever and wherever they may be. How easy it is to feast while offering no crumbs to the hungry. How easy it is to imagine that we have a privileged place in heaven while others get their just deserts. Better to look ahead for our own sake than to look behind us for the benefit of others.

But if only the rich man could have known that final disclaimer: salvation and fullness of life are closer than they appear. The rich man is like those among us whose ears are stopped and whose eyes are closed to true salvation waiting just around the corner. The rich man is so busy looking at himself in the mirror or looking ahead for his own benefit, that he misses what’s in the mirror behind him.

Are we like this, too? Do we have trouble seeing that salvation in Jesus is right among us? As we move ahead in our busy lives, Jesus is there at the gate where the homeless sleep and the hungry beg for food. Jesus is there at the gate where migrants are welcomed in and given safe lodging. Jesus is there, holding close to his bosom, those who died alone or who received no comfort in this life. Jesus is there to give names to those like Lazarus whose names have been forgotten on earth. If we allow this parable to coax us into belief rather than scare us into acquiescence, we will find that salvation is indeed much closer than they appear. In life’s mirror, we too often see only ourselves.

But the good news is that unlike that of Lazarus and the rich man, our story is not yet finished. There is still time to look in the rearview mirror, not at ourselves but at the picture of hope behind us. We have our hope in One who came among us to cross the chasms of our world. He came to seek those lying at the gate and to carry them into his bosom. He came to throw feasts for those who could never hope to receive the crumbs from tables of plenty. He came in judgment, for sure, but not to condemn. He came to invite us, with him, to close the chasms among us. He still comes in each and every Mass, to invite us to sit at his table and to feast.

To accept the invitation, we must be willing to look in the rearview mirror and see all those others who have been invited with us but left behind. We must sit at table with Lazarus, the poor, the oppressed, and even the reviled sinners who have repented. We must dine with all those whom we could so easily cast to the other side of a chasm. The question is whether we will accept Jesus’s invitation. And if we stop looking only at ourselves or ahead for our own gain, if we pause to look in the rearview mirror at the vast picture behind us, we will finally see that all along salvation and fullness of life have been far closer than they have appeared.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 25, 2022

What Shall We Do?

This past Wednesday, I hosted the first meeting of a bimonthly Bible study on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. We began with the second creation story from the book of Genesis, where God forms Adam from dust and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Then, the serpent beguiles them. Remember what God says to Eve after he learns that Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit from the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden. God says to her, “What is this that you have done?”

In Wednesday’s Bible study, I realized that I have always heard that question from God as one of angry accusation, which may say more about the image of God that has been instilled in my mind over the years. But, I asked the students on Wednesday, do we really know God’s tone when he asks this question? What if God was sorrowful that Adam and Eve had disobeyed him?[1] What if God was only objectively posing the question to get them to own up to what they had done?

Questions in the Bible, like God’s question to Eve, can be heard in different ways because, of course, we often don’t get any indication in Scripture of the tone of the speaker’s voice. Read on paper, a question could be either accusatory or genuinely curious.

So, then, what do you make of the dishonest steward’s question to himself in today’s parable from St. Luke’s Gospel? Recall what he says after his master has demanded an accounting of him and fired him. The dishonest steward asks himself, “What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me?”

What emotions are behind this question? Once again, my initial reading of this parable probably sheds more light on my own tendency towards reactivity in times of crisis. I imagine the steward as being anxious. Yikes! My job has been taken away from me. What shall I do? After all, he is now out of a job, and as he later frankly admits, he isn’t strong enough to dig, and he’s too ashamed to beg. What in the world will he do? I wonder what tone you hear in the steward’s voice as he queries himself. Is it one of anxiety and fear? Is it a question posed with elevated blood pressure and a fight-or-flight response to a crisis?

If you imagine anxiety in this question, you’re not alone. The late Rabbi Edwin Friedman, who honed family systems thinking, suggested that we inhabit a culture of chronic anxiety. We demand quick fixes, which usually result in the desperate pawning of tricks and gimmicks that will serve as the panacea for all our problems. But until we recognize the emotions underlying all these reptilian initial responses, no source of data or advice from a consultant will enable us to operate as healthy, well-functioning human beings.[2]

So, is the dishonest steward operating from a chronically anxious mindset? Is he employing a crude mechanism to ensure the stability of his own future, even if it means being dishonest? Or can we read the steward’s self-posed question in another way?

What if the steward is not exhibiting extreme reactivity because of anxiety but is rather responding well and cleverly to his unfortunate circumstances? Perhaps he is merely being shrewd, the quality for which he is praised by his boss.

Scholars and commentators have spilled vast quantities of ink trying to figure out just why Jesus seems to commend someone who is acting dishonestly. Some have even employed astounding interpretive gymnastics so they could explain away the steward’s behavior as not dishonest but honest. This, I think, is missing the point. Jesus is not praising dishonesty or encouraging us to be Machiavellian. Jesus is using an earthy example of shrewdness and resourcefulness to show us the vast potential in God’s abundant gifts.

God’s abundance? you may ask. Nowhere is God’s abundance mentioned in this parable. And that is precisely the point. We’re always prone to miss the evidence of God’s abundance because we’re looking for something obvious. But God’s abundance is most often realized in situations of seeming scarcity. Maybe another parable will help us see this.

There once was a church that had been through many tumultuous and difficult years. Indeed, it was believed that this church wouldn’t survive. Some suggested that selling property would be a good idea. Others said certain budget line items should be slashed. People from outside this church pitied it and said under their breath that it would never survive, bless their hearts.

People came, and people left. They would occasionally drop into the church to pray or worship on a Sunday, but some were discouraged by the obvious decline and never returned. The church was experiencing a frustrating, catch-22 situation common in small parishes. There seemed to be insufficient financial resources to fund staffing to move forward. The church was the steward of a vast amount of property but not enough money to maintain it. At times, the difficult past haunted any prospect of a new future. There seemed to be little hope of a way out of this intractable situation.

And then, one day, a group of bold parishioners said to themselves, what shall we do? It seems like what we’ve been given might be taken away. We are not strong enough financially to fix our building problems, and we’re too ashamed to close. Then, they had an epiphany. We know what we’ll do, they said. We’ll change our vision. We see that while we might be financially challenged, we have great and wondrous gifts from God. We have beautiful buildings, and spacious ones, at that. Our worship and music stand out among other churches. We had a long, beautiful history before we ever had troubles. We know what we’ll do! We’ll invest our hearts, souls, and minds in this new vision. We’ll take risks in how to spend and use what God has given us, and we’ll invest ourselves in God’s abundance. We’ll be generous, not parsimonious. And from that moment on, things began to change.

Do you recognize this parable? Do you recognize this church? This is you, this is us. This is the Church of the Good Shepherd. You’ve been resourceful. You’ve been faithful in a little, and truly, you’ve been faithful in much. You’ve understood, perhaps without realizing it, the essence of Jesus’s parable today. You are such a parable.

But there’s more. This parable is not just about the wider Church or our own parish church. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s about whether we hold something of ourselves back before God for fear that we don’t have enough to give. It’s about whether we hoard our talents or money because we don’t think that God has provided us with enough.

But this parable is also about whether we can find the gleaming pearls of God’s abundant gifts to us even when we don’t seem to have enough. And when we’re in a pit of scarcity, we might just need to shift our vision so that we can see that we’ve always had enough and that we have enough right now, even though others will always tell us we don’t. Here’s the difficult part: we must ignore those jaded voices and trust that God has given us exactly what we need to be resourceful.

We’re entering that time of year when we intentionally and prayerfully discern how we can use what we’ve been given by God in his service. In an unstable economy, with soaring cost-of-living increases and an uncertain future, it may very well seem like we don’t have enough to give. We may be hunkering down even more into saving and stashing away all we can get. Considering a tithe or a sacrificial financial gift to support God’s ministry could seem like a pipedream for this particular year. And then next year, it will seem the same. And then the next.

Jesus’s parable hits us in an uncomfortable spot because it forces each and every one of us to be honest about how we respond to situations of seeming scarcity. What shall we do? It’s a difficult economy, and there are so many demands on our money and time. When we ask ourselves what to do, are we asking with deep anxiety and fear? Or can God help us shift the tone to one of trust? Can we be less anxious and more resourceful?

For the truth is that God has given us every gift and material resource that we need to serve him and his kingdom. Our hurting, chronically anxious world needs all our gifts. It needs our money to support beauty, wisdom, generosity, love, and peace. God has entrusted us with much, whether it seems like much or not. Let’s use it for his gospel and mission. And only then will our vision open to see the true riches that are yet to come. So, beloved in Christ, what shall we do?

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 18, 2022

[1] Thank you to Rabbi Nora Woods, Interfaith Chaplain at Bryn Mawr College, for this suggestion.

[2] Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve (New York: Church Publishing: 2017)

Impossible to Keep

After Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday, the Philadelphia Inquirer featured an article on the queen’s 1976 visit to Philadelphia. It was, of course, the nation’s bicentennial. While visiting the Independence National Historical Park Visitor Center, the queen presented a birthday gift to the city in the form of a ten-ton replica of the Liberty Bell cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in London, where the original bell was cast.

The queen made a provocative proposition during this presentation. Maybe Independence Day should be celebrated as much in Britain as in the United States. As she put it, “[n]ot in rejoicing at the separation of the American colonies from the British Crown, but in sincere gratitude to the founding fathers of the great republic for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.”[1]

It seems to me that these words are very timely indeed, because I can hardly imagine a monarch or world leader saying such a thing today. At times—most of the time, perhaps—it feels as if we are losing all cohesion in civilization. Nations wage war and will fight until the end because they are convinced that they are right. Political parties sabotage their opponents, even their own members, because they have made up their minds on any number of issues or because they just want to be stubborn. Christians argue over issues unrelated to the gospel and prefer schism to living with difference.

That’s why I’m struck at a deep level by the late queen’s words delivered nearly fifty years ago. It’s difficult for me to imagine any modern, powerful nation agreeing to change its mind once it has set its course. To consider yielding what is impossible to keep is usually characterized as weakness rather than commendable humility.

It’s no secret that human pride is the root of much evil. Spiritual pride is a failure to acknowledge one’s own frailty and sinfulness. It’s also an eagerness to point out the sins of others; indeed, it even delights in them. Whether it’s Jesus’s critics mentioned in today’s Gospel or self-righteous modern Christians who think they have all the answers, spiritual pride is a dangerous thing.

Unsurprisingly, when confronted with opposition, Jesus usually resorts to parables. He clearly knows that trying to argue with people who have already made up their minds is a futile endeavor. But telling a parable is different. A parable draws on real, concrete human experience. It’s vague enough to entice the listener’s imagination, at least for a time, until the parable sharpens its convicting point.

This is the context for today’s parables. Jesus’s critics judge him because he hangs out with notorious sinners. And because they seem to have made up their minds about Jesus and about the sinners with whom he associates, they grumble.

To respond to this grumbling, perhaps hoping that minds and hearts could be changed, Jesus tells three related parables in sequence. We get two of them today. The third, which we don’t hear, is the parable of the prodigal son. There’s so much good news in these parables. The quest for one lost sheep among a hundred is like God’s passionate quest for finding us when we are lost. The woman who goes to great lengths to find one of ten silver coins, resembles our heavenly Father who will do anything to find us and bring us home. And in the parable of the prodigal son, how can we not find a similarity between God the Father and the earthly father who is waiting with open arms when his wayward son returns to him?

This is all good news. But I want to focus on another aspect of these parables. In every single one of these stories, the one who finds what is lost rejoices. And finding the lost is not an individual achievement. Finding the lost affects the entire village or community. When the lost are found, it’s a cause for great celebration and rejoicing.

Yes, Jesus tells these parables to illustrate God’s boundless love, mercy, and compassion. But he also tells these parables because he clearly hopes that his critics will change their minds, whether they are those of his day or of our own day or even us. The outward and visible sign of an inward change of heart and a change of mind seems to be an ability to rejoice that others have been found by God. In Christian theology, we call this change of mind and of heart metanoia. It is repentance.

And this brings us back to the words of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Isn’t learning how to rejoice with others a valuable life lesson? Isn’t it really about knowing “the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep”? Because the truth is that, while it may be easy to rejoice in our own individual successes and accomplishments, it’s far more difficult to rejoice in the successes of others. And it seems nearly impossible to readily rejoice in the successes of our enemies or those whom we dislike.

Which of us rejoices when the death row inmate guilty of a heinous crime finds Jesus in prison and experiences God’s forgiveness? Which of us can imagine frauds, convicted felons, corrupt hedge fund managers, cruel politicians, and destructive leaders entering the pearly gates? Can we muster any joy at the conversion of those we perceive as lost? Do we secretly wish they stayed lost?

Dare we contemplate the prospect of God actively seeking out such people? Would God really leave us, the righteous, out in the wilderness while he searches eagerly for the sinners or the irresponsible? And how unfair is that! Would God scour the planet to find those who have angered, hurt, and destroyed the lives of others? Are three parables of Jesus enough to change our minds so that we could begin to imagine a God of such boundless mercy and compassion?

Such a God is scandalous. We are usually taught that changing one’s mind and summoning compassion for the vile and offensive are signs of weakness. To have mercy is to deny justice. But the truth is a bit more difficult to hear. The truth may be that we are not good at changing our minds. And an unchanged mind is an unchanged heart and is also a soul unwilling to turn back to God’s open arms. Lest we criticize Jesus’s critics, at times, I suspect we are there, too, with the scribes, Pharisees, and the elder brother of the prodigal son. It’s much easier to grumble at the company God keeps and at his gratuitous mercy and compassion. It’s much harder to change our own minds.

Our Lord offers us a difficult truth today. As Christians, we are called always to find the right time to yield what is impossible to keep. What is impossible to keep while remaining a Christian is our anger, resentment, and lack of forgiveness. Those are the precious things we want to keep because they are so satisfying. Vindictiveness masquerades as justice and spiritual pride as righteousness.

I’m always struck by a question posed in our prayer book’s Rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent. The priest asks the penitent, “Do you, then, forgive those who have sinned against you?”[2] This is exactly like Jesus’s questions in the parable. The answer he assumes is yes, of course! Yes, we would go after the one lost sheep of the one hundred. How couldn’t we? Yes, we would turn the house upside down to the find the one lost coin. What else could we do? But we know that truly rejoicing with those who were lost but have been found is not easy at all. And Jesus seems to suggest that the outward and visible sign of forgiveness is not saying “I forgive” but rather our ability to rejoice in the salvation of our enemies.

The most authentic mark of our Christian discipleship is not our self-righteousness or our churchmanship or our emotional zeal for Christ. Those things can be deceiving. The truest mark of our commitment to Christ is our ability to rejoice with those who, no matter what they have done, have experienced the joy of God’s scandalous mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. This commitment is marked by an open willingness to understand that by following Jesus we must yield all the poison in our veins that keeps us from rejoicing with those who have been found by God. And above all—and here’s the most difficult part—we must let God help us to learn that it is always the right time to yield what is impossible to keep. And maybe God can change our minds, too.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 11, 2022

[1] “Queen Elizabeth II was the first sitting British monarch to visit Philly. Here’s what happened when she did,” by Nick Vadala, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 2022 (https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/queen-elizabeth-philadelphia-visit-1976-20220908.html)

[2] Book of Common Prayer, p. 451.

A Gesture of Love

Some years ago, the famous composer and conductor Pierre Boulez visited Manhattan School of Music to work with the orchestra. I was a student there at the time, and because Boulez was both famous and infamous, I took some time out of my own practice schedule to sit in on one of the rehearsals. As I watched and listened, I was mesmerized by Boulez’s style of conducting.

Most of us are probably used to animated conducting styles: large gestures, dramatic cues, even hopping up and down on the podium. But Boulez’s conducting gestures were quite minimal, almost eerily so. Some might characterize them as cool, even cold. His conducting box was very small, maybe two square feet. His motions were careful and controlled. So when he moved a hand up or even lifted a finger, it took my breath away.

Reading the Gospel of Luke is a bit like finding significant gestural movements within its literary conducting box. Admittedly, through sometimes unwieldy translations and often sparse details, it can be challenging to get a vivid picture of Jesus. When Jesus makes eye contact with someone or a particular adjective is used in otherwise terse prose, we should pay very close attention. The art of reading Scripture is indeed about finding those priceless and dramatic moments.

 Did you catch one of those moments today? First, remember that in chapter fourteen, we are halfway through the Gospel. Back in chapter nine, Jesus suddenly announces that he will suffer, die, and be raised from the dead. And then, we are told, he sets his face to go to Jerusalem. From now on, Jesus is headed to the cross. And if we follow, we’re headed there, too.

When we enter the story today, notice what happens. Large crowds are following Jesus. Despite his difficult predictions about the future and demands for discipleship, people are still flocking to him. Are they simply impressed because he has worked miracles? Is it because his teaching is so compelling? Do these people hope to gain something from him, maybe healing for a relative or even for themselves? We don’t know, but Luke tells us that many, many people followed Jesus. And then. . . wait for it. . . something significant happens within the conducting box. Luke the Evangelist’s baton moves outside the circumscribed conducting box. Jesus turns and speaks to those who are following him.

What, you say? This is not so dramatic! But remember where Jesus has been heading—straight toward Jerusalem. And here, he stops his progress to the cross, turns, looks at those in the crowd, and then delivers some hard words. They can’t be his disciples without giving up all their possessions. They must be willing to hate relatives. The cost of discipleship is immense. No one gets off easy.

But now, picture this. You and I are among the large crowds on a dusty road following Jesus. Our reasons for following are various. Some of us do it because we were brought up to do it. Some of us are strangely drawn to the teachings of this mysterious man who is our Messiah and Lord. Some of us want Jesus to do something for us. Some of us may be sheepishly and privately hedging our bets with Pascal’s wager and feel that it does no harm to follow Jesus and if everything we’ve been told really is true, it will only help us. Whatever our reasons, we are all in that large crowd following Jesus. And then he turns and looks at us and demands more than perfunctory reasons for following him. Jesus looks at you. He looks at me. Luke the conductor’s gesture has brought us into this story. It is about us.

If we really listen to Jesus’s words and meet his gaze, we should be uncomfortable. Jesus lays it all out there. We must be willing to forsake family and friends for his sake. We must carry our own crosses. We must fully estimate the cost of this exercise in discipleship, otherwise, we might face ridicule or disaster if we don’t succeed. Jesus demands that we part with every material thing, ideology, and stubborn view that we hold in greater estimation than following him. And yet, if that’s all we can see in Jesus’s gaze as he turns and looks at us, we would see only bad news. We would search in vain for the joy in following him.

Indeed, if we do take an accurate assessment of the situation around us, we might wonder if we are among a crowd. Are the numbers of our companions on the Christian journey really increasing, or is the rather tired narrative of Church decline frustratingly true? How many excuses have you heard for leaving the road behind Jesus? Are the crowds getting smaller and smaller on this road? How many have been left behind?

 It can feel like a lonely place on this road. We take to it with the natural burdens of life. We bring the weights of our family troubles, our illnesses, our financial debts, our professional aimlessness. And then Jesus stops, turns, looks at us, and gives us seemingly bad news. Is this why so many turn back or take another route? If we keep ourselves at arm’s length from this difficult text, it seems to bear no good news. But if we enter into the story, there is something more.

As I said before, we should be looking for that easily overlooked but significant gesture from the conducting hands of Luke the Evangelist. A hand is raised. A finger is lifted. Jesus turns and addresses us. He addresses you. He addresses me. He challenges our complacent reasons for following him. But could his difficult words be more than discouragement? Could they be more than mere warnings? Could they, in fact, be an invitation into something that we have not yet seen?

Perhaps we can be too quick to look for the shame in Jesus’s judgment. We see judgment only as condemnation. We see it as another mark against us and one more measure of how we can never be enough. But as Jesus turns to face us, he is soon to turn yet again. He is going to Jerusalem. And we are invited there as well. Jesus is not putting up a wall. He is opening a gate. Maybe his judgment is really about healing. The love of God that surpasses all we can imagine is there in that look from Jesus. More worldly leaders expect people to stare only at their backs. But Jesus turns and looks at us with love. And he invites us forward to the heavenly gates.

Make no bones about it: the journey ahead isn’t going to be easy. Jesus never said it would be. But when we feel alone, we are closest to him. For our own small congregation, Jesus’s words are encouragement, reminding us that as we face many challenges, it doesn’t mean we’ve lost the faith or have been forsaken. It could be that precisely in our smallness, we have found the narrow way into the kingdom. As Jesus gazes upon us, he says that when we feel like we’ve lost our way, taken the wrong path, or made the wrong choices, we always have one more chance to answer his question: will you follow me? Jesus says that even though he’s asking us to part with all our treasures, maybe it’s so he can help us find true treasure. When we are asked to trust one who demands so much of us, we can be certain that the gains far outweigh the cost. When things aren’t going so well for us, it doesn’t always mean that we aren’t faithful or have done poorly. It means the prosperity gospel is wrong and our poverty can be a sign that we are truly following Jesus. And the best news of all might be that when we give up something of ourselves, we are helping others to find the life they never had.

Although we may give up on him, Jesus never gives up on us. Jesus doesn’t turn merely once to greet us. He turns time and time again, inviting us over and over into the Father’s kingdom. Most people, if ever, tell us that we should give things up, unless it’s to gain a better body image or prestige. We are usually told to take more and more on. In the world’s estimation, we are never enough and have never been enough and will never be enough. To gain respect in the eyes of others, we must feed the world’s ravenous mouth with our money and our time and our investments.

But Jesus demands only one thing. It is no small thing, but it’s worth everything we have. Jesus demands that we bear our cross by giving up all else that prevents us from following him, because in doing so, we’ll find life, not just for ourselves but for the entire world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 4, 2022

Learning How to Play

Of all the images from this week’s summer camp for children, one image stands out in my mind. Four children are huddling together on the driveway outside the Tower doors. Three of the children are looking down at a multi-colored circle drawn with sidewalk chalk. These three children are pushing mounds of chalk dust into the center of the circle. But one child looks up at the photographer, with the hints of a grin on his face, as if the adult has visually intruded on a private game.

Without any backstory, the picture alone warms the heart. The four children were enraptured by their play, which was wholly unprompted and unguided by adults. But the photographer understood the backstory. During the week, children had submitted to a regime of carefully planned stories about saints, songs, games, art projects, and service projects. But by day four, it was clear to the adult supervisors that maybe the campers simply needed some unstructured time to play. And this is how we arrived at sidewalk chalk art.

When we got to the circle drive in front of the church, I had intended to lead yet another structured activity for ten minutes or so before music time, but one by one the children began to leave the circle of my planned lesson to begin their own creative projects. And I let them. Before long, campers had divided into groups, working out of their own artistic inspiration. The group captured in the photograph decided to form their own business, which they called Chalk Industries. And soon, they had selected a CEO of the company, as well as other officers, signing a binding contract to sell colored chalk dust. Squish it between your fingers, they said, and it’s a form of calming therapy. Somehow, we had moved from activities scripted by adults into pure, imaginative delight.

Reflecting on the words from the prophet Isaiah this week, I realized that there was a theological lesson in the children’s play and art. As I’m wont to do, I usually prepare for camp or even Sunday formation classes thinking that it’s my opportunity to enlighten the children, but they usually end up teaching me that planning, rules, and structured time hold no candle to unrestricted delight and play. This week, the children at camp taught me a lesson in keeping the sabbath.

Now, children sketching pictures on concrete and creating a company that sells chalk dust seem a far cry from the prophet Isaiah’s words today, but let’s look at them again. Isaiah says that the sabbath itself should be a delight, and the sabbath is about delighting in the Lord. If we were to press a bit further, we would see that the sabbath is also directly related to Isaiah’s urgings towards social justice. The sabbath is indeed the very foundation of such justice.

When we encounter the prophet Isaiah’s words today, they are announced to a people who have recently come out of exile in Babylon and returned to their homeland in Jerusalem. They are longing for a glorious, promised future of rebuilding the temple and reclaiming a lost past. But this resettled people soon realize upon their return to Jerusalem that things are not as utopian as they had imagined. There are enmities and rivalries among them. There is ethnic tension. There is isolationist thinking. And it takes Isaiah, speaking God’s prophetic word, to announce that nothing can be rebuilt without a shared understanding of sabbath.

Only pure and utter delight, unconstrained by individualism and competition, could lead to the rebuilding of the temple and to the flourishing again of a community emerging from trauma. The hope of the future lay not in heeding moral injunctions but in reclaiming an understanding of sabbath. No one owns the sabbath; it is pure, shared gift from God. The sabbath resists control. The sabbath resists individualism. The sabbath resists the pointing of the finger and mean-spirited judgment. The sabbath resists every attempt to make unrestrained delight into a utilitarian means to an end. The sabbath teaches that each of us can only experience such delight if others experience it, too.        

And yet it often seems that the sabbath is only about what you do and don’t do on a particular day of the week. For some Christians, the sabbath is a day on which you can’t partake of alcohol. It’s a day to avoid fun. It’s a day bound by certain obligations that enable us to keep the peace with God because, at heart, we are scared of him. It has become a day of restrictions. No wonder Jesus had to remind us that the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath. It didn’t take long in the grand story of God’s people for the day of rest and delight to become a day full of anxiety about pleasing God. Then it became a day full of anxiety about pleasing others. Before long, it was a day chiefly about pleasing oneself.

See how quickly, too, that anxiety filters into concerns for social justice. There’s always another person to feed. There’s never enough money to temper the excesses of economic injustice. There are never enough hours in the day to accomplish all that we can do. There simply isn’t enough. We aren’t enough, no matter how hard we try. We are so very tired of trying to keep up with what we imagine is demanded of us.

And perhaps this is why God is so frequently associated with anxiety and fear. We are anxious that we are not doing enough to please God. We are anxious that if we don’t check the right box, fulfill that commandment, and do enough good works we will be perpetually out of favor with God.

But on Thursday, as I watched the formation of Chalk Industries right in front of the church, I saw the story of creation happening. Yes, it was much less grand and on a much smaller scale. It didn’t take six days. It took only thirty minutes. And yet I saw God looking upon the darkness and empty void saying, let there be light. I saw God delighting in what he was making. I saw God longing for companions because the creative enterprise could be more than a solo job. I saw God bringing creation into existence not to serve a utilitarian purpose but as nothing more than an unadulterated act of play and creativity.

And then I saw in myself, however well-intentioned it was, the need to control the play of the children before my eyes. I saw how I had become anxious about filling every minute of the morning with activities so that the children wouldn’t get bored. I saw myself worrying about whether the children were enjoying themselves. I saw myself trying to regulate the results of the camp.

But through God’s grace, the children disrupted all this with their unprompted and unstructured play. The children instinctively longed to play with others, not by themselves. They huddled together in circles and created their own business and made their own rules. They shared ideas and ownership of their imaginative enterprise among themselves. The glorious photograph etched in my mind and memorialized in digital form shows the naturally creative and communal impulse of children. It shows sabbath in action, preserved for a moment in digital amber, before adults swoop in with their well-structured plans and need to control.

No matter how much our hearts may and should be set on achieving social justice, eradicating violence, establishing economic equality, and assuaging the needs of the poor and oppressed, we won’t find such justice as individuals. We can’t enact social justice from a place of anxiety. It will emerge when we have found pure delight in the wonder of God’s creation. We will only find the fullness of God’s promised peace, righteousness, and justice when we have embraced the sabbath.

So, I ask you to imagine this. What would happen if we found ourselves scripting our future a bit less and praying a bit more? What if we found ourselves moved by the power of the Holy Spirit from some of our rigid structures and into margins of freedom where we could huddle together and play? What if we pointed fingers less and, instead, used them to grip pieces of colored chalk and draw a new picture of the future on the sidewalk? Instead of thinking that we always know what is best, maybe we should let the children teach us how to play.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 21, 2022

Talking about the Weather

Everybody knows that to keep polite company, there are certain things you do and don’t do. If you’re invited to dinner at someone’s house, bring something, whether a small gift or a bottle of wine. Compliment the quality of the food and thank the host. And for goodness’ sake, don’t talk about religion or politics. If you are struggling to make conversation and don’t know where to start, you can at least talk about the weather.

Talking about the weather is a rather shallow level of conversation. That’s not to say that I haven’t spoken of the weather to make small talk. I do it all the time. But talking about the weather is not really making conversation.

At its most benign, talking about the weather is simply a way of engaging another person, especially if you don’t know them well or are at a loss of words. At its worst, though, talking about the weather is more sinister. It’s more than just a way of trying not to offend the dinner host. It’s a way of isolating oneself from Christian responsibility.

It’s not only about what we say or don’t say. Talking about the weather is about our nonverbal actions as well. I’m sure you know how this goes. You can’t do that in church because it’s political. You can’t point out the racist comment of a dear friend or family member lest you offend them or endanger our friendship. We know we shouldn’t do business with that company because of their unethical practices, but the prices sure are right. That article on child poverty was incredibly sobering, but I have too many problems on my hands and there’s nothing I can do. Time for the comics section.

But listen to Jesus’s words: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” If I’m honest with myself, they make me want to talk about the weather. These aren’t easy words. Who wants Jesus to talk about division in a nation so deeply divided? Who wants Jesus to talk about the destructive effects of fire while wildfires are raging in some parts of the country? In an overcommitted and stressed-out culture, who wants Jesus to talk about the rigors of a baptismal life, a life that requires death to individualism? No, it’s better to talk about the weather. The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

It’s easy to talk about the weather. We have all the meteorological means of predicting when it will rain, when we need to water our plants just a bit more, and when we need to walk the dog before the storm hits. In the Church, too, we are skillful at predicting the weather. It’s summertime, so attendance will be low. It’s a holiday weekend, so we better not schedule the big parish party. It’s November, so get your checkbooks out. The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

Perhaps, though, we have some good reasons for talking about the weather. Why, indeed, would we wish to linger on news of divisions, scandals, and catastrophes when our Lord himself has called us to peace, love, and reconciliation? We are a people of the good news. We are intended to bring people together. We are charged with making peace. We are asked to love our enemies. And so, our churches, maybe even our homes, become refuges where we don’t talk about certain things. We are intent on keeping the peace. If we can make our homes and hearts safe enough, we don’t have to let the bad world in.

But the bad news does get in. We learn that 1,400 people have been shot so far this year in Philadelphia.[1] How many people turn the page and move on to the real estate section? The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

Sobering statistics on poverty just miles from home, searing images from an unending war, neighbors on the next street without money to see a doctor. Hearts melt for a time. Then it’s time for the book review. The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

It’s true that probably not one of us wants to hear Jesus talk about necessary divisions or bringing fire to the earth. Why would we? It most likely confuses us, but it almost undoubtedly disturbs us. The simplest reading of Jesus’s words can also encourage the most destructive behavior. Some Christians relish division because it will pit the good against the bad in the name of Christ. Nations attack other nations because God is on their side and Jesus spoke about division after all. How can there be real peace, especially when we must use violence to defend Jesus’s honor?

But others eschew such violence as a way of following their Lord. They are disturbed by Jesus’s talk of division and lack of peace. His language sounds harsh and angry. Better to talk about the weather. The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

It’s only when we let Jesus call us hypocrites that we have something to learn. We hear the sting of his words, not to become mired in shame or guilt but to wake us up to who God is calling us to be. Because if one person suffers, we all suffer. No, the weather is not always nice outside. It’s frequently rainy and stormy. It’s cloudier in some communities than in others. And if we’re all members of a human family, when there’s one cloud in the sky, there’s a cloud over the whole earth.

The mere absence of conflict or division is not necessarily encouraging. It’s not necessarily good or right. Talking about the weather is one more way of “making peace with oppression,” to quote the language of our prayer book.[2] Talking about the weather is hunkering down in our biological families of origin, refusing to share any sympathy with those of our larger family in Christ. Talking about the weather is reading about poverty and violence and systemic injustice and deadly isolationism and then turning the page to the comics. The weather sure is nice outside. Sunny, low humidity, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

Jesus didn’t come to bring violence. He didn’t come to disturb the peace as a stereotypical knee-jerk radical. Jesus came precisely as he was sent by the Father, as the Son of God, as truth itself enfleshed and dwelling among us. And this truth, peace, love, and righteousness cannot coexist easily with a world that only talks about the weather. Jesus’s truth burns unrighteousness away. It disturbs corrupt world orders and complacent systems of oppression and power, all because it’s good for us. But those who talk only about the weather can’t help but perceive that as violence to their easy lives.

The unjust worldly violence we rightly abhor only ends in destruction. The just violence of Jesus’s life, work, and witness is different; it disturbs us into being the people we have been called to be and ushers in God’s kingdom. An easy peace is no peace at all. In a strange way, the presence of division among us, of tension, even of conflicting ideologies might point to some good news that God has prepared for us. If people are not just talking about the weather but are instead disturbed because of injustice, then just maybe, with God’s help, a different future is possible.

Believe it or not: today’s Gospel has good news for us. It always does. You and I have a choice to make. We can talk about the weather. Or we can risk division and conflict to talk about what God is ready to change through us by making us fully alive. Because the weather isn’t so great outside. It’s cloudy with a chance of storms. But thankfully, that’s not the end of the story. God has something different in mind. Let’s stop talking about the weather, and then through God’s marvelous grace, the sun can shine again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 14, 2022        

[1] “Everybody Is Armed’: As Shootings Soar, Philadelphia Is Awash in Guns,” Campbell Robertson in The New York Times, August 11, 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/us/philadelphia-gun-violence-shootings.html?searchResultPosition=1)

[2] The Book of Common Prayer, p. 209

In Via

They left their homes and embarked on life-threatening journeys, traveling thousands of miles on foot. They crossed deep and muddy rivers. The heat was at times unbearable. The risks were immense. But it all seemed worth it, because they were following the hope of a better future in a new homeland, a place where they could flourish.

No, this is not the story of Abraham and Sarah, although it’s similar. In Abraham and Sarah’s story, God speaks to Abraham and tells him to uproot his family from their homeland in Ur. God will lead them to a promised land in Canaan, and Abraham’s descendants will become as numerous as the uncountable stars in the heavens. Abraham’s lineage will eventually reach to the ends of the earth because of God’s promise. For Abraham and Sarah, the risk of leaving the familiar is worth it because God’s promise will surpass their wildest dreams.

The other band of travelers to which I’ve referred, like Abraham and Sarah, leave the familiarity of their homeland for the promise of something better. These travelers leave Venezuela, a country steeped in conflict, and head to a land of freedom, the United States. Once over the border in Texas, they are met and given a promise. Take a free bus ride to Washington, DC, and you will find everything you need.

But having arrived in Washington, they find the promise to be an empty one. Having made it to what they thought was freedom, they suddenly discover themselves without money, homeless, jobless, and living in tents or without so much as a covering over their heads. They have ventured out on a promise that was really no promise at all.[1]

And this is where their story diverges from that of Abraham and Sarah. The migrants from Venezuela find themselves on the streets of Washington, just steps from the Capitol, with no homes, searching for food and support, hoping against hope that someone would help. The real tragedy is not that they haven’t reached their final destination, wherever that may be. It’s that the promise they followed was no promise at all.

The migrants’ story poses a seemingly intractable problem, doesn’t it? People uproot themselves from their countries, taking an unauthorized chance on this nation of freedom, hoping that they can find some better life here. But often, this land of freedom does not seem to be what is expected. We who are residents here don’t seem to know what to do with migrants when they appear, unbidden and unwelcomed, on our doorstep. At the root of this problem are conflicting interests: migrants want to better themselves and live a life of flourishing, and those of us who lead relatively stable lives are disrupted by them. It’s not our problem, some say. They have imposed on us.

But Scripture suggests otherwise. Throughout its pages, there may be no more common story than that of the migrant. It’s one long story that starts with Abraham and his family. It continues into the land of Egypt, hostile to the Israelites. It persists beyond the Red Sea through the wilderness for forty years. It threads its way through the territories of hostile nations who give no aid to the wandering Israelites. It moves from Jerusalem to exile in Babylon and then back to Jerusalem. It follows Mary and Joseph from Galilee to Bethlehem, and then carrying the infant Jesus into Egypt and back home again. It tracks the short life of an itinerant Jewish teacher and preacher in his ministry, into a lonely garden of Gethsemane, and eventually outside the walls of Jerusalem to a place of execution. It traces the paths of the apostles, on the other side of the empty tomb, spreading to the ends of the earth. It follows the Church through its struggles and victories, and it finds us here in this church today, knowing that we have a destination, too, although it is yet uncertain.

The story of the migrant is not just about twenty-first century politics or humanitarian efforts. It’s the story of our lives as a Christian people, a people who are always on the move, who are always in via—on the way. Our final destination is never fully under our control.

Perhaps this is why the stories of migrants unsettle us. Not only do we see people in dire need and feel guilty about it, but we see a challenge to our own security. The migrants remind us that worldly promises are sometimes false. They remind us that the world is not as stable as we might wish it to be. They remind us that if we’re really living as Christians, the migrants’ story is ours, too, because this earthly home is not our true home.

It’s no wonder, then, that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews recounts the journeys and stories of our ancestors in the faith. They’re all on journeys, either literal or spiritual, or both. These journeys, whether of Abraham and Sarah, or Isaac and Jacob, or even Abel and Noah, all start with God. God confirms a relationship with these people, a relationship built on faith. And the people move, knowing that they are headed somewhere that will change them, even if they don’t know the destination.

The author of Hebrews tells us that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for.” The original Greek is stronger: faith is the hypostasis, the substance, we might say, of things hoped for. Faith is not wishful thinking to brighten the sorrows of life. Faith is real. It's substantive. It’s the reality of God’s promises to us. Faith is built on hope even when that hope is unseen. Faith means taking a chance on the promises of God, because it knows that his promises are true.

This is how Abraham ended up in Canaan. This is how Moses led a volatile group of people from slavery into freedom. This is how the exiled Israelites could dare to imagine rebuilding a second Temple in Jerusalem. This is how a bereft group of disciples could conceive of the Gospel reaching to the ends of the earth after a tragic death.

This is why you and I show up here week after week to adore the living God, who comes to us unseen in bread and wine. This is why our hearts are stirred, convicted, and panged by the injustice we see on a daily basis. There’s no other way to explain it other than that we have faith in something better. Our faith tells us that broken promises to migrants seeking better lives are not legal in the unseen country of which we are citizens.

And so, that, if anything, is what defines us as Christians. That is what makes our way of life perpetually in via, constantly on the move. We are always yearning for that heavenly city, knowing that it will remain unseen to us in this life, and yet it is our ultimate goal if we are truly disciples of Jesus.

Reckoning with those who live in tents means that we confront our own homelessness. It means we confront our heritage, the homelessness of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Moses, Miriam, Mary, Joseph, Jesus, his loyal followers, and the martyrs right up to the present day. It means we accept that even here, today, in this church, we are homeless, too, as the British Anglican priest Samuels Wells reminds us.[2] Being homeless for Christ means that we’re never content with the status quo, especially when others suffer, when injustice prevails, and when Christ’s peace is not fulfilled. If we aren’t homeless, then we aren’t seeking what we should be seeking, which is a home with God.

The Christian life is meant to be a courageous one, not a comfortable one. It tolerates no apathy. Faith means stepping out when we aren’t sure of the answers. Faith means welcoming into our midst those who challenge us and those who disturb us because in them we meet the real presence of Christ. Faith means staying with God even when we’re not clear where we’re headed or how things will turn out. It means never taking for granted what we have been promised.

There’s no question about it: we have been promised much, and Christ is the assurance of that. And something else is certain, too: unlike the false promises of this world, God never uses us as pawns in a game. God always keeps his promises. And if, by faith, we stay with him on the journey, he will never, ever let us go.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
August 7, 2022

[1] “D.C. aid groups overwhelmed as migrants arrive from Texas, Arizona,” The Washington Post, July 13, 2022 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/13/dc-migrants-buses-texas-union-station/)

[2] [2] Samuel Wells speaks powerfully of various kinds of homelessness in A Future that’s Bigger than the Past (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2019), 113-114.

First Person Plural

On my recent vacation, I spent six enjoyable days in Lyon, France. The only challenge was that I speak only a few words of French. Thankfully, I was traveling with others who could speak better French than I. As I tried to navigate my way through a foreign culture without speaking the native language, I noticed a pattern. When I needed to order a croissant by myself in a boulangerie or say something more than bonjour, I would become anxious because I needed to find a way to communicate. And so, I would resort to the few stock phrases I knew, most of which are centered in the first person. Je ne parle pas français. “I don’t speak French.” Admittedly, that’s not a very helpful thing to say, especially if the other person doesn’t speak English, and it’s a bit strange to say you don’t speak French in French. But I did it. When I was pressed to speak with a native French speaker, I always spoke as if I were traveling alone. Even if I was with another person, I would use the first person singular, not first person plural, and this seemed to be prompted by anxiety. When put on the spot, I focused on myself.

As enjoyable as traveling in a foreign country can be, if you don’t speak the native language, it can be a lonely experience. But there was a solution to the linguistic loneliness I encountered, and it involved shifting into the second person. Parlez-vous anglais? If I was lucky, my interlocutor would respond, oui. And then, I could mercifully continue the conversation in English. When I acknowledged that someone else was in the picture, things usually turned out much better for me.

The rich man in today’s Gospel parable seems only aware of the first person singular. Consider his self-consumed monologue. The rich man speaks only to and within himself. He becomes so turned in on himself that he resorts to addressing his soul as if it were another person. This is the closest he comes to using the second person. Otherwise, it’s as if the rich man is the only character on the scene.

In the Christian tradition, there’s a theological phrase that speaks to this condition: incurvatus in se, or “curved in on oneself.” This is the condition when a person becomes so turned inwards on herself that she becomes a little world unto herself. No one else is in the picture. Everything is about her. The self is all that matters. The self is worshipped in place of God.

This is the world of the rich man in Jesus’s parable: incurvatus in se. Visually, we might imagine him as a rattlesnake coiled up so that the eyes are staring at the rattle. But outside this enclosed, narcissistic world, there’s another world that’s so much larger. The man simply can’t see it.

Anxiety and fear are the primary emotions roiling around in the pitiably distorted world of the rich man. And this is rather unusual if you read the parable closely. After all, we’re told that the man has every reason to be happy and grateful. But he seems to be neither. His land has produced a huge bumper crop, which should be cause for rejoicing. If the rich man were healthy enough to stand up straight, he would be able to see that there’s much more to the picture than his own emotions and concerns.

But the rich man is only capable of speaking in the first person singular. He’s apparently unaware of how to address anyone in the second person, except for his own soul. His conversation begins a vicious cycle of narcissism. What starts as a gift—the bumper crop, that is—is immediately turned into a problem by the rich man. “What should I do?” the man asks. Turning more and more inwards on himself, he begins to ask himself questions. He needles a blessing into a curse. There’s a problem, and because he seems to be the only person in the picture of this drama, he must search for the answers within himself. The end goal is clear: with a proper solution, he can rest content, be at ease, and have no more troubles. This is the purpose of the man’s worries: moving to a place of ease so that he can enjoy a long, sated life.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the rich man. Can’t we identify with his worries? Which of us has not been sucked into a cesspool of worrying from time to time? Worrying takes a kernel of something that could be potentially bad or, in the case of the rich man, actually good, and needles it until it becomes a massive problem to be solved. Worrying, after all, usually only knows how to speak in the first person singular.

And just when the rich man’s internal monologue is the most acutely self-centered, another voice enters, unbidden and carrying judgment. God speaks. God interrupts the self-consumed cycle of the rich man’s planning and worrying with a loud call in the second person. What the rich man can’t see is that his life might not last past the present day. He can’t see that his life doesn’t even belong to him.

Although God doesn’t say it in Jesus’s parable, we might imagine what God could say in the second person to the rich man after calling him a fool. Can’t you see, you fool, that the solutions to your self-created problems are right before your eyes? Don’t you have a neighbor with barns to loan for your bumper crop? Isn’t there a hungry neighbor who could benefit from your abundant harvest? Isn’t there another farmer who might have advice for your so-called problem? Don’t you know, rich man, that your abundant harvest is a beautiful gift from me?

It’s a bit difficult to find fault with the rich man because his internal monologue probably seems all too familiar. We excuse worrying by justifying it as concern for another, but is it always really so? We worry about a loved one’s well-being, but is the real worry about how their misfortune will affect us? Some worry about their children and keep them on a tight leash, but is this for their well-being or because they’re too afraid to let go? Others worry about having enough savings for the future or enough money for college tuition, but is this really proactive, constructive worry or a lack of trust in God? Which of us has not experienced the vastness of God’s abundance in our lives and yet made it into a problem?

Which of us with a bumper crop of savings in the bank and a decent pension plan has not obsessively worried about whether a deeply unstable economy will have enough barns to hold it? Which of us has not tasted the rich man’s delectable vision of storing up material goods for the future to ensure a retired life of ease? How many times have we continued to hold our extensive, anxiety-ridden conversations only in the first person singular?

The language of the Christian life is perpetually reminding us that it has little to do with the first person singular. From the rites of baptism and marriage to the dialogues of the Mass, we speak constantly in the first person plural or the second person. Any purported Christian who lives, breathes, and speaks only in the first person singular is not really a Christian.

The first person plural or the second person language of our faith is why we show up here each Sunday. There’s no such thing as being a follower of Jesus in isolation. There can be no such thing as planning for a life of ease funded by our abundant store of resources while others starve and thirst. As Christians, we can never dare to talk about my money or my life. None of what we have belongs to us. It all belongs to God.

The great tragedy of the rich man’s story is that all the answers were in front of his eyes. God was always in the picture, although the rich man couldn’t see it. The man couldn’t see that his abundant gift from God was not a motivation towards anxious resourcefulness but a call to peaceful generosity. The rich man couldn’t see that there was anyone else in the picture but himself.

We are never alone in the picture of our lives. God, of course, is always on the scene, prompting us, encouraging us, convicting us, forgiving us, and guiding us. When one person doesn’t have enough, it’s because we are only speaking in the first person singular. Our lives are shared lives within a fellowship of people. And even when it seems like there will never be enough to go around, God has always given us enough.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 31, 2022

No Half Measures

The protagonist of James Runcie’s novel The Great Passion is Stefan Silbermann, a thirteen-year old German boy who comes from a family of well-known organ builders. Silbermann has been sent to the famous choir school of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach was the Cantor. Silbermann is a vulnerable young chorister with bright red hair, who is teased mercilessly by other students. Because of this, but primarily because of Silbermann’s musical gifts, J.S. Bach becomes a mentor to him.

Bach assumes that because Silbermann comes from a musical family he will, accordingly, be a good musician and that he will have profound knowledge of the construction, mechanics, and tonal constitution of organs. At one point, Bach is discussing the quality of various organs in Leipzig with young Stefan, and Bach suggests that he might benefit from Silbermann’s expertise. The teenage Silbermann modestly defers to the elder Bach. But Bach replies:

“[Y]ou have grown up with the organ, Monsieur Silbermann. It is in your blood. What is it your family say?”

“There’s blood and skin in all our instruments,” Silbermann replies.

“Exactly that,” Bach replies. “We give our lives to our music. There can be no half-measures. Remember that!”[1]

There’s blood and skin in all our instruments. You can’t see or hear the blood and skin, but they are there. Every sound from the organ pipe echoes the hard-won labor of the organ builder, who has likely cut fingers on pipe metal and whose hands bear the scrapes of difficult manual labor. All is done to enable exquisite craftmanship. All is done for music. We could also say, all is done for the glory of God. The organ builder, like any artist or artisan, has skin in the game.

Christian discipleship is not a game nor is it an artistic project, but it undoubtedly demands that each one of us has skin in the game. This is at the root of Jesus’s numerous injunctions in Scripture: Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever does not leave family for Jesus’s sake cannot be his disciple. One cannot even bury one’s father or bid family goodbye before following Jesus. There’s blood and skin in what we do as Christians. There’s no room for half measures. We give our lives to be in relationship with God. The martyrs of the Church are testimony to this cost of discipleship.

If, then, the Christian life necessitates more than half-measures, then in our prayer, shouldn’t there be blood and skin? In our prayer, we give every fiber of our being to God. And yet, it’s easy to approach God in prayer as one would a candy machine. We ask, and God dispenses something pleasing to us. When the machine offers bitter candy, we blame the machine.

And this is where so many people find themselves unable to move on in their relationship with God. Why does God seem not to answer prayers at times? If God really wants what is best for us, why are people gunned down at parades or in schools or in their places of worship? Why do good and faithful people get sick and never recover? Why does the answer to prayer seem to be only silence?

The truth is that when we pray, most of us probably want only the sweet candy. And Jesus knew that his disciples, like us, would misunderstand prayer. When they asked him how to pray, they asked for a model. They asked about technique. They were looking for a formula. They wanted to know how to do it correctly. But Jesus offered more than a model. He went on to deepen his disciples’ understanding of prayer. He suggested that prayer requires some skin in the game.

To illustrate this, Jesus told a parable. Imagine going to a friend in the middle of the night to ask for three loaves of bread because an unexpected visitor had arrived. Jesus said that even if the friend was annoyed at being disturbed in the middle of the night, he would still give his friend the three loaves of bread simply because of his importunity.

But the word “importunity” or “persistence” does not quite fit the bill in the original Greek. Jesus was really suggesting that the person knocking on a friend’s door in the middle of the night is not merely importunate or persistent. He is shameless. He is shameless because he doesn’t care that it’s midnight and the door is locked and his friend and his children are in bed. He is shameless because despite every reason not to ask something of this friend, he does so anyway. And the reason he does so is because he has a relationship with his friend. He knows that his friend will give him what he asks, because he senses in his heart that his friend could do nothing less. Both friends have skin in the game.

This parable doesn’t demonstrate how we pray or what technique we should employ to get what we want. It unmasks the spirit of shamelessness and profound investment that is at the heart of prayer. Jesus was clear: ask and you will receive. Search and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. It doesn’t mean that when we put money in the machine, we always get sweet candy. It doesn’t mean that we always get what we want or think we need. But it does mean that God is always acting in favor of us, even when it doesn’t seem like it. And we see this most clearly when we have some skin in the game.

Treating God like a dispenser of favors, as if he is no more than a machine, reduces our relationship with God to something perfunctory or transactional. God sits in heaven. From down below, we ask, and God gives us what we want, if we’re lucky.

Some of us have been led to believe that with God, the door is always locked. It’s always midnight, and God is always in bed. We dare to knock for fear of annoying God. Perhaps, somewhere inside, we really do believe that God can be a cruel trickster. If we ask for an egg, we’ll receive a scorpion because we can never measure up to what God demands of us.

Some of us worry about getting the formula or the technique right. If we pray in a certain way, we can win God’s favor. And if we heed the poor translation in some renderings of today’s Gospel passage, we could believe that persistence in and of itself is a value.

But true prayer is less about persistence and more about having skin in the game. If we are vulnerable, then there’s skin and blood in all our prayers. Mere faithfulness in prayer is worth something, but true prayer is so much more than that. Having skin in the game is being shameless in our prayer and bold in what we ask for. We are not to ask for frivolous things. Praying is not asking for a snow day so we can stay home from school or for our favorite team to win the game. Having skin in the game means that we are willing to face whatever God hands us, however difficult it may be, knowing that in the mystery of God, what we sometimes receive cannot be understood as good, knowing that in a world that also contains evil and sin, the answers to our prayers often seem hidden. Having skin in the game means trusting that, in spite of our doubts, God has our best interests in mind.

The skin we have in this game is a willingness to say, like Jesus on the cross, not my will but thine be done. God himself has already had skin in the game. We do not need to beg him or curry his favor. There’s blood and skin in all my children, God says. Aching sinews on a hard cross and blood poured out for the salvation of the human race, that is having skin in the game. Jesus Christ is proof that God has skin in the game. There is nothing God has not given for our salvation. What, then, will we not give for God?

So we, like those disciples, can ask Jesus to teach us to pray. Teach us, Lord, to sweat blood in our prayers when we are in agony. Teach us to seek thy will alone, knowing that it is best for us. Teach us, Lord, when we desire only sweetness, to receive any bitterness with patience and humble gratitude. Teach us, O God, that when we have skin in the game, we are closest to you. Help us to trust that the door is never locked to us. And if we only ask, search, and knock, our hearts will be opened to you.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 24, 2022

[1] James Runcie, The Great Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 28, Kindle edition.

Trust Issues

You are standing in the center of a circle of people. You close your eyes and let those in the circle know that you are ready to fall. With heart racing and palms sweating, you lean back and let yourself fall. Will anyone catch you?

You may well recognize this as a trust exercise used at staff retreats, among friends, or in youth groups. The point is to challenge ourselves to let go. If we relinquish our own sense of control, will everything still be okay?

When we talk about trust, we usually talk about it in the context of other people. Do you trust your boss? Do you trust your classmates? Sometimes, people stand in for organizations or institutions. Do you trust your company? Do you trust the Church?

We talk about whether we really trust God. None of this is surprising. But how often do we speak about whether we trust the Gospel?

Do we trust that the Gospel is true? Will the Gospel make a difference in the world? Will the Gospel save us? But as much as we work on trusting the Gospel’s efficacy, the real question is whether we trust the Gospel to fend for itself. Do we honestly believe that the Gospel is strong enough to weather the most strenuous and difficult of circumstances? Will the Gospel continue to stand despite evil and entrenched human sin? Will it hold up against doubts, malice, or outright atheism? Or do we think that it’s our job to help the Gospel and protect it from harm?

These may seem like silly questions, but if we were to drill down to the roots of our faith, I suspect that many of us might struggle with trusting the Gospel. They say that preachers preach to themselves. And I know how easy it is to become protective of the Gospel. Sometimes this is revealed as reactionary defensiveness: of course, the Gospel is good news! Sometimes it manifests itself as an obsessive need to preserve the faith from harm: if I teach this doctrine well enough, I will make a bunch of orthodox Christians. Sometimes my protective instincts show forth as desperation: if I promote this church program or teach this class, the faith will spread, and the work of the Gospel will flourish. With my help, the Gospel will ring true for others.

But as worthy as some of these goals may be, I’m aware that my overzealousness can become protective and possessive. And I also know, from history and from my own experience, that when we become possessive of the Gospel, it rarely leads to anything good.

So, when Jesus commissions seventy people to go out and preach and live the Gospel, he gives very practical advice. Jesus knows that there will be a tendency to become overprotective of the good news. The seventy will be lambs sent into the midst of wolves. They are to greet each house they enter with words of peace, but they should know that not every house will receive that peace. If so, they are to shake the dust off their feet in protest.

It sounds remarkably like family systems theory. Differentiate yourself from those with whom you interact. Don’t take on their negativity, anxiety, or hostility. Move ahead, confident in your own sense of self and in what you have to say. Jesus’s words to the seventy are simple: proclaim that the kingdom of God has drawn near. That’s the only mission. And don’t fuss over who accepts it and who rejects the Gospel.

It’s clear that by the time the seventy return to Jesus from their mission, they are inflated with its power. Even the demons submit to them in Jesus’ name. Jesus warns them not to rejoice at their own perceived authority but, instead, that they have found favor with God. Jesus knows the danger of overzealousness. There is always a risk that the Gospel itself will be controlled by humans and that in doing so, all the life will be squeezed out of it.

This brings us back to our beginning question: do we really trust the Gospel to fend for itself? We can intuit from Jesus’s charge to the seventy that he knew all too well the temptations to become possessive of the Gospel, whatever the cost. And often, these nagging temptations are the work of the devil himself. If people don’t welcome you into their homes, cast judgment on them or force them to welcome you and the good news you carry. If people are not inclined towards peace, pester them until they learn it. If a town does not immediately receive the healing message of the Gospel, then maybe you aren’t doing your job effectively enough. In a world where demons submit to the name of Jesus, a little heavy-handedness might do some good.

But beware of this way of thinking. This so easily becomes us versus them. I’m sure you’ve heard these claims before. We are orthodox, they are heretics. We have a monopoly on truth, and others need to hear what we have to say.

Confronted by one problem after another, it’s all too easy to want to help the Gospel out a little bit. At the root of gimmicks and overprogramming is an inherent distrust of the Gospel. Perhaps we think that if we beat the good news into people’s heads enough, we can change their minds, or if we can only hoodwink them with something flashy, the Gospel will stick.

Which once again brings us back to our initial question, the million dollar one: do we really trust the Gospel to fend for itself? Or can we heed Jesus’s injunctions to shake the dust off our feet when people reject what we have to say? If we offer peace that is rejected, can we let that peace return to us without jamming it down someone else’s throat? Can we trust that preaching the Gospel, living it in our lives, and announcing that the kingdom of God has indeed drawn near are all we are called to do? Can we trust that the Gospel has sufficient power on its own terms if we don’t shy away from embracing its difficult truth?

Far from being an excuse for inaction, this means that we must be prepared to let God do his mysterious work through our imperfect proclamation of his good news. It means that God does not bulldoze his way into human lives. God never has. And God always works among people in ways we could never expect. I’m reminded of the wise words of the late Michael Ramsey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury: “Beware of attitudes which try to make God smaller than the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus.” [1] So, the question is this: can we trust the Gospel to fend for itself, or are we tempted to make God smaller than he is?

What we learn from St. Luke is that the Gospel is powerful in its own right. It can withstand rejection by one village after another. It withstood the unjust death of its chief proponent on a cross while others jeered and mocked him. The Gospel has survived persecution and infamy. The Gospel has outlasted even the most flawed endeavors of the Church, like the crusades, deadly heresy trials, or the ongoing weaponizing of the Blessed Sacrament. That the Gospel has made it this far is testimony enough to the fact that, thankfully, the Gospel is bigger than our feeble minds.

And yet, we, like those seventy missionaries, are sent out into a world, like lambs amid wolves. If you haven’t already felt the bite of those wolves’ fangs, you probably will. If you haven’t had your own offers of peace rejected, prepare yourself. If your proclamation of the good news doesn’t seem to move anyone or spark any change in the people who most need to hear it, you’ve likely felt defensive for the gospel. Perhaps you’ve been jealous for God’s sake. And maybe you’ve resorted to making God smaller than he is.

But in a world that badly needs the love, truth, peace, and justice of the Gospel, we are given one reassuring piece of news today. The Gospel is trustworthy because God is trustworthy. We can even be bold and risky with our charge, knowing that the Gospel can indeed fend for itself when we mess up. And the best news of all is this: if we can truly trust in the immensity of God, all we need to do is be faithful to the Gospel. God will take care of the rest.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
July 3, 2022

[1] Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today (London: SPCK, 1975, 1982), 25.

The Hidden Good News

There are some who think we are foolish week after week to carve out precious time on a Sunday to be here in this place. After all, there are plenty of reasons to stay away. A lazy Sunday morning with the newspaper and coffee is alluring. The golf course or the children’s baseball game beckon. For many, the biggest reason of all to stay away is that there only seems to be bad news these days, and we Christians purport to proclaim something called the Gospel, which, of course, means good news. So, we who have chosen to be here today seem like fools to those who can only see bad news. And we are perceived to have committed ourselves to a message that rings false.

Admittedly, it’s gloomy out there. I’m not denying that, nor should you. It’s very difficult to find a news headline that boosts your spirits, especially in recent weeks and days. Rancor is more common than civility. Petty attitudes prevail over open generosity. Injustice masquerades as law. Our nation’s legal system appears frailer than ever. The cost of inflation is soaring at atmospheric levels. Schools have become battlefields. Wars and pandemics rage without end. We seem to be going backward rather than forward. I know that our time is not the only time that has been riddled with difficulties, but we should at least be honest with ourselves: the present moment doesn’t seem to carry much good news.

Considering this, isn’t it significant that we are here today? Something has brought us here, despite or because of recent headlines. Maybe it was an assigned liturgical duty, or a sense of obligation, or even the opportunity to see friends. But I hope we are here because of something more. I suspect that we are secretly hungering for some good news. I suspect that we know it exists.

I don’t mean that good news is a false happiness or a phony smile. I’m not suggesting that good news spells prosperity for the faithful and gloom for the heathen. I don’t believe that good news is always readily apparent. And I certainly don’t think that good news requires a vapid denial of real agonies. But we are gathered in this place today because, by the grace of God, our hearts have been inclined to trust that there is good news out there, even if it’s hidden. The good news may be elusive, but we must trust that it can be found. Seek and you shall find. Ask and it will be given to you. Just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

Just as the good news seems to be hidden from the headlines, it also seems to be hidden in the words from St. Luke’s Gospel that we have just heard. If we are willing to follow Jesus, we wouldn’t necessarily be inspired by what Jesus demands of his followers. We might, in fact, be deterred by what we hear today. First, Jesus is rejected by a village in Samaria. Even in Jesus’s day, the good news wasn’t always received, and it certainly seemed hidden to many. Second, someone who offers to follow Jesus is greeted by the news that the Son of Man will have nowhere to lay his head. The implication is that Jesus’s followers must be prepared for rejection and loneliness. Along the road of discipleship, there will be no room in the inn. Third, Jesus discourages a man from burying his own father before following him. And finally, Jesus requires that true disciples leave their homes without even so much as a goodbye to their families. There’s no looking back. If we’re looking for good news, then we are going to need to look harder.  

But just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The easiest thing is to give up on God by making an easy correlation between consistently unfortunate circumstances and God’s perceived absence. Even for those who stay with the Church, it’s all too easy to blame a godless, secular society for the lack of good news. In truth, it’s easier to fight the culture than it is to search for the good news. It’s much more difficult to stick with the Gospel until it gives up its hidden pearls of goodness.

Perhaps this is part of the demand of discipleship. Discipleship requires, first and foremost, that we ask for the patience, wisdom, and generosity of spirit to stay with the Gospel even when everything around us seems to be bad news. Discipleship demands that we trust that, with God, there is always good news, even if it's not readily apparent. Just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And because you and I are here today, I trust that we are willing to ask so that we can receive. We are prepared to seek so that we can find. We are going to take a chance on the Gospel because we can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. With this in mind, if we turn back to today’s Gospel passage, what seem to be four pieces of bad news might just be good news after all.

The first piece of bad news is the refusal of a Samaritan village to welcome Jesus. But below the surface, there is good news in this episode along the road to Jerusalem. At first, James and John can’t see this. When the village appears to reject Jesus, they immediately want to inflict punishment on the village. But when Jesus rebukes them for their inclination towards retribution, he offers good news. The Gospel is so much stronger and bigger than one village’s rejection. And the Gospel is certainly stronger and bigger than mere wrath and punishment. The Gospel will not perish because of one village’s rejection. There are many villages to reach. Just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

The second piece of bad news is in Jesus’s strange reply to an anonymous person along the road to Jerusalem who offers to follow him. Jesus discouragingly states that the road to Jerusalem is a lonely one, with no place to lay one’s head. It echoes Mary and Joseph’s quest as they prepared for the Savior’s birth. Jesus’s frank acknowledgment of the difficulties of discipleship is neither an affirmation of his prospective follower’s willingness to follow him, nor is it a rejection. But it is, oddly enough, good news. On the other side of Jesus’s death and resurrection, we know that in our loneliest moments, we are closest to Jesus. When we have nowhere to lay our own heads, we can at least lay our own heads on Jesus’s shoulder, because he has known the depths of our own sorrow. Just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

The third piece of bad news is when Jesus commands a man to follow him without bothering to bury his father. Just go and proclaim the Gospel, Jesus says. Oddly enough, this seemingly insensitive remark bears good news. The road of discipleship is not oriented towards death but towards life. Only later would Jesus’s disciples learn, as we now know, that death is not the end of the story. Our God is a God of the living, not of the dead. The dead are not in the hands of the living but of God. God himself will take care of the dead and give them life. To accept this is to proclaim the Gospel and follow Jesus. Just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

The last piece of bad news is when Jesus discourages a possible disciple from bidding farewell to his family before following him. Once you begin to follow Jesus, there’s no looking back. You must be prepared to leave everything, including family and your deepest loyalties, for Jesus’s sake. And as difficult as this must sound, the good news is that by following Jesus, we don’t let go of our family, but our family gets bigger when we follow him. Our family is expanded to include not just the people back at home but those we meet on the road, who are on the baptismal journey from death into life. It includes all those who are eagerly seeking after the good news, just like you and me. And this is bliss to the ears of those whose biological families have rejected them. After all, just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

Seek and ye shall find. Ask it and shall be given unto you. Discipleship demands that we stay with the bad news knowing that in it, there is plenty of good news to be found. This is the task of the Church. With bad news everywhere, now is the Church’s moment to speak and act. The good news may appear hidden at first, but by God’s grace, it will yield its fruit with time. Those who think we’re foolish for being here today may not understand this. And it’s not our job to command fire to come down and consume them. Keep moving ahead with the Gospel, which is so much bigger than anyone’s rejection. And know this supreme piece of good news: just because the good news isn’t obvious doesn’t meant it isn’t there.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 26, 2022

More Than Just Bread

When I hear the word “paradox,” I think of my high school freshman English class. My teacher, who was excellent, taught us figures of speech, and I remember one vivid example to this day. To explain the meaning of “paradox,” she quoted from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.”

The class stared at her. What is she talking about? You’re out on the sea in a boat. There’s plenty of water. Sure, there’s water to drink! But, my teacher said, it’s salt water. You can’t drink it. Oh, right, we thought. How could we not see that?

Paradox is one of the most widely used figures of speech in Scripture, and it certainly features prominently in the New Testament. You can’t understand Jesus without understanding paradox. Think of the parables. Think of fully divine and fully human.

And when we talk about Mass and bread, we have to talk about paradox. There’s something about bread that makes it the perfect material substance in which Christ comes to us sacramentally. Here, I’m reminded of how American author Bill Buford describes the bread made by a French boulanger named Bob, whom he knew while living in Lyon: “Bob’s bread was exceptional. . . the bread was more than just bread.”[1]

The bread of which Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel is more than just bread. It’s bread, but it’s also his flesh. It’s eaten by mortals, but it enables immortality. It’s material, and yet it’s spiritual. It’s bread, but it’s more than just bread.

To speak of the Blessed Sacrament, of the Eucharistic Bread, is to speak in mysterious language and to wallow in paradox. Yes, Corpus Christi is about bread, but it’s about more than just bread. The Bread of life does more than just satisfy our hunger. It sustains us when we have lost our way. It offers healing to our brokenness. It convicts us in our idolatry. Corpus Christi is about more than just bread.

But do we really understand this? Look around at our broken world, and we could very well alter Coleridge’s paradox in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and apply it to bread. “Bread, bread, every where,/Nor any crumb to eat.” This may not be universally true on the Main Line or in parts of Philadelphia, but it is true, even blocks from here and in corners of our local community.

How is it that we have lost our way so badly that there are vast quantities of bread in some places and not a crumb to eat in others? Why are there food deserts in one of the richest and most technologically sophisticated nations on earth? How can extravagant wastefulness and profound poverty exist side by side? “Bread, bread, every where,/Nor any crumb to eat.” The one thing about a paradox is that it’s true.

As I said before, the Feast of Corpus Christi is about bread, but it’s about much more than just bread. In the Mass, we see Bread. We revere Bread. We eat Bread. But the Bread is more than just bread. It’s Christ himself, who comes among us in every Mass to offer us eternal life. Paradoxically, when we only focus on the bread, we lose our way.

Look at the stories of our forebears in the faith. In Deuteronomy, Moses speaks to God’s chosen people as they rest on the plains of Moab, awaiting their entrance into the promised land. The land is so near they can smell and taste its many fruits. They have spent forty difficult years in the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt. They are yearning to step onto the soil of the promised land. But they are not there yet.

Moses reminds them not to forget their past, because the greatest sin is to forget that God is God and to forget what God has done for them. What Moses tells the people is strange. God has not brought the pilgrim people the short way to the promised land; God has brought them the long way. God has done it to test the people, to humble them. God has done it not as cruel punishment but as loving discipline, so that the people would remember that God provides. God provided in the past. God provides even now. And God will continue to provide.

On the edge of the promised land, the people needed to recall that, when God fed them in the wilderness with manna, God gave them just the right amount: no more and no less than they needed. After all, the food was more than just bread. When the people disobeyed God and didn’t gather the remaining manna, it rotted and went to waste. God’s abundance does not enable gluttony. It does not favor certain people. It’s just what every person needs, no more and no less. Wastefulness is a sin, and the allowance of poverty is a sin, because they both mean that people have forgotten God. They have forgotten that God’s gift of bread is more than just bread.

Look, too, at the story of Jesus’s disciples in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Before Jesus reveals himself to be the living Bread from heaven, he has fed 5,000 from only five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish. The people’s ability to trust is tested. Can Jesus really provide? Will there be enough? Is God inclined towards abundance? And after the people have all been fed, even the crumbs are gathered up. Nothing is to be wasted. The bread is more than just bread.

If God’s gift of bread in the Mass is only ordinary bread to us, we will find that there’s bread, bread, every where, nor any crumb to eat. The bread becomes an end in itself. The bread is merely what satisfies us. Bread that is no more than ordinary bread makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Such bread is a way to wealth, or a way to poverty, because we think we can control the bread. And when the bread is just bread, it has no connection to God.

But when bread becomes for us living Bread by the power of the Holy Spirit, the true Bread that gives life, it is paradoxically, bread and more than bread. It’s God’s gracious gift to us. It’s a sign of God’s abundance. It’s what we need to be fed and only as much as we need. It’s bread that can never be wasted. It’s what allows us to feast on Jesus, to abide in him, to be intimately tied to the only one who will give us true life and who is truly present in the Eucharistic Bread.

Bread, bread, every where, nor any crumb to eat. This awful paradox is the source of many people’s inability to trust in God. They see glaring poverty and assume that God cannot meet these problems or doesn’t want to meet these problems. They assume that food deserts in a wealthy country are signs of God’s absence.

But these very real problems are not arguments for God’s neglect of humankind. They are simply proof that we have forgotten that bread can be more than just bread. When bread is no more than ordinary, we become sinful consumers, and the poor and oppressed are neglected. When bread is an end in itself, people suffer, and some doubt whether God does provide.

On Corpus Christi, the words of Moses and the words of Jesus himself call us back to remember our story. We must remember what God has done for us. We are asked to trust what God is doing for us now. And we are called to hope in what God will do for us in the future.

God has given us what we need, everything and not a crumb more. If some have too much, then it’s the result of a sinful world, not God’s design. If some have too little, then it means that we have lost the ability to be responsible for God’s gift and have forgotten that the bread is more than just bread.

On this feast, we adore Bread that is more than just bread. And because the Bread we eat and adore is more than just bread, there are plenty of crumbs to go around. There is no shortage. There is nothing to waste. It’s just what we need, no less and no more, so that we can live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle
The Feast of Corpus Christi (transferred)
June 19, 2022

[1] Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 93, Kindle version.

The Gift of Time

Trinity Sunday is one of two things: it’s either the day on which preachers tentatively walk out on eggshells, praying that their sermons will not crack the Church’s doctrine. Or it’s the day that preachers allow themselves to be stumped. The task is not made any easier by the Scripture readings provided by the lectionary. We find ourselves threading out of Scripture a doctrine codified many years after Scripture was penned. And yet we can see glimpses of that doctrine in Scripture.

I, for one, will go with option two. I choose to let myself be stumped, and I hope you will, too. I don’t mean that we should cease exploring the meaning of this doctrine that’s at the heart of our faith. I don’t mean that we throw caution to the wind as we speak about the Trinity. I mean that we let the doctrine do precisely what it is: we let it be a mystery for us. And so, we let ourselves be stumped for a time.

But wallowing in mystery can frequently be an excuse to stay in our heads or spin vague generalities. For millennia, scholars and theologians have tried to muster up new images for the relationship of three Persons sharing one substance. But as important as this theological discourse is for trying to understand the nature of God, at the end of the day, words fail. Images fail. Ultimately, we are stumped. So, why not just start there? Let’s begin this Trinity Sunday by acknowledging that we are stumped. And if we can start with that honest acknowledgement, then perhaps we have something else to learn.

If we are stumped, could it be that we have spent too much time in our heads? Could it be that we have failed to recognize that the doctrine of the Trinity is not about intellectual gymnastics but about our lives on the ground here and now?

Now, being stumped, being slowed down for a bit in the fast race to know everything, is exactly where today’s Gospel reading picks up. For the umpteenth time in recent weeks, we listen in on Jesus’ Farewell Discourse to his disciples on the eve of his death. The last thing the disciples want to hear before their teacher and friend departs is this: I have many things to share with you, but you cannot bear them now.

The car has been moving along at a comfortable 40 miles an hour, gaining speed, and suddenly there is a speed bump. Hit the brakes. Slow down. You have been stumped. Maybe you should be moving at 25 miles an hour instead of 40.

Being stumped, being patient, and slowing down are not always easy. In some sense, the disciples were students. And most pupils do not like being told to slow down in the beginning stages of a learning process. Recall those moments in your own life where a teacher insisted that you take some time rather than racing ahead. I remember the first months of studying a new instrument. Practice the scales. Work on your chops. Hone your technique. But whatever you do, don’t plunge into the difficult repertoire that you’re just dying to play for your own satisfaction. If you do, you’ll be stumped. You’re not ready yet. You’ll be able to do many things as a musician, but not at this time. Your shoulders sag, along with your spirits.

Or imagine those first months of learning a new language. The page is simply gibberish to your eyes. The foreign characters mean nothing. New vowel sounds are indistinguishable. Your language teacher has many things to say to you, but you’re not ready for them now.

Even the most avid learners don’t like to be stumped. It’s a painful and humbling thing when we’re up against our lack of knowledge or ability, especially when we know that we have the potential to be somewhere other than where we currently are. But to be slowed down in our quest to move ahead is perhaps even more frustrating—or at least it’s frustrating until we realize that slowing down and waiting is precisely where we are meant to be and that we have been given the gift of time.

The gift of time is exactly the opposite of what we usually think it means. We usually assume that it means more hours in the day to accomplish the ridiculous amount of work that has landed on our plate courtesy of an overcommitted culture moving at breakneck speed. The gift of time allows us to speed ahead happily to the finish line of the race within our duly allotted span of hours.

But God’s gift of time is quite different. God’s gift of time is not extra hours in the day. God’s gift of time isn’t a gust of wind that helps us sprint to the finish line. God’s gift paradoxically seems like a frustrating moment in which we are stumped. And yet it’s really a moment in which we must allow the Spirit to guide us into all the truth. When we think we can race ahead of God, we are usually stumped.

When we’re stumped, and when we’re offered the gift of time by God, we experience the life of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—at its fullest. When we begin to understand the gift of time and how it reveals God’s truth, we see God as Trinity most clearly at work.

Look again at what St. John tells us in today’s Gospel. It’s not yet full-fledged Trinitarian doctrine, but it’s a vivid glimpse into the life of God. In the power of the Spirit, Jesus has been revealed as the image of the Father’s love for the world. He is truth. But that truth can’t be swallowed at once like a magic pill. Its fullest meaning is only discerned over time. Over time, the Spirit guides us into all truth and lets us hear those things that we need to hear precisely when we’re able to bear them.

The Spirit doesn’t reveal new things so much as help us see those things that earlier we were not mature enough to handle. One more thing is true: the Spirit can only do this with the gift of time. The Spirit doesn’t speak alone in a bubble. The Spirit speaks what is heard in the life of God. And this requires the gift of time.

I dare say that many of us may be feeling stumped at this moment in time. Do you have any clue how to move forward as a Christian disciple when every road seems to have a thousand speed bumps? Are you stumped as to the most effective way to address heinous injustice or broken political systems in which truth is cheapened or ignored? How do we move to action wisely and compassionately when it seems there’s no time to lose because human lives are at stake? When is the appropriate time to act and speak? When should we simply listen? Or maybe, unintentionally, we find ourselves echoing Pilate’s question to Jesus: What is truth? We find ourselves incapacitated because we are stumped.

There are no easy answers here. But could this be exactly where we’re meant to be? Could this be God’s gift of time? Can we be honest that we are poor at letting the Spirit lead us into all truth? Accepting the gift of time means letting God take the reins and lead us where we are supposed to be, in God’s time, no matter how impatient or patient we may be. The gift of time dispels our pet projects. It humbles us. It allows for healing where healing must happen before truth can be borne. It tempers our impatience. It coaxes us where we need coaxing. It dredges up the honesty that must be embraced before we can truly swallow the truth. The gift of time enables us to be mature Christians. It invites us into the truth so that we don’t make up our own truth.

There are many things that the Spirit has to say to us. As of yet, we do not have the strength to bear them. But where we are, stumped though we may be, is precisely where God intends for us to be. And although the Holy Spirit will continue to guide us into all the truth, right now, there are things meant for us to hear and then do. At this moment, at this time, and in this place, we may be frustrated and stumped, but know this: God has given us exactly what we can bear. There are things for us to hear, right now, at this time. And for the present time, that’s just enough.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Trinity Sunday: The First Sunday after Pentecost
June 12, 2022

Confounded by Grace

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, a motley group of people found themselves together in one place in the face of an unspeakable tragedy. To their surprise, it was the tragedy itself that united and inspired them. In their grief, when their own words failed them, they were given a new language.

On that day, a long, long time ago, through an indescribable power, this ragtag group suddenly discovered that they could speak in new ways. They could say startling things and others could understand, no matter their race or language. Diversity was no longer a divider. It was a unifier. A mysterious power moving among these persons gave them a purpose. Through that same power, they understood what they needed to do. They began to move. And the journey began.

A little way into this long journey and the problems began. Spectacular things were happening, but there was also trouble, trouble and troublemakers. Some of this group, fired up by the initial power that propelled them forward, were persecuted. Many died. But still, most of them were undeterred. They ventured forth. They followed their call. They advanced. They scattered and spread to the ends of the known earth, for that was what they were meant to do.

Some died brutal and bloody deaths in foreign lands. It was even said that their blood was the seed that would bear much fruit. And as this rough crew of quirky humans spread from east to west, they encountered mountains and hills, rough terrain, and dangerous passages. Nothing about the journey was easy.

Until one day, many years after the story began, they came upon a level plain. After such a rough and tumultuous pilgrimage, this plain was a welcome sight. They soon forgot the initial charge of their ancestors and the fire that had been enkindled at the beginning of this family story. Indeed, they forgot the story itself.

Looking at the level plain, free of vexing passages and steep hills, they said to one another in their common language, “Let’s settle here. Let’s build a grand city like none other on earth. Let’s build up and make a name for ourselves.” And they did. For a while, the city thrived. In fact, more cities were built. Soon, many of these cities were structured around grand buildings where they worshipped the Source of the power that had moved them on. They knew this Source as the living God. If you were journeying out on the open land, you could locate a city by a building dedicated to this God. People flocked to these buildings. And although the people continued to build up and up, with grander projects, and even though this family of people seemed to become more and more powerful, something was amiss.

This people, convinced that they were doing the right thing, made one major mistake: they forgot their story, and they failed to tell it. Over the centuries, they had lost the memory of that initial catalyzing event when diverse peoples were gathered around an incredible fire of passion and witness, around suffering and death. And although this amnesia persisted for many centuries, one day everything came crashing down.

Some said it was God’s punishment. Their enemies used their misfortune to mock them. What had the people done wrong? What egregious sins had they committed? What had provoked God’s wrath? The people were confounded. The earlier united purpose was now fractured. The people were fractious, arguing and fighting. No longer were their sacred buildings the centers of cities; cities were built around much taller buildings dedicated to wealth and other types of power. No longer were the sacred buildings even full of people. Something was wrong. And all the people could imagine was that they were being punished. The lingering question was whether they would even survive.

You’ve probably guessed it already. We are that people. This story is our story, the Church’s story. Yes, in some sense, it’s the story of Babel, too. And today, on Pentecost, we celebrate that auspicious beginning so many years ago in Jerusalem. This is the day to remember our story, which perhaps we have forgotten. Some have called Pentecost the birthday of the Church. So, let’s stand around our birthday cake, if you will. In the middle of it stands a tall candle. But don’t blow it out. Gaze upon this candle and offer a prayer instead of a wish. Offer a prayer that we will remember and reclaim our story.

If you survey the scene of our family, scattered across the earth, we appear to be more divided than united. We are more violent than peaceful. We have been ravaged by deadly diseases. We talk to screens more than to human faces. Some who look at us are increasingly less inspired by our unity, because we seem to have lost a common purpose. Our sacred buildings are not very full. What has happened to that mysterious power that started our grand story? In the long story of advancement, we seem to have paused and are standing still.

In some sense, existential questions such as these were the questions of that confident group of people, our ancient ancestors in the Book of Genesis, who journeyed westward and settled in the land of Shinar. United by one language, there was nothing the people couldn’t do together. But they chose to stop their movement, to stop advancing, and build up rather than across. They chose the vertical over the horizontal. And so, God confounded them.

We, too, may wonder what we have done to be so divided. Why are we standing still without a perceived destiny? The easy answer is to pin all the blame on God. But what if being confounded is a gift, a moment of grace.

We have spent so many years building up, out of complacency, arrogance, and even laziness, that we have forgotten the impulse of the beginning of our family’s story. We have to go far back, even before the incident at Babel, to the moment right after God renewed creation following the flood. God gave a charge to his people. “Be fertile and increase and fill the earth.”

God wanted his people to scatter to the ends of the earth, to fill it with his good news, to bear fruit in all times and places. At Babel, when God scattered his people, it was not a gesture of cruel punishment but a moment of grace. The people needed to be confounded in order to remember their story and their mission. Building up would stop the advancement of God’s mission. Only a moment of profound humility would remind God’s people of their call.

Today we are invited to reclaim our story as we gather around this tall Paschal candle. We will soon journey to the font by its light to welcome new members into our motley crowd, to charge them with God’s mission, to unite them under the name of Jesus. We will renew our own baptismal covenant and be reminded that God wants to scatter us. Like Eucharistic bread that must be broken to be shared, we must be broken and shared with the world. Our purpose is not to stay still and build up but instead to be scattered and continue advancing the cause of the Gospel.

Sometimes what we build must be rebuilt by God. When human hubris values sameness over a unity in diversity, then it’s a precious moment of grace when God confounds our pride. Perhaps we would do well to invert the words of the great Te Deum hymn. Lord, let us be confounded, especially when we have forgotten our story and lost our way.

There are two ways to look at this present moment. We can remain still and create a story of blame, where we blame God, others, disease, or whatever else we choose for our inability to keep advancing. Or we can be humbled and confounded and let God scatter us to the ends of the earth. We can let God shatter our idols and our grand projects that we’ve long outgrown.

We can bravely choose the rugged mountains and deep valleys over the easy, lazy plains. We can venture out with the Holy Spirit at our backs, knowing that we can never rest until the peace of Christ reaches not upwards but horizontally across the face of the earth.

This is our family’s story. Today is the day to remember that story. Caedmon and Meredith, this is about to become your story. This day, more than ever, is the day to retell our story. Let us reclaim it. Let us keep moving and advancing until we have been scattered by God to the ends of the earth.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Day of Pentecost
June 5, 2022

What's Meant to Be Heard

One of my seminary Bible professors used to say that reading the apostle Paul’s letters is like listening to one end of a phone conversation. We can hear what Paul is saying to the early  churches, but we can’t hear what the churches are saying back. Reading a Pauline letter makes you itch to know just what naughty things those Corinthians were doing. What we primarily hear, though, is Paul scolding them.

Listening to Jesus’s prayer to God the Father is quite a different experience. It’s more like listening in on a phone conversation from somewhere else in the house. You quietly pick up the phone in the guest bedroom, and you hear everything your mother is saying to your father who is traveling out of town. And you hear your father’s response. Your mother tells of your recent poor behavior, and your father demands that you should be grounded for a week.

Yet even this analogy is not quite accurate. Slyly listening in on a conversation via an extra phone involves hearing something you’re not meant to hear. The fact that you want to listen in secretly is perhaps proof enough that you’re in trouble and that you shouldn’t be listening in after all. But listening in on Jesus’s prayer to his heavenly Father is hearing exactly what we are intended to hear.

Jesus’s prayer to the Father feels like a monologue, but it’s really a conversation directed to the ears of Jesus’s disciples, even if we don’t hear God the Father’s response. When we are handed the phone to listen in on this prayer, Jesus is at table with his friends on the eve of his death. He has washed their feet. He has offered a long farewell discourse, explaining in lofty language what is about to transpire. And without missing a beat, he begins to pray to his Father in the hearing of his disciples. He wants them to hear what he says. And we are also meant to hear what he says.

Listening in on this prayerful conversation somehow feels as if we are eavesdropping. It seems odd that we are meant to hear the surprising content of Jesus’s prayer. The Father has had a plan for us from before the foundation of the world. Jesus’s work now depends on us. Indeed, he has said that we will do greater things than he has done. He has said that partaking of real, selfless, cross-shaped love is possible even for us. Indeed, unity of purpose and will is also possible for us. And if we can show such unity in our lives—if others can taste, smell, see, hear, and touch this oneness of mission—perhaps they, too, will believe in the power of Jesus, who was sent by the Father. Jesus’s conversation with the Father is still alive, and it’s up to us to invite others to listen to it.

But if this conversation seems strange to us, it’s a testament to how strange its language has become to our modern ears. Love and unity sound like vague concepts because we so rarely see this kind of love and unity realized in the flesh. Maybe we can’t hear this conversation because our fingers are in our ears. Or are we too self-consumed? Maybe we can’t understand the self-giving love of Father and Son because our society puts too much love in material things over love of God and neighbor. After such a week as this one, shouldn’t we identify what is keeping us from knowing concrete love and unity? What do we really love? Has our fear of losing our rights or our guns surpassed our love of God and neighbor? Did Jesus ever tell us that love wouldn’t require some sort of sacrifice? Because if our desire to hold onto something is so great that we’re willing to tolerate one more needless massacre of our brothers and sisters, then it’s clear that we are listening in on the wrong conversation. We are, in fact, listening to no conversation at all.

Jesus’s prayer often gets lost in the noise of other words that are hurled at us from all directions. You’ll hear this flurry of words in the incessant blare of television commentators in hospital waiting rooms and airport lounges. It appears in written form in the newspaper and online, in tweets and Facebook rants. This verbosity is one sided. There’s no dialogue. There’s no listening. It’s just a lot of talking with no real conversation.

This talking speaks loudly. And it usually gives us one consistent message, even if it’s phrased in different ways. The distinct message here is that Jesus’s prayer for love and unity is over, has petered out over the centuries, is unrealistic, is utterly impossible. Of course, Jesus’s name is rarely mentioned, but the implication is clear. We’re listening to a faint whisper from the past that is soon to die out if it hasn’t already.

This barrage of words convinces us, even if unintentionally, that sacrificial love can hardly be real for us. We should be afraid instead. There’s little we can do except to embrace our fate and ride out the wave of troubled times. Jesus’s prayer has died out. We are left hanging with the dreadful ring tone of a phone line gone dead.

This cacophony of words to which we are subjected day and night, even against our will, is no conversation at all. It’s a narrative spun out of anger and fear. It’s the reactionary claim of talking heads disconnected from a larger body who have lost the ability to hope that Christ’s love can be made real. It’s the language of a world that is afraid of such love because of what it demands. In response, words are flung against a wall and into our faces without seeming to expect anything back in return. There is no conversation.

Which makes it so very different from what St. John invites us to listen in on. Jesus prays to the Father not just for his immediate disciples but for us, too. We only hear Jesus’s voice, but if we listen carefully, we can also hear the implied response of the Father. And before too long, we are a part of that conversation between Father and Son.

But despite our distorted values, Jesus’ prayer has not been entirely drowned out. It’s still humming in our ears, a faint tone underneath raucous clanging. The tone of Jesus’s prayer is still heard in tactile and compassionate responses to unspeakable violence. Christ’s prayer has threaded its way down the ages in the lives of saints and martyrs whose lives enabled love to be real on the ground. This prayer sounds in the ordinary corners of our communities if we listen closely and don’t hang up the phone.

The conversation we’re meant to hear does not control us by fear or anger or reactivity but draws us in by love, because the only way that we can keep the conversation going is to experience, know, taste, feel, smell, hear, and see what this love is really like. And once we know such love, we are compelled to pass it on in our lives. Selfless love lived might just be a love embraced.

This conversation of love is so dynamic and alive that it spills out beyond its immediate participants. Its purpose is to widen the circle so that the conversation never stops adding more voices to it, and it never ends. This conversation is meant to give life, not to kill it, to open dialogue and not to shut it down.

I don’t know exactly when some people stopped listening to this conversation. I don’t know what happened for some to begin to favor the sound of angry and fearful screeds and to submit to nihilism. I don’t know what has led others to give up godly love and to retreat into wordless words or numbing silence or murderous action.

But I do know that because we are in this church today, we are being called to listen to something else. We are called to hone our ears like the finest musicians to tune into a conversation that has been happening since before the worlds were made. We’re not being asked to eavesdrop. The conversation to which we are asked to listen is intended for us to hear. It’s meant for us to carry on, because there is an aching world that needs to hear it.

Despite what we are told, Jesus’s prayer has not been lost. It’s still alive. No matter how many people have hung up the phone on this great conversation, I urge you: continue listening. Stay in the room. Keep the conversation going. And just maybe, others will listen.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 29, 2022

Somewhere between the Clouds and the Earth

This week is a week when all I want to do is look up. I find it difficult to look down, because when I do, it brings my spirits down, too. Do you feel the same? It seems that when we look around, the bad news keeps coming. For the second week in a row, we are reminded that the ordinary places of our daily routines are stoked with fear because they can be the sites of gruesome gun violence.

When I look down, I see in the news the anguished faces of parents, weeping outside a school building, wondering about the fate of their child or knowing what has already happened. I worry for the parents who worry about their own children’s safety. I see an intractable conflict across the globe. I see rising prices on everything from gasoline to groceries, which I know means for some, one fewer meal. I see yet another subvariant of a tenacious, awful virus in its third year. I see friends and loved ones suffering. Where is the good news?

And so, it’s very tempting just to look up. If I divert my gaze to the sky, I can escape from this world for at least a bit. If I look up, I don’t have to look down, because when I look down, it drags me down.

Ascension Day would seem like an occasion to look up. It’s obvious why the disciples stood gazing up when Jesus ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives. It was quite a spectacle. They were rightly gobsmacked and a bit sad too, I’m sure. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were now at an end. They wouldn’t see him anymore. They really didn’t want to look down. And when they did look down, perhaps their spirits were brought down as well. Certainly, they saw the biting inequities of their own day. Surely, they saw a world that was messed up, even if in different ways from our own. So, for a variety of reasons, those disciples looked up, choosing for a time to be drawn into awe and wonder, choosing to check out of painful daily existence for at least a bit.

Many people don’t know what to make of Ascension Day. Some cannot get past literal images of Jesus being physically taken up into heaven. Just as the disciples gawked at Jesus’ feet sticking out of the clouds, some in our modern day laugh at a preposterous image and defiance of spatial reasoning. And this only deflects from the deeper meaning of the Ascension. Ascension Day is the feast that helps to locate our vision in the right places. It restores a balance to our vision.

If you ask me, on this Ascension Day, we should claim the Church is primarily a place for two things. The Church is called to gaze up into heaven in worship. And the Church is also called to look back down and around and realize that we have something utterly unique to say to the world, that it is imperative for us to say it, repeatedly, in word and action. We have the good news of redemption, of second and third chances and more, of a peace that passes all understanding, which really is possible if we desire it. We bear the good news that God’s image is in each and every one of us, and if we only really believed that, things might be so much different. The good news could go on and on. This week is a vivid reminder that we have an alternative vision that needs to be proclaimed. Last week was a reminder, too, and countless weeks before that. We could add a long list of weeks where we could have been reminded of the Church’s higher calling, where we could have been called to action.

But too often for us in the Church, our gaze is not balanced between these two places. Our vision is directed to only one of the places. And I wonder, is this why so many people are fleeing the Church for the religion of the workforce? Is this the reason that school and extracurricular activities are chosen over Sunday School? Is this the reason that Sunday brunch tables or the golf course are more popular than the pews? Is this the reason that we see so much despair? If all your faith is put in a failed human system of government or secular mechanisms of change, in a week like this one, it seems there is nowhere to turn.

But there is a dual identity to the Church that is emblemized on Ascension Day, and it is a source of hope. Awe and transcendence must be balanced with on-the-ground action. And when people lose faith in the Church, it could be that they see us gazing in only one of the two places rather than both. So then, why go to the Church for anything? Ascension Day is also conviction day for the Church.

I don’t need to tell you that many in the Church find it all too easy only to gaze up into heaven. They are rightly fascinated with the transcendence of God. But it ends there. To quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, they are “so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good.” Worship becomes an excuse for inaction. Transcendence becomes escapism.

On the other hand, there are others who never look up. Church is simply the place to find community and to relieve privileged guilt by engaging in acts of charity. Transcendence matters little; action is all that matters. The purpose of the Church has become humanist. Jesus is not worshipped; he is followed as an ethical guru.

I wonder if those who choose to give up on the Church have become disenchanted by our distorted gaze. Are we seen as looking too much up into heaven or not looking up into heaven enough? Where have things gone wrong?

Ascension Day is an opportunity to refocus and rebalance our gaze. It seems, at first, that this is a feast only about transcendence and staring up into heaven, a feast to look at dangling feet in the sky. But if we probe deeper into its mystery, we will find an indispensable piece to that heavenly gaze which is often forgotten. Looking up into heaven at Jesus’ feet hanging below the clouds, the disciples stood for a moment in awe before two men in white reminded them to come back to earth. Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

Look around you. Look at yourselves. When the Holy Spirit alights upon you, you will be the Church. You will be charged with a great task: to do even greater things than Jesus. How’s that for a mission? Jesus’ power will no longer be confined to his physical earthly presence. It will be spread to the ends of the earth in you and me, his living Body.

That message is for us, too. Make no doubt about it: many will call us fools. They will accuse us of gazing up into heaven and putting our trust in something unseen, beyond the clouds. Some will say we should seek only policy and action, not thoughts and prayers. Others see no connection between Sunday mornings as we gaze up into heaven and weekdays where homeless people sleep on church steps and Christians bully one another like children on a playground.

But none of that should be the final word. This evening, we are gazing up to heaven because it’s the beginning of everything we do. If we don’t start there, then very little else matters. The meals handed out to the hungry and the beds offered to the homeless will only be navel gazing, unless we first gaze up into heaven.

But after gazing up, we must look back down. We see the face of Christ in the person at the bus stop and above the hand that gives us change at the grocery store. We see Christ in the faces of parents who have lost children, in the faces of the lonely, and of those who suffer. It’s this face that will call us to a proper response. Only by looking up first will we know how to respond and take action.

Somewhere between the clouds and earth is the deepest meaning of all. It’s the only meaning that can fill the void in our lives. The 70-hour a week job, the countless extracurricular activities, the gym, and the yoga studio may seem to fill our lives with value, but they lack the one thing that Christ alone can give. He corrects our vision and rebalances our gaze. Christ recalls our gaze to this place, this community, the Church. It is here where the vertical and the horizontal meet. Ascension Day is the Church’s strongest charge both to gaze up into heaven and then back down. We look at him, and then we look around. And if we hold our gaze in both places, we will never be left comfortless.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ascension Day
May 26, 2022

A Tale of Two Cities

I have recently been reading a book by Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, entitled Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. In this book, Bishop Williams is exploring a theology of aesthetics. He suggests that, in the sacramental life of the Church, most notably in the Mass, “God makes himself other; the world is a world in which things make themselves other or are made other (they are more than they are and give more than they have.”[1]

What an astounding claim this is. Because God took on human flesh, the material world—this world in which we live and move and have our being—can represent, indeed can be so much more than it is or seems to be.

Now, remember that, because we’ll come back to it. But before we do, I want to offer a tale of two cities. The first city I want to describe is the city described in the Revelation to John. If we were to include some verses of chapter 21 that were omitted from this morning’s lectionary excerpt, we would get a vivid physical description of this city. It’s a perfect cube, and the foundations of its wall are bedecked with jewels. It sparkles in the light. It has twelve pearly gates, and the names of the twelve tribes of Israel are inscribed on these gates. The single street that runs through this city is pure gold but also transparent, like glass.  

We hear in today’s reading that this city’s gates are always open. It is lit only by the glory of God; it needs no artificial light. There is no darkness; nothing is hidden there. Everything is exposed and brought into the full light of day. There is no need for secrets; there is no room for secrets. And in the middle of that gold, transparent street is a crystal-clear river, flowing from the very throne of God. Along its banks is a fruitful tree, whose leaves are intended for the healing of all.

The denizens of this city are continually worshipping God. It is their only business and their supreme joy. They see the very face of God, something forbidden until one arrives in this city. And all these citizens are marked with the name of Christ.

But there are other qualities of this city that we can assume, knowing that this is the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem. In this city, there’s no fighting or violence. Even though people there bear the painful markers of their past experiences in another less heavenly city, in this city, the suffering and violence are gone. All are now at peace. And there are a variety of people here, from all races and nations. This city is heaven itself.

To use Rowan Williams’ words, it’s a city in which things are other, or have been made other. Things are more than they seem. The vision of this city is something that literally seems unreal to our minds and imaginations.

But the second city that I want to tell you about is much more familiar to us. You will recognize it. It’s a place where things seem to be precisely as they meet the eye.

In this city, there are no definable boundaries. Rather, the boundaries, size, and shape of this city seem to mutate frequently, like an amoeba, based on human whims. And its gates are routinely closed in the faces of those who seek entrance, for whatever reason it may be. Even once inside this city, if you’re lucky enough to pass through its gates, there are usually more gates to navigate. And if your circumstances are too unfortunate, those gates will be closed to you. You can bet on that.

This city is full of light, but that light alternates with darkness that covers all kinds of sordidness, shame, and evil. The light, though, must come either from the sun itself or from the artificially produced light of human technology; it is not constant. When overconsumption and human greed dominate, the power fails, and the light goes out. If people can’t pay their electric bills, the lights are turned off.

There are many streets in this city. Depending on where you live, some are maintained better than others. There are certainly rivers here, and there is plenty of water. But in some locations, the public water supply is contaminated.

Trees abound in this city, at least if they haven’t been cut down or died because of extreme climate conditions. But their fruit is usually controlled by regulations and rules. The fruit is not available without a price. And rarely do the leaves of these trees lead to the healing of all. Usually, the frenetic pace of this city impedes healing. Stress, exhaustion, and poor health are common.

The citizens of this vast city worship all manner of things. Some purport to worship God. Others refuse to worship God. Some worship multiple gods. Many say they worship God, but they really worship a variety of things: status, success, affirmation, money, material goods, power. You will find some people in this city who are covered with tattoos, but these markings commonly proclaim the names of earthly idols and Pelagian claims to achieve happiness and success on their own.

Unsurprisingly, there is a diversity of people in this city, but too often, they don’t get along. Peace is rare, violence is more common. People are shot in grocery stores, schools, and churches. Wars are waged simply because national leaders lust for power. Children starve. Pandemics rage. Death is unavoidable. What you see is really what you get. Even if the image isn’t appealing, it’s not a surprising one. We know what this city looks like.

And I dare say that the first city, what Scripture tells us is the city of God, seems less real to us. It’s something like a theological Disneyworld. We imagine that we can take trips to it in our minds, but such a city can never really exist. Whether we like it or not, the second city is the stuff of our world. It’s the unavoidable reality of our daily existence.

And sadly, much Christian preaching has led us to believe that these two cities can never meet. We are told to pray that we will be a part of that heavenly city, which is our ultimate destiny. If we do all the right things and if we are well-behaved, one day, we might be fortunate enough to walk through the pearly gates of that holy city. Meanwhile, we toil through the city here below, praying only to escape it.

But in a world that God himself deigned to enter and inhabit, in what has sometimes been called a sacramental universe,[2] things are “more than they are and give more than they have.” While we may settle for less, and while our expectations might be detestably low, isn’t something more possible?

And isn’t this the good news in St. John’s vision of the city of God? Far from being a theological Disneyland or a hallucination prompted by a laughable naivete, it is a glimpse of what can be realized but what so often isn’t due to human sin. And this sin is usually a failure to dream and hope. It’s a failure to see that things “are more than they are and [can] give more than they have.”

Contrary to the ways in which St. John’s Revelation is usually interpreted, the heavenly Jerusalem is not something to which we escape. It’s something that God will bring to us, if we will bother to let him.

St. John’s vision of God’s kingdom will never be fully experienced by us in this life. But the city that we currently inhabit, the one I have described in such sobering terms, is not all there can be. We should thank God for that. It’s God in Christ who gives us the hope to believe that we live in a city where things are so much more than they are and can give so much more than they seem to give. Our faith is one where things are never what they seem. Things are, can be, and should be so much more.

It’s not exactly true that the world has needed the Church now more than ever. It has always needed the vision of the Church. And it does need it now. Things are not and do not have to be what they seem. God gives us another vision. Visions of two cities are before us: one we can only see in our mind’s eye, but we walk the streets of the other each day. With God’s help, we have a choice to make. The question is this: what city will we choose?

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 22, 2022

[1] Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (London: Continuum, 2005), 82.

[2] A phrase used by Archbishop William Temple

First on the Scene

The relationship between worship and belief has been summed up in the well-known Latin maxim lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed. Belief follows practice. Belief, indeed, emerges from prayer and worship. The primary material of the creeds, of Scripture, and of any belief system is human experience and encounter with the Divine. Any system of theology is always a reflection on what God is already doing in the world. To put it another way, God is always on the scene first.

But for all our good intentions, we Christians usually think we are on the scene first. Humans are used to being in charge, and we too often believe that everything starts with us. We put ourselves in the position of the primary actor, usurping the place that belongs rightly to God. Without even realizing it, many Christians tell others to believe or to behave like them before worshipping with them. Our belief is the right belief, so if you don’t think like us, you are not one of us.

This way of thinking is not just limited to the Church. The history of colonialism has been driven by nations assuming that they should impose their way of being on other cultures, usually deemed inferior. One culture’s way of living is better than another’s, and so whoever wields the most power can make the rules.

When this mentality has infiltrated Christianity, it has led to much harm. It has fostered an underlying assumption that it’s the task of Christians to bring God to places where God has never been. The effort, it would seem, all lies in the hands of humans. God has been sidelined to the role of spectator, and we have asked God to cooperate with us. At our most arrogant, we have invited God to accompany us to places where we think God needs to go.

If any book in the Bible smashes this way of thinking to smithereens, it’s the Acts of the Apostles. Consistently throughout this action-filled book, there is one primary actor, and it is God. God sends the Holy Spirit upon the apostles on the Day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is the source and catalyst for what God is doing in the world. The Holy Spirit alights on people and empowers them to proclaim the Gospel. The Holy Spirit causes people to speak in tongues. The Holy Spirit inspires people to do lots of strange things so that others think they are either drunk or out of their minds. One thing is always true: humans are the secondary source to God’s primary source. God acts, and people respond. But when we think that we were on the scene first, God’s actions seem very strange indeed.

This is exactly what is happening when we pick up the story today in the Acts of the Apostles. There is no small degree of consternation among the early followers of Jesus about what has been occurring in recent days. Not only have the Gentiles accepted the Gospel, but no less a person than Peter has violated his usual practice by sharing table fellowship with Gentiles, disregarding certain prohibited foods. Peter himself is perceived to have betrayed his identity as a Jewish Christian by eating with Gentiles. And beyond all this, it seems incomprehensible that the Gospel news could be shared by both Jews and Gentiles. The converting message of repentance and new life in Christ is now available to all, with no distinctions.

It’s hard for us to imagine just how shocking this would have been. It’s just as shocking for us when the Church discerns that she is being summoned to follow a new course of action, especially one that has never been done before. It’s shocking for us to imagine that our belief system might not always have existed in its current form. Isn’t it shocking to realize that maybe we don’t have everything figured out? It was shocking for Peter’s companions to comprehend a shared fellowship with Gentiles who had very little in common with them, and it would have been shocking for Gentiles to conceive of sharing the same Gospel message with Jews. It’s all so very shocking, and yet it's only shocking if we forget that we constantly need to catch up to what God is already doing.

And without this realization, nothing makes sense. Peter has a vision in which he is told to disregard food purity norms. Peter is told by the Spirit to go to Cornelius and his Gentile companions and not to make a distinction between them and him. Peter is told to proclaim the Gospel to them. And then Peter sees the Gentile believers manifesting signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence when they speak in tongues. Peter is undoubtedly flabbergasted until he has a stark realization. He remembers the word of the Lord. John may have baptized with water, but you will be baptized by the Holy Spirit. Humans will move from the place of actor to passive recipient of God’s gift. The correct order will be restored, and God will be the one acting first.

But if we are used to making distinctions between them and us, then any attempt to ignore such distinctions seems dangerous. In its most evil form, it results in racially or ethnically motivated violence, as we’ve just tragically witnessed in yesterday’s shooting in Buffalo. Fear breeds suspicion in the Church, too. If the Church does something she has never done before, it often creates discord and is treated as a passing whim. Isn’t this the root of so much current Church conflict? If we admit that perhaps we have not always had all the answers, it’s an admission of failure. And if something seems alarming to us, then it can’t be of God.

Unless, of course, God has been on the scene long before we ever were. If that is so, then it’s our responsibility to figure out what God has been doing all along. But such a quest to find God in unexpected places can only begin with our own humble confession. Recall Peter’s own confession in the Acts of the Apostles: who was I that I could hinder God? It’s only through Peter’s own experiences with the power of the Spirit and those unlike him that he comes to see what God has been doing all along. Because Peter thought he was on the scene first, he tried to put up roadblock after roadblock to the Spirit’s initiatives. But when he realized that God had been there before him, and that God had always been on the scene, everything changed. And it changed for his companions, too. Their assumptions and expectations were disturbed by God, and they were reduced to silence.

The experience of Peter and the early Church is also a challenge to the contemporary Church. Even though we are preceded by a long history of God breaking in to reestablish himself as the primary actor, we usually forget it. Even though we know intellectually that God has always been on the scene of creation, we forget it. Every possible change is a threat to our way of being. Difference is seen as a threat to conformity. Innovation is viewed as the murderer of tradition. The new is a shallow bulldozing of the old. Unless it’s really true that God has been on the scene before us. Because then, it may not even be that God is doing something new. It only seems new because our vision is catching up to the vision that God has been paving for ages and ages.

And the real challenge is this: how do we know what is of God and what isn’t? How do we recognize a change as true and lasting as opposed to ephemeral and cheap? How do we hold to tradition while being open to the uncontrollable impetus of the Spirit? Once again, the Acts of the Apostles helps us out.

Amid all the surprising things that the Spirit was doing with Peter and Cornelius and the earliest Christian believers, if you read carefully, there is one constant. Going down to the root of it all, there was a primary foundation that supported a future of newness. There is always a primary source to our secondary source. Peter’s vision was not a random dream. Peter’s vision came about as the result of prayer. Cornelius didn’t hallucinate that an angel visited him. An angel came to him in prayer. The Gentiles didn’t fake speaking in tongues. They spoke in tongues as a response to the prayerful proclamation of the Gospel.

It is the presence and power of prayer that testifies to what we so often miss. Prayer reveals to us how God has been on the scene doing things long before we ever get there. God has always been on the scene, and it is we who respond to what God has already been doing. And if we keep this at the forefront of our minds, then maybe we will be a bit less surprised by God. It should indeed be no surprise at all that when we catch up to God, we find he has been on the scene long before we ever knew it. And this is the sublime gift that is available to all, with no distinctions.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 15, 2022