Writing with Light

In a recent photography class, my instructor showed us a photo he had taken at night with a very slow shutter speed, which was necessary to capture as much light as possible. The photo consisted of a black background, against which was written in the dark night sky the word “love.” The instructor had literally written with light. He lit a sparkler and wrote the word “love” in the air in cursive script, and by using a slow shutter speed, he was able to capture a still shot of something in motion.

I’ve been learning a lot about how to capture light in this photography class. One of the first things we learned was that the word “photography” means writing with light. The amazing thing about photography is that you can capture light in almost any situation. There’s always some light available. At night and on gray days, the light is less present, but the light is still there, and the task of the photographer is to channel this light and write with it.

At night, the photographer must slow down the shutter speed to allow as much light into the camera lens as possible. If a photo doesn’t come out quite right, it’s usually because the light hasn’t been captured properly. When the photographer learns to move away from the camera’s automatic mode, she has great power. She has the power to write with light, even in a very dark setting.

The feast of Candlemas comes at a fortuitous time of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. The sun usually doesn’t rise until 7 a.m., and it’s dark by 5:30 p.m. A feast that celebrates the light is just what the doctor ordered. Indeed, the light seems to take on greater meaning when the days are so dark. But it’s extremely difficult to capture the light during the winter. And metaphorically speaking, it’s challenging to harness the light when our world seems dark, too.

We must assume that the world of Anna and Simeon had plenty of darkness, just like ours. I only wish we knew more about Simeon and Anna themselves. St. Luke provides a few details from which we can glean something about their lives. Simeon must be old, since he’s waiting to die until he sees the Messiah. He’s awaiting the consolation of Israel, which also suggests that Israel must be experiencing some sort of desolation. Things are not as they should be. God’s people have been waiting a very long time for their Messiah to come and reign. Meanwhile, justice is sorely lacking. The people may have been brought out of Egypt, but they still aren’t entirely free.

Simeon is faithful and devout, waiting in the darkness with confident expectation for the coming of his Lord’s light. He’s like the long exposure of a camera, a slow shutter speed of a life desperately trying to capture the light as much as he can. His life is shaped by his religious faithfulness, presumably comprised of constant prayer and faithful worship in the temple. Surely this long exposure of a life lived dutifully towards God helped him discern the Spirit’s guiding hand when he was finally led to the Temple to meet his Lord.

And then there’s Anna. We know she’s old, although her exact age is somewhat uncertain depending on how you translate the Greek text. Her life has been a long exposure, too. St. Luke tells us that she never left the Temple. She worshipped and prayed and fasted day and night. She’s a steady presence in the Lord’s house, waiting patiently and faithfully to capture the light when it comes. But her presence there seems to surpass mere duty and obedience. Like Simeon, she’s also waiting expectantly for the redemption of Israel. Her life is permeated with hope. Once again, we’re led to believe that things aren’t as they should be among the Jewish people. And Anna’s life must have had its sorrow, living for so long as a widow. In the world of Anna and Simeon, darkness must be more prevalent than the light. But Anna and Simeon seem to know, like a good photographer, that the light is always present. What matters is what you do to channel it.

And so, on that day of Jesus’s presentation in the Temple, the moment is ready for a glorious photograph with the perfect exposure. The child is brought into the Temple, and because Anna and Simeon are patient and faithful and expectant, and because they’ve been so molded by the Holy Spirit that they know when to show up and what to do, Simeon and Anna are poised to capture the light. And when the light comes to them, they write with it. Gazing upon their infant Lord, they capture in their hearts and minds the perfect image of the living God.

But this light is so powerful and so illuminative that it can’t be held inside the hearts and minds of Anna and Simeon. Most certainly its intensity would have shattered the lens of any camera. This light is meant to be shared. It’s meant to be written on the darkness of the world as a sign of hope for its consolation and redemption, like the word “love” written on a dark night sky.

When the times are spiritually dark, the light seems elusive. The easy solution is to devolve into panic because we can’t seem to capture the light. We might be tempted to throw up our hands in defeat, to despair of ever writing with light again. We live in an impatient, confused, and cruel age, but I suspect the world has always been so. And it’s very difficult to get a perfect exposure in such times.

And yet, there may be an invaluable lesson in the art of good photography, the art of writing with light. The more darkness there is, the longer the exposure must be, because we need to let in as much light as possible. And the longer the exposure is, the more essential it is that the camera is held as steady and still as possible.

If Simeon and Anna were like spiritual photographers of their day, it was because they knew how to capture the light. The Temple and its worship were at the center of their existence. They understood how to be still in the presence of God, unshaken by the restlessness of the world. They understood that their constant, regular presence in the place where God was most truly worshipped was the way in which they could capture the light. They knew that they needed a perpetual open-eyed watchfulness to take in as much light as possible. But above all, they were deeply aware that to write with light, you must first believe with all your heart that the light is there, even in times of overwhelming darkness.

This feast of Candlemas is a celebration of the marvelous good news that the light never goes out, no matter how dark things seem to be. Even forty days after Christmas, we still keep alive St. John’s words that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can’t overcome it. And not only is the light always present for us to capture. It’s meant to be shared as a light that will enlighten every corner of the earth.

The Church has been called a hospital for sinners but in times when the darkness becomes oppressive, maybe we should think of the Church as a school for learning how to write with light. It’s in the Church that each week we take Christ into our arms—literally into our bodies—and then in turn, we move outside of the Church to bless the world, just as Simeon blessed Joseph and Mary. It’s in the Church that when we encounter the presence of the risen Lord, we speak to all whom we meet of the redemption of our Lord, just like Anna. It’s here in the Church that we’re formed to write with light, especially when the light is hard to find.

In the Church, we’re reminded that there’s always light to be found. The darkness can’t comprehend this light. And while Jesus’s disciples have been called fishers of men, maybe we’re most appropriately called writers of light. A long exposure in the darkness, a steady presence in times of anxiety, and eyes that are constantly open will enable us to capture the light and find the perfect image of God. And the Church is where we learn to do this.

My dear friends in Christ, never relinquish the hope that permeated the lives of Anna and Simeon. Never forget that our redemption is always drawing nigh, and our consolation is always on the horizon. Never give up on the possibility of writing with light, because although everything may appear to be darkness, the light is always there. And with God’s grace, we can capture it and write a love message to the world.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple
February 2, 2025

Back to Our Roots

Family reunions on my father’s side were like civic meetings of a small village. My father was one of eight children, and his mother was one of fourteen. There were people on my dad’s side of the family that I didn’t even know existed, at least not until I went to our family reunions. I suspect that it was because my family was so large that we needed those family reunions. Hundreds of us would gather in a fellowship hall somewhere, and there would be games, a festive lunch, and dancing. And there would always be Mass. The local priest would come with his Communion kit, a linen was thrown over a folding table, and we all shared in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers.

As I grew older and got above my raisin’, as we say in the South, I had less and less time for those family reunions. In my youthful arrogance, I thought I had moved on from the insularity of southeast Texas to the sophistication of the east coast, from guitar folk Masses to pipe organs and choirs (well, truth be told, I think I was right about that last one). My personal perspective had expanded from local to international, but when I was home for the summer, I still went to the family reunions anyway.

I’ll never forget one reunion when we were gathered for Mass. I looked over at Big MawMaw and Big PawPaw, my gentle and loving great-grandparents. I saw their clear blue eyes. Yes, that was certainly a reminder of where my own blue eyes came from. I noticed their tears as the priest spoke of the Blessed Sacrament, and I was reminded of my own love for the Eucharist. I had come home to my roots, and there was no way around that fact. My roots were in this huge, down-to-earth Cajun family and in the sacramental life of the Church. I was the progeny of two devout, big-hearted people whose children had spread out across the nation. No wonder we had family reunions so often. Our immensity risked diluting us into a diffuse, scattered lot. We needed to be concretely reminded of our roots.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus comes home to his roots in Nazareth right after a period of testing in the wilderness by the devil. He moves from a confrontation with the mystery of evil back to the specificity of his hometown, a small hamlet far from Jerusalem. The local boy who is beginning to amass a favorable reputation comes home. It’s his custom, after all. Week after week, without fail, Jesus, like his fellow faithful Jews, shows up in the local synagogue.

Jesus hasn’t gotten above his raisin’. He’s not above ensconcing the beginning of his mission in his small hometown. The global thrust of his Gospel isn’t too large to come home for a bit, to a local context, nor is it too universal or general to be incisive and specific. Jesus is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and with laser-sharp focus he sifts through the scroll until he finds the one passage that is for this day, this time. But it’s also for every day, every time. It’s as if he says, it’s time to be specific, lest we forget our roots.

Before his mission really begins, he needs to give a summary of it, a precis for a confused world. In such a world, with problems as intractable as our own, Jesus stands up to read from the scroll, and he needs to be perfectly clear. The unspoken question to him is, who are you, really? What are you really about? And then Jesus stands up to read.

He reads the specific words of God’s eternal promise of release and freedom, of forgiveness, and of God’s unbounded love and care for his children. And now, in the hearing of this local family reunion, as the vibrations of Jesus’s voice resound in the cochleae of their ears, they begin to understand who he is and what he is about. So, now we should be specific about what the Gospel really is. Let’s come home to our roots.

In Jesus, good news is preached to the poor, not just the spiritually poor, but to the materially poor struggling under the boot of the empire. In him the captives are released, not just those enslaved to sin but the real prisoners, the ones to whom Jesus offers a second chance of redemption. In him, the blind recover their sight, and physical and spiritual healing happen. In him, freedom is given to those who are oppressed, the marginalized, the stranger, and the forsaken. Yes, this is the acceptable year of the Lord. Not tomorrow or at the end of the age, but now, today. Let’s be specific.

Jesus tells the family story, the story whose specific thread is woven throughout the epic story of God’s people from creation until Jesus stands up in that synagogue. But the thread has become confused over time, splayed and frayed, and the people have often forgotten their roots. This is why Jesus must be utterly clear with them before he even begins his work. This is my mission, he says. This is your story. And when he sits down, all their eyes are fixed on him. In him, they see the hope of their family story manifested in a human being. In him, they see who they’re called to be. Now, it has become specific.

And that family story is ours, too. We, the Church, are heirs of that story, which gives hope to the poor, the imprisoned, those in need of healing, the oppressed, and the forgotten among us. But as inheritors of this story, there’s more, so let’s be specific. We’re Christ’s body on earth. The mission God has given us is as specific as Jesus’s was in that synagogue in Nazareth. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are the ones God is charging, with his help, to turn what can seem like empty words into a reality.

At the present time, the Church seems to be grasping for a mission. Maybe we’re overwhelmed by the problems and complexities of the world and don’t know how to respond. Perhaps we feel inadequate for the task. But maybe we’ve forgotten something else that’s highlighted in today’s story from Luke’s Gospel. Maybe we’ve forgotten to come home, as should be our custom, week after week, not on the Sabbath but on the Lord’s Day. We’ve forgotten our specific roots in this grand story of God’s unbounded love, mercy, and tangible power to bring righteousness to pass. It’s here, in our family in Christ, that the seeming vagueness of our mission finds great specificity, a clarity that might make us uncomfortable at times. Let’s be clear. It’s here, in the Word proclaimed and in the Bread broken and shared that we fix our eyes on Jesus and discern what God is asking us to do.

Let’s be specific. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by life and are grasping for next steps, come here. Week after week. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Let him teach you. Let him remind you of our collective story, a story that isn’t too broad to be specific, a story that the world so desperately needs to hear. Let’s be clear. Our mission is not limited to empty speech. It’s not judging or condemning others. It’s not vilifying our enemies and taking sides. The Gospel is none of these things because the Gospel can only be good news. Our task is one thing: to fix our eyes on Jesus and the Gospel, and then to live as if its words are really true, not only in the future, but right now, today.

So, let me be specific. Here’s the mission entrusted to us by God.  By his power, we must proclaim good news to those who can hardly pay their bills and to those have no homes and are looking for shelter in the frigid cold. And we must help them. We must work to find forgiveness for our enemies and work towards the freedom of that forgiveness in the justice systems of our own society. We must work for the physical and mental healing of those who suffer. We must work tirelessly to advance freedom for those who are the most ostracized and marginalized among us. We must offer a home for those who seek safety and refuge.

But let’s be specific. We can only sustain this work if we come here, week after week, on the Lord’s Day, to be nourished in our true home. We can never get so above our raisin’ that we can’t come back home, to the local context, where things get specific. We should never take our eyes off the One who will give us life and who sends us out in his name to give life to others.

When I went back home for those family reunions, even when I didn’t feel like it, I learned something about myself. I learned that I was a larger person than I thought. I belonged not only to myself or to my immediate family but to a giant, extended family. I was reminded of my specific roots in an anonymous, nameless world.

It’s the same with us. When we come here, week after week on the Lord’s Day, we’re nourished with heavenly Food and given the strength and wisdom to learn that we’re so much bigger than we thought. We’re reminded of the universal family of God of which we’re members. And together, with our eyes fixed on Jesus, we remember the heart of the Gospel. In this worldwide family, if we remember our story, the impossible is possible. Let’s be specific: if we fix our eyes on Christ, the world will never be the same again.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
January 26, 2025

The Best Is Yet to Come

When did we stop telling our stories? When did the Church begin to question whether she could speak convincingly enough of what God was doing among her members? When did Scripture become the only story to tell and our lives become just ordinary, boring events, seemingly devoid of the Holy Spirit’s fire? When did the Church start to focus more on judging and indoctrinating and operating like a business rather than telling that sweet, sweet story of Jesus and his love, of Jesus and his glory, to quote an old hymn.[1]

I’m not exactly sure when we stopped telling our stories, but Jesus certainly taught by telling stories. He told parables to give us glimpses of the kingdom of God. And of course, we’ve been given the stories from the Bible themselves, real stories of Jesus’s life and ministry, like the story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee. That story is a true story from the past, but it’s a story that intersects with our lives, too.

Today, I want to tell you a story that intersects with the story of the wedding in Cana of Galilee. That’s what Christians do; they tell stories. Many of you have probably heard this story in some form before, but I want to tell it again because this story echoes so many different stories from the Bible.

Once upon a time, there was a priest who was quite happy in his church, but he felt a growing, mysterious call from God to explore ministry elsewhere. It wasn’t because he needed to leave his position. The nudge he felt was a peculiar push from comfort into discomfort, from impossibility to possibility, but with no certainty of a secure future.

As he explored this potential new call, he met with the leadership of that church, all three of them. A folding table was set up in the Choir Room, which was also a makeshift parish office. It was a cold winter’s day, and the priest was a bit uneasy. Some people thought it was foolish for him to leave a vibrant, growing church to consider leading a church on the rocks, struggling to keep the lights on.

So that priest listened to the parish’s leadership, to their ideas and hopes for the future. He asked questions. He tried to gather all the right data, just like you do in an interview. Is there real potential for growth here? What are the people like? How many are there? What are their dreams? And then, he asked the clincher. So, if nothing changes with this parish’s financial situation, how many years do you have left? And one of the vestry members held up his hand. Five. Five years. Five years and the good wine would run out. Five years to fill the jars to the brim with water and pray for a miracle.

Admittedly, the priest’s heartrate went up. Maybe this was a bad idea after all. Why risk a salary and a career on a mere nudge? But the tug on his heart persisted. The priest, against the judgment of some, decided to accept the call to serve that small parish.

When he first arrived, there was a shared fear that the good wine was running out, leaking out heavily from cracked jugs. But before long, people in that parish began to discern that Jesus was telling them to do something. It was as if the Blessed Virgin herself, long an intercessor among the parish’s members, was saying to them, “do whatever he tells you.”

They did. They prayed and listened. And they gathered as many jars as they could—many of which were cracked and leaking water—and they filled them to the brim. They dipped into their endowment—which was small and leaking water itself—and poured money into ministry. Those outside the parish would have considered this a fool’s errand, but they were simply obeying the risen Lord.

And behold, after some time, the parish began to grow. New ministry was created by putting more and more water into questionable jugs. The tenor of conversations among leadership changed from assuming the wine would eventually run out to assuming that the feast would go on. Now, maybe the wine wouldn’t be as good after a while, but at least there would still be some wine to serve. This wedding party didn’t have to stop. Just do what Jesus tells you, and then be surprised. This parish had decided to serve the good wine first, but not to skimp at the end. This parish had chosen to serve the good wine and keep serving it, world without end. And sure enough, the wine that kept appearing was even better than at first. What happened to this parish was a sign of great hope. It was a sign of Christ’s new creation, of a rising from death to life, of God’s abundant provision when scarcity had been the primary narrative. It was a sign of the future hope of glory breaking into the present and renewing the broken past.

That story is my story, but it also belongs to you. Some of you are in it, but most of you aren’t. But it’s still your story because I’ve told it to you, and now it’s about you, too. And this is how stories work. They’re personal, and only I or you can know how my or your story is a striking example of God’s action in my or your life. Only from my own experience can I share authentically with you how God turned water into wine in my life when the good wine had run out. And only you can do the same with your own experiences.

In the beloved Scriptural story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee, Jesus performs a miracle, turning water into wine. But he does so much more than that. He reveals his glory, which is manifested in the new creation he brings, not only in that wedding at Cana in Galilee and in his death and resurrection but also in our own lives, day after day.

But this marvelous sign defies any attempt to be a parlor trick. It misses the point to command Jesus to turn water into wine because we’re desperate, and it’s irreverent to treat him as magician. No, Jesus won’t operate in that way. In Cana, he seems wary of working a miracle until the people become involved, too. Do whatever he tells you, Mary tells them. And the people trust that even though they engage in an ostensibly futile endeavor of filling stone jars with water to the brim, Jesus will do something for them. They don’t at first know what, and when Jesus does change the water into wine, it’s more and better wine than they could have expected. They could never have controlled or predicted the results. Jesus surprises them.

But there’s an important detail hidden in the extravagant working of a miracle. There’s an inside group that knows more about what happened than anyone else. They’ve witnessed firsthand what occurred. It’s only the servants who know that Jesus turns water into wine. Everyone else just knows that when the supply of good wine had run out, more wine—even better wine—suddenly appeared. They don’t know the secret behind this story.

It’s the same with us, in our own stories. I imagine that each of us, if we see with the eyes of faith, has a story of how and when Jesus turned water into wine for us. Was it when your last ounce of energy had given out and you thought you couldn’t go on but suddenly God gave you the strength to go on yet one more day? Was it when you took a chance to leave a ruthless, unhappy job which had drained all the joy from your life and then God led you to something much better to fill you to the brim with delight? Or was it when you’d lost all your faith and reached rock bottom and then felt that prompt to find a church, and when you did, all the tasteless water of your life became rich, delectable wine? Only you know your story, and it’s up to you to tell it.

The story of the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee, and my own story of coming to this parish as a priest, and your own stories of water changed into wine, are all challenges to a pessimistic world. The Biblical story and our own stories are evidence against the tired narrative that the Church’s wine has all run out, and there will be no more left. If Jesus truly inaugurated an eternal wedding feast when he was raised from the dead, why should we assume that the feast needs to stop when the wine appears to have given out? Why do churches panic and cut budgets and conserve resources as if that will produce new wine?

This is why we must tell our own stories. It’s the work of the Gospel. It’s our call as followers of Christ to testify to the signs of Jesus’s glory in our own lives. We must tell all the world that when nothing but water was left and the jars were all cracked and the party was grinding to a halt, we remembered the voice of the Blessed Mother: Do whatever he tells you. And we prayed and listened, and we heard Jesus’s voice.

We ran and found all the stone jars we could find, and we hauled buckets of water, and filled them all to the top with bland, tap water, with the most ordinary things we could offer. It seemed reckless and futile, but we were simply listening to Jesus. It was a response to Jesus in faith. And then, we waited and were surprised, because although it seemed that all the good wine had given out, the best was yet to come.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 19, 2025

[1] “I love to tell the story,” A. Katherine Hankey and William G. Fischer

Counted

Harry Ashfield is one of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River.” He’s four or five years old. No one seems to know, and that meshes with the child’s unfortunate family circumstances. Harry lives with his mother and father in an unnamed major American city in a nondescript apartment filled with odd, abstract art. And Harry is neglected.

When we first meet Harry, he’s being picked up by Mrs. Connin, a babysitter. She’s clearly from the country, not the city. And when she appears at the door of the Ashfields’ apartment, which is dark and colorless, his father can hardly get him into a coat properly, and his mother is in bed with a hangover.

The father doesn’t seem to care where Harry will be taken by Mrs. Connin, nor does he care when he will return home. The later the better, as far as he’s concerned. He’s not perturbed when Mrs. Connin, the babysitter, announces that it will probably be later than eight or nine o’clock at night, since she’ll be taking little Harry to a river in the country for a healing service by a preacher named Bevel Summers.

Mrs. Connin and Harry leave the dimly lit apartment and venture out into the gray city, dark at that early hour. On the way to Mrs. Connin’s home in the country, she suddenly asks Harry what his name is. Until this point, she only knew his last name. “Bevel,” Harry answers, which is strange because it’s not his name; it’s the name of the country preacher they will soon meet. But it’s also the first indication that something significant is about to happen to Harry Ashfield. Mrs. Connin has no clue that Harry’s name isn’t really “Bevel.” Nevertheless, off they go to Mrs. Connin’s house out on a farm.

When Harry first enters Mrs. Connin’s house, he soon notices a picture hanging on a wall. Unlike everything else in the story until this point, the picture is in color, and it features a man wearing a white sheet, with long hair and “a gold circle around his head,” who is sawing some wood while children watch him. It’s clear and simple, unlike the abstract art in Harry’s parents’ apartment. Harry doesn’t yet know it’s Jesus in the picture, but later, he would learn that “he had been made” by this “carpenter named Jesus Christ.”

After some time at the farmhouse—enough time for Harry to be teased by Mrs. Connin’s wild children, who turn a pig loose on him—the whole family makes the journey down to the river to the healing service led by Bevel Summers, the preacher. When they arrive at the river, Preacher Bevel is standing out in the river with water up to his knees. He's no more than nineteen years old. He sings, and he preaches. He talks about the River of Life, the only river that matters, the one that comes from Jesus’s blood. It's the river that can handle our pain, he says. It's the river in which we can be cleansed. It's that river that leads to the Kingdom of Christ, says Preacher Bevel.

Eventually, Mrs. Connin raises Harry up above the crowd and announces that this boy has probably never been baptized. The preacher invites little Harry forward, and the child tells him that his name is Bevel, but of course it isn’t. He has no idea what baptism is, but when the preacher asks him if he wants to be baptized, he says yes. Before, in his life with his parents, everything was a joke. But Harry now realizes that this event at the river is no joke. Harry thinks to himself, “I won’t go back to the apartment then. I’ll go under the river.” The preacher says to him, “You won't be the same again. You’ll count.”

Harry is dunked in the water, and the preacher affirms, “you count now. You didn’t even count before.” It’s what Harry later affirms, too, when he returns to his colorless apartment in the city and his mother asks about what the preacher said to him. Harry replies, “He said I’m not the same now. I count.”[1]

This is, of course, what we say about Christian baptism. After we’re baptized into Jesus’s death and resurrection in the water of the font, or the water of the River of Life as Preacher Bevel would have said, we count. Unlike little Harry whose name changed at baptism, our name remains the same. But we are different after baptism. We count in a unique way.

But it's not as if we never mattered before. It’s not as if we aren’t children of God before the water hits our head. It’s not that God doesn’t love us or protect us before we’re baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. It’s just that after we’re baptized into Christ, we aren’t the same, as little Harry said. We can never be the same again, because in the sacrament of baptism, God has done something to us that’s real and mysterious and wonderful. We count. We’re marked as Christ’s own forever. We’re destined for something different. And we’ve been immersed in a way of life that does turn our world from dull gray into color, from a joke into something real and true.

But at its core, today’s feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ isn’t really about us and our baptisms, oddly enough. And this is such a novel concept to our self-obsessed culture. This feast is about Jesus and who he is. He alone is the Son of God. He alone is sinless with no need to be cleansed from sin. He alone is the Christ, the Messiah, the Word made flesh, perfect man and perfect God. And yet, Jesus submits to baptism as an identification with all of humanity, not to wash away sin but to allow for this moment of epiphany, the moment where he’s manifested to the world as God’s beloved Son.

Unlike us, our Lord doesn’t need to count in a different way after baptism. He’s always been the Son of God and always will be. But when he springs up from the water of the River Jordan, it is as if things go from grayscale to full color. The heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove, and the voice of God the Father is heard proclaiming Jesus as his only-begotten Son. In human time, in a brief moment of spectacular color and sensory perception, it’s as if the life of the holy Trinity becomes visible and audible to mere humans.

Yes, this feast is really all about Jesus and not about us, even though we want to make it about us. It’s about who Jesus is, because if he isn’t the beloved, unique Son of God manifested in this baptism at the Jordan, then we can’t be counted as we know we are. If he isn’t the Son of God, wholly different from us and yet fully identifying with our human condition except sin, then our own lives remain in grayscale, and they’re drab and lifeless. They’re a joke. Jesus’s baptism is not our baptism and yet it has everything to do with our baptism.

But here’s the wonderful irony of today’s feast. When we make today all about Jesus and not about us, we most fully discover who we’re called to be. When we focus on who Jesus is, then we learn who we are. We see that we’re only truly ourselves when we’re baptized into the One who makes us count.

We can’t help but talk about our own baptisms on this day, but only after we’ve talked about the baptism of him who turns the story of our lives from grayscale into color, from a joke into something real, who makes us count in a way we can never make ourselves count. And yet, this is precisely the modern temptation. We try to make ourselves count in all the wrong ways. We relentlessly climb social ladders. We fight our way to success in our jobs. We live vicariously through our children’s triumphs. We try to make ourselves count in ways that will only change the lighting in our world from color to grayscale, from real into a joke.

But when we focus on Jesus's baptism, and when we’re united in prayer with the One who lived, died, and rose again so that we might be baptized and count, we’re scandalously brought into the divine life. We find ourselves listening in on a conversation between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And we realize that, because of Christ, we count more than we ever imagined. We count because we have the extraordinary privilege of calling God Abba, Father.

There’s nothing else and no one else that can make us count. Only Christ can do that. And this day is all about him. But when we make it all about him, we discover, incidentally, that it’s about us, too. Because of him, our life is transformed fully into color. Because of him, we aren’t the same as we were before. Because of him, now, we count, and we are his forever, and that’s no joke.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ
January 12, 2025

[1] Flannery O’Connor, “The River” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), Kindle edition

Salvation's Footsteps

When I was a newly ordained priest, I served in both a parish and as choir director at St. James School in north Philadelphia, a place well known to many of us. Each summer, the entire school would spend several days at an outdoor adventure camp in northern Maryland, which was a hands-on learning experience for the students and several days of unharnessed fun. But the camp was more than an excuse for a vacation in the northern Maryland woods. It was an opportunity for students to gain self-confidence as they navigated various challenges with courage and grace.

And this is how I found myself standing in line for a ropes course mounted high in the trees of a section of northern Maryland forest. As a school staff member, I was assigned to accompany a group of students in their scheduled activities each day. At this camp, staff members participated as fully as the students. Everybody was in it together, and apparently this shared participation included walking on tree limbs hundreds of feet in the air, with nothing but a harness and helmet for protection.

As I stood in line, my heart began to race. I don’t like heights. I wondered how I might gracefully avoid the ropes course while still supporting the students as they walked out on limbs. Could I just cheer them on and not move forward in the line myself? But I watched as one student after another, some of whom sang in my school choir, literally went out on a limb, encouraged by their fellow classmates.

It was exhilarating to see each student bask in the victory of completing the challenging ropes course, however torturous it was for an acrophobic. Soon, it was my turn. How could I, as their teacher and elder support them with words and not action? They were waiting for me to join them in this test of emotional bravery. So, I stepped up to the course attendant, saddled myself with a harness, and walked out on a limb. Behind me, the students cheered. I went farther and farther out on the tree limb. The ropes course got trickier with each step. My hands sweated. My knees trembled. But the students cheered me on, and when the nightmare was over, the students congratulated me, too. We’d all been in it together.

While I hope never to undertake such an obstacle course again, I understood the impression this whole experience had on the students. They needed their teachers and mentors to share this experience with them. The relationship between teacher and student was one of mutual investment. Students invested trust in their teachers, and teachers invested themselves fully in their students. It was an inspiration for the students to see their elders facing their own fears, just like them. Everyone was in it together.

One of the most common reasons people give up on God is that they don’t believe God is in it with them. They think that God isn’t fully invested in the human experience. God has failed to prove his benevolence, they say. God reigns on high while below children starve, airplanes crash with hundreds of people on board, and terrorists drive cars through crowds of innocent people celebrating the holidays. Meanwhile, God does nothing, say those who have given up on God. Why should they go to church and worship a God who seems distant and removed from the human condition, who isn’t in it with them? To their eyes, God is far away, and we toil here below. We’re not in it together.

To those who think this way, I’ve never been able to provide a convincing argument for belief in God. I suspect that no theologian has or will either. I’ve learned that silence before the mystery of suffering is the most genuine response. It’s often what garners the most respect, even among those who want nothing to do with God.

The Gospels themselves fail to address the problem of suffering and evil in a systematic way. It’s not what their aim is. And yet, if we steep ourselves in the Gospels, they do have something to say about God’s involvement with evil and suffering—quite a lot, actually. And it’s no small comfort to hear St. Matthew the Evangelist assure us that our Messiah and Savior is named Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Surely, Matthew knew suffering in his own life. He knew what it was like to be a reviled tax collector-turned-Christian. He knew what it was like to give everything up to follow his Lord. Unsurprisingly then, at the heart of Matthew’s Gospel, we discern the unspeakably good news that even though bad things happen all the time to good people, our God hasn’t forsaken us after all. And God certainly hasn’t caused the evil and suffering himself. God has been with us in the most intimate way in the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, God with us.

Without this deep conviction that God is really in it with us, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt makes no sense. St. Matthew is indeed the only evangelist to give us this story. Practically speaking, I suppose the Holy Family had to flee to the most remote place possible, far from the jurisdiction of Roman tyrants, and certainly, Egypt was high on that list. But what Jewish person would have wished to go back to Egypt, the place from which their ancestors had fled so many years before? Who would have wanted to make that long and arduous trek through hazardous conditions? And even after the Holy Family departed Egypt, the journey was still filled with uncertainty and the specter of yet another tyrant to avoid, which explains how they eventually ended up in Nazareth.

At first glance, Matthew’s story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt simply provides more fodder for those who want nothing to do with God. How could God allow the Savior of the world to escape Herod’s wrath while all the Holy Innocents were slaughtered? And was all this simply to fulfill Scripture?

But Matthew doesn’t try to explain the massacre of the Holy Innocents, nor do I think he intends to literalize Scriptural fulfillments in a rigidly providential way. St. Matthew is telling us something profound about salvation in his story of the flight of the Holy Family to and from Egypt. The infancy of the Christ child retraces the footsteps of God’s people, in thick and thin. Our infant Savior is taken by his parents into the land that enslaved his own people in the past. And under his parents’ care and God’s providence, the holy Child is brought once again into freedom. The One who comes to make his home with us and within us, becomes for a time a homeless person, wandering like many today. The One for whom John the Baptist prepared a straight path, is carried by his family through a circuitous desert excursion until they finally make their home in Nazareth. The Holy Family must meander its way around the traps of imperial oppression. The Word doesn’t become flesh in a distant, straightforward way, but in a human, intimate, and complicated way. God hasn’t removed himself to a remote corner of the sky. God, in Christ, has been through it all with us, to Egypt and out of it again.

God in Christ, in human time, has gone where our spiritual ancestors had already traveled and suffered and been liberated, and God in Christ, in human time, goes where his beloved children will yet venture in the future. And in between Good Friday and Easter, the Son of God goes to the depths of hell to ensure that not one corner of the earth is left untouched by his saving power. As the Gospels tell us, Jesus sent his disciples out into the places where he himself would go. Our Savior doesn’t leave us to experience hell alone. He’s been there, too.

On this twelfth day of Christmas, as we continue to celebrate the coming of God-with-us in Christ, no amount of Christmas cheer can turn our faces from the horrors around us. War continues in the Middle East. Families of those killed in random acts of violence mourn their beloved. Refugees risk their lives to seek better futures for themselves and their families. People still worry about their next meal. Friends and family are separated by unhappy divisions. Bad things still happen to good people.

St. Matthew doesn’t explain any of this. We can’t explain it. But St. Matthew suggests that we can trust that the God we worship and adore, who has come to us in the most intimate way, has not left us to our own devices, nor does he treat us like puppets on a string. In Christ, God has been where we’ve been, and God will go where we’ll go, too. Christ has been homeless. He’s thirsted on the cross. He, too, has shed human tears. He, too, has lived with the poor and as one of the poor. He, too, has gone from slavery into freedom. He, too, has suffered and died. But he’s also been raised again so that he can reign in glory. And where he’s gone, we shall go, too. And no matter where life will take us, we know that he’s been there, too.  

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day
January 5, 2025        

Incomprehensible Grace

One of our young acolytes refuses to let his light go out. I’m referring to the torch that he carries at Mass. Once we’ve processed out of the church and are saying the final prayer outside the Tower doors, he frantically cups his torch with his hand. The wind is furiously raging against the light, doing its best to extinguish it. The tiny flame shakes violently, and our acolyte redoubles his efforts to keep the light alive. Our young acolyte usually wins. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.

Our young acolyte has been formed through the Godly Play curriculum that we use in Sunday School, where each week we light a candle to remind us of God’s presence with us before we pray together. And each week after prayer time, a child is invited to change the light. They don’t extinguish the light; they change it. The light simply morphs into smoke that spreads throughout the room, so that anywhere we go in the room, we can be close to the light. The light changes, but it doesn’t go away. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.

But there’s another way of translating that verb which is usually rendered “overcome” in the Prologue to John’s Gospel. The King James Version of the Bible says that the darkness comprehended it not. Now, that’s an interesting translation, which I rather like. We might even say that the darkness can’t overcome the light because it can’t comprehend the light. The darkness hasn’t a clue how to deal with the light, as much as it tries.

For centuries, Christians have tried to explain the darkness, which we name as sin and evil. Evil is a privation of good, St. Augustine of Hippo suggested. Our prayer book’s catechism tells us that sin’s power lies in taking away our freedom.[1] Sin and evil seem like powers and forces. They appear real to us. St. Paul understood this when he said that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. We all know our own besetting sins, our proclivities towards gossip, prejudice, envy, and those things we know we shouldn’t do. We know we shouldn’t malign that person, but we do it anyway. We know we should return curt words with kind ones, but we refuse to do so. And evil is at work among us. We only deny it at our peril. We see it plastered all over the headlines of the daily news.

But our young acolyte who won’t extinguish his light after Mass must intrinsically believe in the simple but profound truth of St. John’s words. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The darkness comprehended it not. No matter how much we are subject to sin and evil, they can’t hold a candle (pun intended) to the light that continues to shine.

Maybe the truth about darkness is that it makes us feel like it has power. It dupes us into thinking it’s stronger than it really is. And it functions, primarily, by taking things away. Sin takes away our freedom by tempting us to put distance between ourselves and God. Evil assails us with doubts and deprives us of our confidence. Darkness attempts to wear us down gradually, a death through a thousand small cuts.

How many of us can withstand all these tiny deaths? Our perennial temptations do wear us down and lure us into sin. The systemic evils in our world conscript us into their schemes, and before long, we’re under their sway. It certainly seems as if darkness has an intrinsic power, and yet, the nasty secret about the darkness is that it only gains power by taking things away.

But St. John, in the exquisite Prologue to his Gospel, explains how the light works in contrast to the darkness. John focuses on the light, like our young acolyte tenaciously guarding the light of his torch. John reminds us of the light that shines in the darkness but which the darkness can’t overcome, indeed, can’t comprehend. It’s through this light, manifested in Jesus, the Word made flesh, that we receive grace upon grace. And this is how grace works. Grace heaps more grace upon grace. It gives without ceasing because its very nature is to give. Grace functions in a sphere of infinity, where in love God the Son is begotten of God the Father, and where their endless love is shared in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Grace never runs out. Grace is constantly being poured out upon us. We’ll never receive enough grace because there’s always more to receive.

But the darkness doesn’t understand this. In fact, it can’t comprehend it. Darkness operates in a zero-sum world, where supplies are limited and everyone and everything is in competition. It feeds on the deprivation of good. It chips away at freedom, and it whittles away at good. And as long as we’re operating with the same zero-sum mentality, the darkness will have power over us.

For centuries, the spiritual tradition has told us that in our holiest moments, we’ll feel most vulnerable to the darkness. As St. Paul said, when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. And so, at holy times in our lives, we’re vulnerable to the darkness that assails us in small ways. One nagging doubt is enough to push us away from a good decision. One more taunt from an ill-meaning person lures us into a less than charitable response. An ill-timed inconvenience destroys our last ounce of patience. We can’t explain how darkness finds us when we’re at our holy work, but it does. And to explain it and ruminate about it is to give darkness too much power. In some sense, it only has as much power as we give it. Darkness grows when we react against it and when we try to fight it. Oddly enough, the more we believe we must fight the darkness, the more unwittingly we can come to personify it.

Renounce the darkness and reject it, but don’t fight with it. The light always shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t overcome it. It can’t comprehend it. And from the fulness of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, we’ve received grace upon grace. There’s no end to this grace. In every moment of sin, grace can be found in forgiveness. In every instance where evil divides, grace continues to restore relationships and draw our eyes to the light that still shines in the darkness. Grace never ceases to find us, and so the light can never be extinguished.

And this is why St. John’s Gospel takes us back to the beginning, where everything is light and infinite gift and goodness. Before the darkness tried to take it away, the light was always offering itself in love. And even now when darkness tries to take it away, the light always continues to give its radiance to a bleak world. But the darkness hasn’t overcome the light because the darkness can’t comprehend it.

What the darkness can’t comprehend is that on Good Friday, when it tried to do its worst against the light, it was bested by gentle, strong, courageous love. When darkness tried to take away the life of the world’s Savior, the Savior nevertheless gave his life willingly on the cross so that all might live. And through that gift, we continue to receive grace upon grace.

When our kindness is rebuffed, we receive grace upon grace and give more kindness in return. When life throws us yet another curve ball, we resort not to bitterness, but we’re given grace upon grace to strengthen us with peace. When it seems like we just can’t go on another day and when all seems like darkness, there’s always more grace for us to receive from the eternal light, the Word made flesh, who always comforts us with hope.

I wonder if we might reimagine St. Paul’s belief that when we try to do good, evil lies close at hand. The truth according to St. John is that when darkness lies close at hand, there is yet more grace upon grace. And like our young acolyte we, too, can keep the light shining in the darkness, asking for more grace upon grace until we’re saturated with it.

This grace upon grace is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s the mystery of Christmas. It’s the light that shines in the darkness. And although the darkness will constantly try to put it out, it can never overcome the light. It can’t overcome the light, because it can’t comprehend the light. There’s always more grace upon grace, and despite the efforts of the darkness, this grace will last forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas Day
December 29, 2024       

[1] The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 849.

Music for Strings

At Christmas, music for strings seems more apt than music for brass. Don’t get me wrong. I love brass music. Each year, I listen with great pleasure to the spine-tingling brass arrangements of Christmas carols by the late Sir David Willcocks. But at Christmas, I really prefer music for strings.

It must be the intimacy of string music that I associate with the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the eternal Word of God becoming flesh and dwelling on earth. String music is chamber music, music for close quarters and cozy spaces. Brass fanfares are for palaces and cathedrals. Brass instruments seem to herald the coming of a king with the acclamations of crowds of people. And a King does come to us this time of year, but this King comes with little fanfare. He comes quietly in a manger, unknown to the crowds outside the stable. He comes with human tendons and sinews flexing into new life. He comes with the music of strings that are energizing themselves into the frequences of music.

Have you ever watched a string musician making music? As a keyboardist and former trumpet player, stringed instruments fascinate me. I do have a sense of what it’s like to know one’s instrument, of forming one’s mouth into an embouchure to send vibrating air through brass piping, or of resting one’s fingers on the keys of a piano or organ, feeling exactly where middle C is. I can recall sensations of instruments that just didn’t feel right, of horns that produced a dull sound or of pipe organs where the keys resisted a precise touch.

But I know nothing of the relationship between a violinist and her violin, where her head rests gently on the chinrest, inevitably feeling the resonance of the instrument. I know nothing of the way a violin would sound with an ear so close to where the music is coming alive. The connection between a violinist and violin is so close that many violinists bear a visible mark of that proximity on their skin. While an unmusical pianist could stoically run his fingers over the ivories, how can a violinist not feel the intimate connection with her instrument, as her head snuggles up to the sound of wood and strings vibrating with life?

In the beginning, there was divine music, a perfect music of love between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It was always there, beyond time and space, and it will always be there, beyond time and space. But on a certain day in a certain year and in a very specific place on earth, this music, always present within the life of God, was perceived within human time and space. It was like music composed within one’s head that was notated and played in audible form for the very first time. It’s as if God lifted his bow, cradling all of creation next to himself as intimately as possible, in the crook of his neck, and the bow touched the strings. And the music sounded forth.

It was perfect music resonating within the soundwaves of imperfect time. For once, humanity could hear the perfection of this music, if it chose. The divine music came so close to creation that creation  was inflected by true life, and yet creation refused to receive this life. It’s almost as if this life was rejected precisely because it was so close. It was so near to human beings that they missed it.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. All of creation resounded with the glory of God in audible form when the bow touched the strings. But God came so close to his beloved children that they pushed him away. Maybe they couldn’t believe that God Almighty would deign to cradle them in the crook of his neck and play his divine music on the strings of their lives. And when the first prayer seemed to go unanswered, it was assumed that God had lifted his bow from the strings. When the first instance of suffering happened, it was because God was playing humans like a fiddle, manipulating their lives and yanking them around arbitrarily. When more and more tragedy occurred, it meant that God and his divine music were removed to a remote corner of heaven while humanity was left with cold silence below. Or could it be that God swooped down from on high in that year when the Word became flesh, playing the perfect music for thirty-three years until the world cut the strings of the violin and shattered its wood? Perhaps, people speculated, the music ceased, and God went back up into the sky. The divine music was so unbelievably close that the world couldn’t hear it, like our own heartbeats in our chest.

And yet, despite the world’s deaf ears, the incomprehensible mystery of Christmas remains, which is that the divine music never stops even in our time and space. It has never stopped. It will never stop, although it seems unthinkable to us that God would continue to cradle us near his heart, that he still allows our warped strings to resonate with hints of his divine music. It’s inconceivable that God would touch his bow of life on the reluctant strings of our own frail humanity to make music through us. Can this happen even after the crucifixion? Can these broken strings still produce the music of life?

In our loneliest moments or in the most difficult times of our lives, we may feel like warped wood, like strings that won’t flex, or like a cracked soundboard on a violin. God’s perfect music is inevitably distorted when sin damages the material of our lives. While the truth of Easter is that nothing in our lives is beyond repair, the truth of Christmas is that the restoration of divine music is possible even in the brokenness of our lives, all because God is closer to us than we care to perceive. With God’s grace—especially if we recall how close he is to us—our strings can soften and flex into divine music once again. Our soundboard can be mended. We can give voice to the music that God is animating from within us.

In the prologue to his Gospel, St. John makes a claim so astounding that it’s frequently tuned out by much of the world. Because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we have the miraculous power to become children of God. Because we are God’s children, God’s Church, God’s beloved ones enlivened by the power of the Holy Spirit, St. John tells us that we are capable of doing greater works than we can ever imagine. Even on the cracked soundboards and brittle strings of our lives, God can make wondrous music.

Living as if we have the power to become children of God is the art of music, but it’s more than honing technique or blindly observing rules. It’s living as if the true Light of the world has enlivened every fiber of our being, warming cold strings to vibrate with the glory of God. It’s living as if we do believe that God continues to cradle us in the crook of his neck, close to his bosom, settling his bow on the strings of our lives.

We can feel the warmth of his love against our skin. We can sense his divine bow not coercing us into life but drawing life out of the hardened strings of our existence, mending the cracks in our soundboards, and coaxing sweet sounds out of bitterness. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God’s bow touched strings of flesh, and divine music resounded.

On this Christmas day, we celebrate the nearness of the divine music, so near we might refuse to hear it or might be prone to ignore it. But however dark your world may appear right now, however warped the wood and however calcified the strings of your life are, you’ve been kissed by grace. You’re still cradled in the bosom of God. You’re still granted the power to become children of God, made to bring forth divine music, despite your imperfections. So, nestle yourself in the crook of God’s neck, let his bow draw glorious music from your lives, and let them resound with the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 25, 2024        

Finding Our Way Home

It was sometime during the Twelve Days of Christmas, and he was standing by the crèche, gazing adoringly at the sheep and the donkey and the ox. He was making cooing noises, admiring the cuteness of the animals as they reclined before the baby Jesus. He had found his way to the church in the middle of a bustling urban center. Truth be told, it was a home of sorts for him. To my knowledge, he had no other home, but he frequently showed up at the church for daily prayer and Mass.

He was a character, to say the least. He’d been known to wave a Mexican flag at the peace during Mass on Cinco de Mayo. At other times, he could be seen striding up to Communion, with large designer glasses on and a scarf wrapped luxuriously around his neck. He knew the church was his home, because on the day that he was beaten up on the streets, he headed straight for the church, where he was lovingly embraced by the parish priest. The church may have been the only place on earth where he felt loved.

As he stood before the crèche on one of those Twelve Days of Christmas, admiring the animals in the nativity scene, he turned to my friend and asked, “Do you think the animals knew it was the baby Jesus?” Now, that’s a theological question if I ever heard one. It’s a question that most of us would be too embarrassed to ask. We don’t often think of the animals in the manger as having so much sentience. To be honest, no one really knows how the sheep, the donkey, and the ox came to be associated with the nativity scene. The Gospels say nothing about them at the manger. The sheep, we could reason, found their way there with the shepherds. But the donkey and the ox? Who knows? And yet, it would be an anathema to have a crèche without them.

Tradition tells us that these animals were introduced into the nativity scene because of a mysterious line at the beginning of the book of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah says that “the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” This is Isaiah’s prophetic judgment on our spiritual ancestors. He sharply suggests that, despite God’s gracious care, his people were so stubborn and willful that even an ox and a donkey would have a better sense of obedience. We might say the same of ourselves. An ox recognizes the feel of its owner’s pull on a halter, as well as the standard verbal commands. A donkey must sense the pressure on his back as its owner leads it where it should go. A cow clearly knows where the feeding trough is. Even Scripture tells us that the sheep will answer to the voice of the good shepherd. But many of us refuse to follow the lead of our true Master, nor do we really understand who’s leading us at times.

Animals know sometimes. They just know. They have a sense that someone can be trusted. They know where food is. They know where home is. My father-in-law recently told me a story about a dog he had when he was young. One day my father-in-law, his brother, and mother went over to the site of their future home in the town where they lived. And the dog went with them. But when they opened the car door, the dog jumped out and ran away.

They searched and searched for a couple of hours, but to no avail. They couldn’t find the dog, and so they eventually started home, worried about where he was. But when they arrived back home, several miles from where they’d been searching for him, the dog was already there, sitting patiently outside the house. For whatever reason the dog ran away, he knew where home was, and he found his way back there.

So, I wonder: did the ox and the donkey and the sheep know that it was the baby Jesus? We’ll never know, of course. But they did know where home was. The donkey knew the stable as his home. The ox knew it, too. And the sheep must have followed the shepherds, because wherever the shepherds were present to protect them, it must have been home to them.

That urban church of which I was a member years ago was also home to a restless soul who asked my friend a rather perceptive theological question. He knew that the church was home, where Jesus was always enthroned in the tabernacle on the altar. He knew that it wasn’t silly to query whether the animals at the manger knew it was the baby Jesus, because they at least knew where home was, through obedience and familiarity. And that sense of knowing is too often lost on us, however advanced we might be on the evolutionary scale. Maybe the animals did somehow know it was the baby Jesus.

In those days when a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled, the edict from on high was that every citizen should go home. Each was to go to his own city, which is how Mary and Joseph ended up in Bethlehem, the city of David. It was a nondescript place, a tiny hamlet not far from Jerusalem but worlds removed in terms of sophistication. To Bethlehem they went because it was home. Well, technically speaking, Nazareth was home, but from God’s perspective—from a spiritual perspective—Bethlehem was really home. From the viewpoint of salvation history, Bethlehem was where it all began. It was the city foretold by the prophets as the home of the Messiah. Bethlehem was home.

And through a marvelous intersection of history and divine providence, a stable became a throne. A sweeping decree from a worldly ruler enabled the true King of the world to begin his reign in the back room of a country lodge. A homeless family found a home in a stable that wasn’t technically home to them. And yet, it was home.

The manger was home for the animals, because there they found food. For the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know who its true King is. The sheep knew to follow their shepherd, even if thousands enrolled in an imperial census were led by bad shepherds, who for reasons of greed uprooted them and sent them each to their own cities. For Mary and Joseph, the stable was a home, because the baby was there, the Word was made flesh there, the Bread of Life was born in the House of Bread, which is what Bethlehem means.[1]

And on this night, we, too, have come home. Something other than Christmas cheer must have brought us to this church. I suspect that more than a few of us are struggling to find Christmas cheer, but we’re in this church for more than simple happiness. So, like an ox finding the comfort of its master’s lead and a donkey recognizing its master’s crib and a sheep following the guidance of its shepherd and a dog finding its way home again, we have found our way here. We must know this is home. Like that man who found his way to the church when the world beat him up, we have made our way here, to the crèche, to adore the newborn King, the Prince of Peace. He is our home.

On the other 364 days of the year, we might feel as if we have no home. We are frequently strangers, wandering all over a planet where there seems to be no peace, searching for our true home. We’re led by bad shepherds at times. We’re force-fed food that doesn’t nourish us. But tonight, we must return home to be quickened by the life of the Word made flesh.

For earthly homes aren’t always the places we think they’ll be. Earthly homes aren’t always happy. Going home can feel like a regression, backsliding from maturity into immaturity. But on this Christmas night, we can rest assured that this place is more than a mere earthly home. It’s an earthly home touched by heaven itself. It’s a home of peace, love, and joy. Perhaps, once again, we need to become an innocent child or take a cue from animals who can’t solve math equations but who at least know who their master is and where home resides. Tonight, we’ve come home.

And the marvelous mystery of Christmas is that home isn’t only in Bethlehem. Home isn’t only at the crèche at the back of this church. Home isn’t only before the altar of God where Jesus reigns in the Sacrament. No, because of the mystery of the Word made flesh, home has spread to the ends of the earth. Home is taken with us in our hearts, where Jesus also reigns in glory. Home is anywhere, in the grimiest alleyways of cities or in the feeding troughs of country villages. Home is where we know the love of our Lord, our true Shepherd, who leads us, guides us, and protects us forever. Home is where he feeds us and promises us eternal life, so that one day, we’ll abide with him in the heavenly mansion.

So, come, let us worship the newborn King! Come, let us adore the baby in the manger! Come, let us kneel before him and offer him our hearts, so that in them, he will make a home and abide there forever!

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2024

[1] This play on words has roots in the patristic tradition.

A Song, a Dance, and a Question

How many children do you know who refuse to sing? Singing is just what little children do. They sing as they play. They sing in front of adults without a second thought. Even the ancient chants of the Mass have a melodic resemblance to the sing-song intervals of children at play. And we adults aren’t usually surprised when children sing. We expect them to sing. We smile and laugh as we witness the carefree, joyful singing of children. It would, in fact, be odd for a child not to sing. It would be bizarre if we never sang to a child when she was sad or when we wanted to coax him to sleep.

Children dance, too. I used to watch with glee as my niece and nephews danced to music on TV. We adults would laugh, good-naturedly, as they danced, not laughing at them but with them. We didn’t think it strange that they would dance. Like singing, we would find it strange if they didn’t dance. And it would be equally unusual if we didn’t dance with babies, too, bouncing them on our knees while singing and comforting them and gladdening their hearts in play.

In case you haven’t noticed, children like to ask questions, as much as or more than they like to sing and dance. Children can ask some of the most theologically astute questions of all. Will we ever see him again since he died? Why did Jesus have to die on the cross? What happens to our tattoos when we die? I’m not kidding. I’ve heard all these questions at one point or another, and there may be no truer test of our own grasp of the Christian faith than to respond authentically to the questions of children.

But there comes a day—and I’m not sure when it happens—that shame enters from stage right or left in the drama of our lives. Is it in adolescence, or is it before? I don’t know when, but the day inevitably arrives when we feel that pang of embarrassment to sing or dance or question in public. We might sing privately in the shower or dance in the isolation of our rooms when no one is looking. And we certainly always continue to question in our hearts, wondering why something has happened to me or someone I love. But the song, the dance, and the question always remain, even if we hide them from the public eye.

Maybe someone tells us that we don’t have a good musical ear, and that callous remark stops our song. Or we become so self-conscious that we can no longer dance with others, and so we sit on the sidelines at the wedding reception as everyone else gyrates and busts a move while we watch, saddened by our inability to participate. We laugh at those who sing spontaneously in public, saying that it makes us uncomfortable, and so, we stand with hymnal closed as the rest of the congregation belts out the hymn. We laugh at the silliness of those who dance when something wonderful happens to them.

I can remember when I stopped singing in public; it was too embarrassing. I still refrain from dancing in public, because I’m too self-critical. And at some point in school, I stopped asking questions aloud, although I had plenty of them. I was worried that others would think I was unintelligent. Do you relate to this? What was it that made our songs cease and our dancing shameful and our questions anathema? Who told us that our questions were ridiculous and shut us up?

Maybe it’s actually the question that muffles our song and stills our dancing. We question why life has taken a turn for the worse. We question why a parent is terminally ill. We question why children starve and others have too much to eat. We question why we pray so hard and our prayers aren’t answered. With all these questions, how can we sing? How can we dance?

And yet, the story of the visitation of Mary to Elizabeth wouldn’t be the same story without song and dance. At first glance, we can only see why Mary would break into song as she greets Elizabeth. At a superficial level, we can easily grasp why John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. Mary has become mysteriously pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit, and Elizabeth is also great with child, although like Abraham’s wife, Sarah, she is far too old to give birth. Of course, there would be singing and dancing at this news. Mary and Elizabeth have both received extraordinary blessings.

But there’s also every good reason that there should be no singing or dancing. If we can move past a greeting card’s romanticizing of this Biblical scene, we’ll discover that things were much more complex than the Hallmark company’s estimation. Mary was no more than a teenager when Gabriel announced to her that she would bear the Son of God. Undoubtedly, she was scared and frightened at her unexpected pregnancy. Can you imagine the shame she would have felt to be visibly pregnant with a child that was not Joseph’s? Do you remember how ancient society treated women in such situations? And what about Elizabeth? She was in her golden years, preparing for death, not birth. Did she have the energy and stamina to raise a child? What would people have said about her? Surely, she must have been wary and frightened, too.

As St. Luke gives us this story, at the center of this touching scene between two cousins, both surprisingly pregnant, there abides a question. It’s a wondrous question and less of a cynical, skeptical one. It’s a question of marvel and awe, and Elizabeth gives voice to it. Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Why indeed! Why should the elder woman be blessed by the greeting of the younger? Why should the Son of God be born into her biological family? How was Elizabeth pregnant? How was Mary pregnant? Why was the Son of God coming into the world as flesh and blood? Why indeed!

Elizabeth’s profound question could have justified every effort to stifle a song or to quell a dance. The question could have internalized an obsessive rumination about how things would be and about what burdens both Mary and Elizabeth might have to bear because of their startling news. But the question only elicits a song from Mary, and an intrauterine dance from John. The mystery of God’s unspeakable blessing to both women evokes a song and dance in the face of a very good question.

To live as part of the human condition is to accept that shame will find us. We’ll be privy to jadedness and loss of innocence as we get older. There will always come a day when the real questions of this world will overwhelm us, and with that sense of being overwhelmed, it will be natural to stop our singing and dancing. Indeed, in the face of the manifold problems of human existence in a world influenced by sin, it will seem unnatural—even inappropriate—to sing and dance.

How can we sing when others are given no voice to denounce their oppression? How can we dance when so many are shackled by human cruelty and violence? How can we even appear to be joyful when there’s so much sorrow and when others suffer because of our own privilege? These are the intractable questions of growing older as fallible human beings.

But Mary and Elizabeth witness to a joy and trust that persist despite the tangible realities of a broken world. Mary and Elizabeth find song and dance even amid their momentous questions, even as they wonder how such things could happen to them. Mary’s song testifies to the fact that God’s blessings and grace come to us from within the trials and tribulations of human life. As it was true for Hannah who first voiced that song so many years ago, it was true for Mary. And as it was true for Mary and Hannah, it’s still true for us.

God still brings righteousness. God still lifts up the poor and casts down the powerful. God still fills the hungry with good things. God still helps his people and remembers his mercy promised of old. Even as things seem so incomplete and our questions remain unanswered, God is still working and bringing all things to perfection and completion.

We sing and dance not because we experience completion or know all the answers. We sing and dance because we have faith that God is showering blessings on us and on the entire world even though sin is all we can sometimes feel and see. We sing because the question of Elizabeth is our question, too. Who are we that our Lord should come to us and visit us with his blessing? Who are we? We are God’s beloved children, still this day and forever, adopted by his grace and made heirs of eternal life. And that’s a truth in which we can have faith. It’s a truth that should make us sing and dance.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 22, 2024

All from Love

Everything from duty, nothing from love. That was the striking title of a chapter in a novel I recently read. I was hooked. I went on to read about the misery of a woman in a loveless marriage. Her life was full of wearisome tasks that wore her down. She had always been a dutiful person. She’d excelled in school. She’d held great promise, working hard to overcome a difficult childhood, until her life was derailed by an unexpected pregnancy and she was forced to marry at eighteen. Day after day, she fed the crying baby, washed the clothes, cleaned the farmhouse in which she lived with her husband, looked out at the loneliness around her, and despaired of her loveless marriage.

She found herself dreaming about creating more time so she could keep up with all the tasks demanded of her life. But each day, she got out of bed earlier than the day before to add more productive hours to her day. It seemed that more and more was required of her, and getting up earlier was the only way to cope. It never ceased. She was feeding a beast that couldn’t be satisfied. She couldn’t find love because duty was eating her up.[1]

Duty isn’t a bad thing, in fact, it can be a very good thing. I am, by nature, a dutiful person. The language of the Mass even tells us that it’s our “bounden duty” in all times and places to give thanks to God. Duty is an integral part of being a Christian disciple. Indeed, I often wonder whether the Church would be better off if more Christians had a sense of duty.

But duty can be stifling when it becomes the end and not the means. Duty is imprisonment when its aim is to please something or someone that’s never satisfied. So many strings can be attached to acts of duty. The duty-obsessed parent says to the child, “I raised you and cared for you and paid for your college education. I did what a parent is supposed to do. How dare you move out of the house and have a life apart from me!” Some churches say, “Your salvation is assured if you are in this fold and you simply follow these rules. If you’re obedient and dutiful and observant, you will be blessed. But should you leave the fold, you are anathema.” Yes, duty can be divorced from love. Duty can be the string that is attached to conditional love, which really isn’t love at all.

Everything from duty, nothing from love. Maybe this chilling statement summarizes the mindset of the crowds that approach John the Baptist. They’ve heard of a wrath to come, and they don’t want to meet that wrath. Perhaps they feel that the clock is ticking, and the alarm will go off soon. Maybe they need to make up for lost time. There’s a God who needs to be appeased, and they’d better hurry. And so, they arrive at John’s feet, by duty, we might say, rather than by love. John himself seems to encourage such duty as the proper response of a faithful child of God. Bear fruits that befit repentance, he says. Don’t rest on the laurels of your status as children of Abraham. Be dutiful, you brood of vipers!

But the crowds who come to John seem stuck on duty. And John’s exhortation to behave as if they are repentant also seems stuck on duty. The crowds don’t know what to do. There’s an urgency to John’s message, and they’re anxious, which is even more of a reason to demand specificity from John. “What then shall we do?”

But did John’s advice help the eager crowds, or did they become more stuck after John addressed them? Surely, those who had two coats went to share one of their coats with the unclothed. Surely, the tax collectors changed their extortionary financial practices. Surely, the soldiers tried to be a bit more just in their dealings with others. Surely, they all heeded John’s good advice. But did they become unstuck? Was everything still from duty? Was anything from love?

How often do we, too, get stuck on duty? Maybe in our own lives, we’re stuck right now. We get out of bed on Sunday mornings, pile on layers of clothing against the cold weather, and we show up here. We’ve heard there’s a wrath to come, and it sounds terrifying. The visions of hell, fire, and brimstone that we’ve heard about from TV preachers or that we’ve read about in Scripture sound a lot like words from the mouth of John. They’ve been used as sticks to beat people into submission. In gentler moments, they’ve been used as guilt-laced carrots to lure people into duty. But the duty that’s elicited by such tactics is based on fear, not on love. And once again, we’re stuck. We don’t know what to do about the state of our soul against the reality of future judgment. Duty seems the only answer when up against the specter of winnowing forks and an unquenchable fire.

And so, we show up here, or we kneel by the side of our beds at night, and we ask, “What then shall we do?” Perhaps it’s the threat of condemnation that has driven us through the doors of this church or to our knees by our beds. We want answers. What then shall we do? And the unspoken part of that sentence is the elephant in the room that we never want to name but is crystal clear. What we shall do is anything that allows us to escape the wrath of God and the flames of hell. Anything at all. Just tell us what to do. Everything is from duty, and nothing from love. We’re stuck.

Good works become the ticket into heaven. We use duty to get something, and love is nowhere in the picture. Let’s face it. In this earthly life, it’s so easy to become stuck. We’re stuck between the rock of God’s assumed wrath and the hard place of our compulsion to live and act justly. What then shall we do?

Maybe the answer lies in rescuing the image of John the Baptist and his fiery speech and his pointing hand from a crude summons to duty. Maybe the answer lies in following the pointing hand through duty to its ultimate reference, which is, of course, Christ, the Messiah. And if we follow John’s hand to Christ, we might be able to discern a deeper message beneath the call to duty, one that is indeed—as St. Luke’s words tell us—good news for us.

John isn’t pointing to good works themselves, which are bound up with Christian duty. John isn’t simply pointing to the good fruit on the tree as the end of all things. John is pointing to the image of God within each one of us that naturally bears the fruit of good works done faithfully and dutifully. John is pointing to the healthy root of the tree that will enable it to bear good fruit. John is pointing to the source of that tree’s life. And in this realization, we learn who we are and who we’re called to be. By virtue of our baptism into Christ in the Spirit’s power, we’re made children of God and heirs of eternal life. And through that same Spirit, God can raise up from our hearts of stone new hearts on fire with the love of God.

John calls the crowds to repentance not simply for the sake of duty; he calls them to repentance so that they can make an about-face in their lives and turn to see the wide-open arms of a God who has always been waiting for them to discover his infinite love. This God whom we worship and adore isn’t a hungry beast, demanding more and more good works. There’s no ticking time bomb of which we should be afraid. God doesn’t ask us to add more hours to our days to do more good works so that we can appease him. Through God-directed duty, God invites us to discover his love that frees us from the shackles of the machinery of all loveless duty that drains away our life. And it’s through repentance that we turn from our idols and misdirected duty to God, who desires love more than duty. With this God, because he loved us first, everything really is from love rather than from duty.

So, follow the hand of the prophet one last time. Don’t be put off by his fiery speech and rough appearance. Move through his words of repentance to notice where his finger is really pointing. It’s pointing through the duty of faithfulness to Love himself, Jesus the Christ. It’s pointing to the Son of God, who by virtue of taking on human flesh and defeating death through his resurrection from the dead has given us the power to become children of God. If we follow John’s finger, we will see more clearly who we’re called to be, which is a people growing more and more into the likeness of God. For John is pointing to Christ who was and is and is to come, who by the power of his Holy Spirit, reigns within our hearts and calls us to new life. And in him, we find that our bounden duty, however very meet and right it is, has now all become love. You see, although duty has its place, everything is really from love.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 15, 2024

[1] Chapter three from Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004)

How the Word Slips In

One of the treasured items in my office is a religious icon recently given to me by the wife of my former spiritual director, who died a year and a half ago. The icon is mounted in a glass box, preserved as if it’s a museum piece, although the icon is really a living vehicle of prayer that leads us to deeper union with God. The icon in my office dates from the fourteenth century. It may even be older than that.

The story behind this icon is fascinating. On the back of the box in which this icon is displayed is a typed note, explaining its history. It was purchased at a gallery in Philadelphia and given to an Episcopal priest, who bequeathed it to my former spiritual director. And then, it was kindly given to me. Supposedly, this icon was found strapped to the back of a Russian emigrant to this country at the time of the Russian Revolution. This emigrant was fleeing the unstable political scene there.

When gazing upon this icon, you can feel its age, so much so that I get little prickly goosebumps when I gaze upon it. It’s in the form of a triptych, like a miniature version of the triptych found behind the altar in our Lady Chapel. Two smaller outer panels frame a larger central panel. The outer panels can close inwards like doors, but in the icon’s current framed box, they remain open, fastened to the central panel with rudimentary wires.

It's difficult to tell exactly which saints are depicted on the outer panels because the layer of paint is rubbed off in many places, revealing the old wood beneath. But the center panel is almost fully preserved. In the center of this central panel is Christ himself, sitting, as if teaching, holding a book with Greek lettering, his hand raised in blessing. Mary and John surround him, gesturing to him with their hands. Christ looks straight at you, the beholder of this gorgeous icon.

Whether the legend of how this icon was transported to America is true or not, it’s an intriguing story. Imagine fleeing a country in turmoil and feeling compelled to bring an icon of Christ with you. Of all the things you could bring, why an icon? Did the emigrant sneak onto a boat crossing the Atlantic? Did he come by way of the Bering Strait? But the fact that this icon was supposedly strapped to the body of a Russian emigrant suggests that the endeavor had to be furtive. It’s as if this emigrant needed an image of Christ held close to his body to give him hope. It’s as if Christ were smuggled into this country, under the radar of authorities, and Christ’s visage, with hand raised in blessing, continues to bless those in possession of the icon. An image of the Word of God—capital W—entered this country on the back of a Russian emigrant.

It’s a strikingly good image for the way in which God’s word—lowercase w—seems to come to us. Through the ages, God’s word has come to dozens of prophets, alighting on them, unbidden and unsolicited, by surprise, slipping into their lives. Some of those prophets were called to give the people of Israel a good talking to. Others were called to encourage and comfort when times were rough. But through the ages, in a great succession of unlikely individuals, God’s word was smuggled into human time, and then passed on down the ages.

It's no different with how God’s word comes to John the Baptist. St. Luke the Evangelist seems to be making such a point as he lays out a litany of worldly authorities exercising power in the time when John the Baptist received God’s word. In the reigns of Caesar and Pontius Pilate and Herod and Philip and Lysanias and Annas and Caiphas, who all hold either earthly or religious power, John’s name is dropped in by Luke as an absolute nobody. He’s simply the son of Zechariah. He has no territorial jurisdiction. He’s not even in a city of great magnitude. He's in the desert, the wilderness, a wild and dangerous place that people generally avoid.

Into this unruly place, to a man of no fame, God’s word slips into human time. It seeps into human history from beneath the eyes of those wielding worldly power and abusing it all the same. God’s word enters the human story in a particular place and time, while rulers hold sway who would later be responsible for the death of Jesus, the Word of God—capital W. This is how God works. This is how God’s word—lowercase w—enters human history. God may be outside human time, but God works in our time.

But there’s more. The word comes to John as a chosen prophet. He has no claim to fame, except that we know him as the cousin of Jesus. But when God’s word comes to John, his mission doesn’t remain local. The word spoken into human history isn’t trapped in John’s head or heart or in his hut in the wilderness. That word is carried by John, as if strapped to his back like an ancient icon, and it goes into the region around the Jordan.

In this ungovernable region, into which only brave souls would tread, there’s no territorial jurisdiction by a Caesar or Pilate or Herod or Philip or Lysanias or Annas or Caiphas. It’s the wilderness, wild and free. It’s the area around the Jordan, where God’s people made their final journey from their wilderness wanderings across the Jordan River into the Promised Land. It’s the region that will be the site of Jesus’s own baptism. It’s a land of profound freedom.

Into this place, God’s word is carried by John, close to his heart, and then announced to all. It’s a message that might first seem about condemnation, but it’s not. It’s about freedom. It’s a call to be freed from sin and to live in the newness of that freedom and life. And like an icon that was smuggled into freedom and passed on from person to person, God’s word would be handed down from John through the centuries to us.

It was a word that made it to Jesus’s ears and called him to baptism. It was a word realized and fulfilled perfectly in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. It’s the word that alighted on the apostles at Pentecost and drove them to the ends of the world. It’s a word that has been taken into every corner of history in every time and place, to those who were willing to receive it. It’s the word that gives life.

The paradox of this holy word is that it’s always available. It’s the most transparent and open declaration imaginable. It’s a word that liberates people from secrecy and releases them from bondage to oppression. And yet it’s so frequently stifled or overlooked or rejected. In the face of human sin, this word must emerge from beneath the smothering effects of earthly might and human deceitfulness. But it always finds its way to us, not to trick us but to woo us in love.

No valley of pain and sorrow is too deep to escape the balm of this word of God. No mountain and hill of human hubris is too high for God’s word to humble it. No crooked path of life’s surprises and disappointments is immune from the reach of God’s comforting word. No rough patch of challenges is left untouched by God’s word of grace. God’s word always finds its way in to call us to repentance, forgiveness, and new life. And just when we think that God’s word has been snuffed out or drowned out by our cares and preoccupations, it comes to us to bless us and invigorate us. We only need ears to hear it.

The advent of God’s word to John was merely a precursor of that great advent of God’s Word—capital W—into human time, when Light and Life were smuggled into history in a dark cave in Bethlehem. But that’s for a few weeks from now. For now, it’s enough to prepare and make our hearts ready, and to clear an open path for God’s word to reach our ears and our hearts. It’s enough to welcome this word and treasure it and strap it to our bodies, like an ancient icon making its way from one continent to another. It’s enough to let Christ be on the central panel of our lives, to gaze upon his image, and to let it invite us to grow more and more into his likeness. It’s enough to know that God’s word will always find us, call us to repentance, forgive us, and set us free. And it’s enough to carry this good news into every place we go, proclaiming the timeless word that nothing can destroy: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 8, 2024

Watching and Praying

Alexandre Schmid is the night watchman of Lausanne, Switzerland. Five nights a week, he climbs 153 steps to his perch at the top of the cathedral tower and announces boldly to the city that he’s there. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix!” “It’s the nightwatch! It’s 10 o’clock! It’s 10 o’clock!” The night watchman has been on guard in the cathedral tower since 1405, following a disastrous fire. The position was created as a means of security for a pre-industrial age, a proactive response to a crisis. In former times, the night watchman would survey the horizon for fires or invaders, serving as the first harbinger of danger. He would also announce the time of day and ring the cathedral bells.[1]

But this position is, of course, a modern-day anachronism. We now have technological means of sensing fires and alerting others to their danger. Bells in church towers can be run on automated timers—that is, if they’re working, unlike ours! Few cities are worried about bands of threatening invaders approaching, and if invaders did show up, they would be detected by national security agencies, not a night watchman on top of a tower.

For the citizens of Lausanne, the night watchman may be an anachronism, but the position isn’t pointless. The night watchman is an institution, a valued part of society. Perhaps the real value of the night watchman isn’t practical but emotional and symbolic. The voice of the watchman crying out each night at the same time, regardless of the weather or wars or a pandemic, is comforting. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix! Maybe it’s like falling asleep in a thunderstorm, where the patter of rain on the roof is soothing and one is assured that inside the warm, dry house, all will be just fine.

The night watchman seems to thread a needle between overreaction and apathy. He will, of course, sound a warning should there be real danger, but he must also be careful lest he sound a false alarm. Nor should he become distracted or disinterested. No one wants a night watchman sleeping on the job. The night watchman is the bedrock of stability, of reliability, of vigilant presence. C’est le guet! Il a sonné dix…Il a sonné dix! In feast or famine, the voice continues to cry out.

 The night watchman is a helpful metaphor for the ideal posture of Christian discipleship. The spiritual tradition has always invited us into a median place, where we must thread the needle between severe anxiety and chilling listlessness. A look at the contemporary Church isn’t always encouraging in this regard. We hear, more often than not, cries of alarm. The night watchmen of the Church are usually not simply announcing the hours with patient confidence; they’re frequently crying out in alarm. The Church is dying! The Church is dying! It’s the eleventh hour! Save yourself! Maybe this is simply an overcompensation for decades of malaise—the other extreme.

This alarmist desperation has hardly been helpful. For decades, this anxiety within the Church has fed a strange sort of neo-Pelagianism, in which we’re supposed to pull more and more rabbits out of hats so that the people will show up to church. We’re supposed to be endlessly creative, and perpetually novel. It seems that someone is always crying, fire, fire,!, and we must react. Those who are part of the supposed problem—that is, the ones who have left the Church—have been equally reactive. They’ve abandoned the pews because of one crisis after another, having lost faith in the ability of the Church to do anything good. The ones who flee and the ones who stay are equally reactive.

But on the other side, there are those who have failed to react. They’ve even failed to respond. It’s as if it doesn’t matter at all what the Church does. They stay away from the pews not because they’re angry but because they don’t care enough to be there. Some are in the pews or even in the pulpit, but they’re apathetic and content with the status quo. There could never be a fire of which to warn people. These night watchmen have neglected their duties. They’ve fallen asleep at the switch.

Rarely do we hear voices from within the Church threading the needle. What has happened to the night watchmen of the Church? What has happened to that predictable faithfulness of showing up both in feast and famine to watch with reliable confidence and hope, expecting redemption to draw nigh?

And yet, this is precisely what our Lord consistently calls us to do. Throughout the Gospels, he entreats us not to be anxious. He urges us not to worry about tomorrow or be consumed with fear over the drama or exact time of the end of all things. And in his final words before his passion—words that anchor this season of Advent—Jesus offers his disciples words of comfort: watch at all times. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. These are words of reassurance that are too often lost in hypervigilance. Watch at all times, Jesus says, and above all, pray. This is how we thread the needle. We remain alert. We stay vigilant. And more than anything else, we pray, and we pray, and we pray.

The most obvious solution to the Church’s current situation is the one that we’ve consistently neglected. When many of the Church’s watchmen are crying out in alarm and predicting fires that have never happened, taking time to pray seems like a waste of time. Anxiety has a strange ability to convince us that we should always respond with everything but prayer, regardless of whether it’s meaningful or not. But Jesus tells us that watching, waiting, and praying are the bedrock of how we live faithfully in the world as we await the Second Coming of our Lord.

Over four years ago when I came to this parish as your priest, many were crying out in alarm. I was told that it was a mistake to come here. I was told that if things didn’t change, the church would run out of money. I was told by others that in light of the parish’s drastic decline in recent years, I had more than my work cut out for me. And I admit that it was difficult for me to ignore those cries of alarm. I wrestled with demons as I tried to discern what God was calling me to do.

But I came here anyway, and I’m so glad that I did. Even after I arrived, the voices of alarm continued to sound. And frankly, there will always be voices of alarm in our midst, whether we’re trying to make decisions for this parish or for our family or for how to live faithfully in this world. But there’s one thing that we did in this parish despite the cries of fire! fire! We prayed. We tried as hard as we could to listen to God’s voice and to respond faithfully. We woke from a long sleep. But above all, we prayed. And your presence here is a testament to that prayer.

There’s a lesson in our parish’s own story for the wider Church. Watch and pray. Watch and pray because the strength we need to endure the difficulties of this life will only come from prayer. The Church needs her own watchmen to show up, constantly and faithfully, to announce, It’s the Church! Our redemption is drawing nigh! Our redemption is drawing nigh! Pray, listen, watch, and pray!

We’ll seem to some like an anachronism, rather like the watchman on the bell tower of the cathedral of Lausanne. What’s the point in announcing our presence? Who needs the Church when we have social service agencies and medical care and technology? But we show up anyway, despite any accusations of futility, and we watch and we pray. We’re needed less to predict the future or cry out in alarm than to give the Church and the world the comfort of Christ’s good news.

We’re the watchmen of the Church. Our Lord invites us to not to be anxious and not to worry about the future of our existence as his beloved Church. He encourages us to lift our heads when the cares of the world threaten to weigh us down. He tells us to be alert, to watch, and to wait, because our redemption is always drawing near. We’re to cry out when the Church and the world need to be redirected to good news. But our most important task is to show up and pray. Watch and pray. Watch and pray, always in hope and joyful expectation and with confidence. Look up. Raise your heads, because our redemption is drawing near.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
December 1, 2024

[1] “The Watchman of Lausanne” by Michael Cervin (https://craftsmanship.net/the-watchman-of-lausanne/)

Redeeming the Question

Can you recall the last time someone said or did something that you were convinced had already been said or done? Is it déjà vu? Or is it simply something from our subconscious rising to the surface? This happens to me occasionally. Sometimes, I realize that an actual event had been foreshadowed earlier in a dream. At other times, a person says something that sounds so familiar that I’m certain they must have uttered those words before. But there are also times in which a word or image will trigger a memory from long before, even though it’s seemingly obscure. The glimpse of a word or prior experience, even in a dream, might be a way for us to make sense of the story of our lives. It might be God’s way of speaking to us.

I had a déjà vu moment when reading about Jesus’s judgment before Pilate in John’s Gospel. At first, I thought contentedly, Oh, I know this scene. What new thing could I possibly discover? And then, a few words lit up for me like a light bulb, and I thought to myself, I’ve heard those words before. But where?

I wonder if they lit up for you as well. Pilate is annoyed that the chief priests and Jewish leadership have handed Jesus over to him for judgment. It’s utterly inconvenient to him, because he doesn’t want to be bothered with this itinerant Jewish preacher. He would prefer to offend no one and to wash his hands of this whole mess. He interrogates Jesus, What have you done?

Did those words light up for you, too? Where have we heard those words before? Was it from the lips of an irritated parent scolding you for making a mess in the kitchen? Was it in the exasperation of a frowning teacher who was trying to determine why other students were tattling on you? Was it in the ire of your boss attempting to pick up the pieces from a project that you totally messed up? What have you done?

I don’t know about you, but it’s very difficult for me to hear those words and not attach a tone of disapproving judgment to them. It’s hard for me not to hear an implicit answer, I’ve done wrong. The words What have you done? seem meant for judgment. Is it because we can’t escape the punitiveness and unforgiveness of the world in which we live? What have you done? Those words make me squirm and feel guilty even if I’ve done nothing wrong. So, where have we heard those words before?

Well, in the garden, of course. Adam and Eve have been told quite clearly by God that they shouldn’t eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden of Eden, or they shall die. But they do it anyway. And when they do, they realize they’re naked. In a bit of sad comedy, they attempt to cover their nakedness with fig leaves, a futile project if there ever was one.

But then, they hear God walking in the garden, and they hide, for they’re ashamed. God knows that something is amiss when Adam and Eve recognize their nakedness. Then the blame game starts. Adam blames Eve. Then God asks Eve, What is this that you have done? And Eve blames the serpent.

There’s the question. That’s where we’ve heard it before. Ah ha! What have you done? Maybe we feel uncomfortable with that question because we read the story of Adam and Eve as the first example of sin. There’s no particular reason why we should assume that God’s voice carried an angry tone when he asked Eve what she’d done. But that’s what we assume, which probably says more about our image of God and about the lack of forgiveness in the Church and in our world.

But regardless of God’s tone when he asks that pointed question, it’s one that elicits embarrassed attempts to justify disobedience. God’s question is followed by Adam and Eve’s punishment and banishment from the garden. But it’s also followed by God’s tender gesture of love, when he makes clothes to cover up Adam and Eve’s nakedness. In hindsight, surely this was a gentle foreshadowing of the later moment of déjà vu. But stay tuned. . .

So, when Pilate asks Jesus, what have you done, how can we not recall that question in the garden? Here the new Adam stands before an earthly judge, but his answer is quite different from the old Adam’s blaming of Eve in the garden. Jesus’s response is a non-answer. My kingship is not of this world. If his kingdom were, a blame game might ensue. The chief priests are responsible for my arrest, Jesus could have said. My own disciple has betrayed me, he might have said. Even Peter has denied knowing me, he could have lamented. But he doesn’t. And here in Jesus’s non-answer to Pilate’s loaded question, we find the true meaning of Jesus’s kingdom.

What have you done? Jesus redeems that question from a cycle of shame and guilt. He turns it from a condemning question directed at the Lord of all creation into an opportunity to confess the true nature of his kingdom. His kingdom isn’t of this world. His kingdom isn’t a kingdom based on earthly power. His kingdom won’t be ushered in with military might, as the Jewish people had assumed about their Messiah. His kingdom isn’t in competition with kingdoms of this world, because it’s a heavenly kingdom and holds no space in finite time.

And yet, that kingdom must be realized here and is partially realized here. That kingdom is comprised of citizens—of you and me—who live in this world but as if we are not of the world. Jesus’s mission is to bear witness to the truth, and as his beloved, we’ll follow his voice, which speaks only the truth. We’ll put ourselves as close as we can to the one who is truth.

What have you done? In a moment of déjà vu, Jesus redeems the question for all of humanity. As the Word made flesh and perfect image of God in human time, Jesus has no wrong to confess. The question of judgment directed at him becomes a question of judgment directed back at the world. What have you done?

And what we’ve done over so many centuries is turn our backs on the One who came to save us. We’ve gone our own individual ways. We’ve forgotten God’s many blessings. We’ve followed other gods and made other idols. We’ve turned inwards on ourselves. We’ve tried to be anything but ourselves, a people God calls daily to grow into his likeness. We’ve hidden in the garden when God has called our names. And when we find ourselves naked before him, we’ve tried to foolishly cover up our vulnerability with all kinds of fig leaves.

What have you done? Jesus isn’t scolding us with that question. He isn’t condemning us. He’s inviting us to confess, first, our falsehoods and deception. And then, Jesus redeems the question by inviting us to confess what he has done for us. We’re his risen Body. We’re his disciples. What have you done? This question is an invitation to us to confess what Christ has done for us and for the world.

What has he done? He’s freed us from sin. He’s freed us from our earthly divisions so that we can exist together in unity and peace. He’s reconciled us to God the Father and to one another. He’s made us into one family here on earth and in heaven. He’s loved us even when we haven’t shown love to him and others. He’s given us life even when we’ve denied fullness of life to others. He has and does protect us as a Good Shepherd protects the sheep. He’s sought us out when we’ve been lost. He continues to speak to us and comfort us with the Holy Spirit. What has he done? So much! And we must proclaim this good news to the world through our own lives. What have you done? Jesus has redeemed the question so that we can turn from sin and live in the fullness of life he’s prepared for us.

Here in the Mass, before the altar of God, there’s nothing we can or should hide. Outside the walls of this church, it’s almost impossible to be fully ourselves. We’re either told we’re not enough or don’t have enough. We’re judged by our worst mistakes. And we know that if we lived as truthfully as God desires us to live, we would suffer, as an echo of our Lord’s suffering on the cross. In some corners of the world, we would indeed be killed.

But this is the house of God, the gate of heaven, and in this holy place where there are no secrets before God, we remember that Jesus has redeemed the question for us. What have you done? It’s asked not in condemnation but to elicit first our confession and then our turn of repentance to face the true life given us in Christ Jesus. And that life is found when our whole lives are an answer to what Christ has done for us. What have you done? Pilate asks Jesus. And although he makes no real answer, we as his disciples and risen Body make our own answer. What has he done? He has witnessed to the truth. He has called our names. He has loved us and set us free. Thanks be to God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Christ the King
November 24, 2024

A Time to Sit Down and a Time to Rise Up

The minute someone calls you and asks whether you’re sitting down, you know that the news is either bad or extremely surprising. It isn’t wise to take shocking news standing up. I’ve seen people fall to the floor and crawl into a fetal position in response to something distressing. Your heart rate increases. Your head spins. You wonder whether you’ll pass out. Some news is best received sitting down.

After the past few emotionally charged weeks, it feels as if we all need to sit down for a bit. We need to sit down, breathe, and collect our thoughts. Perhaps we should talk a bit less and listen a lot more. It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. The fact is that we’re all in for a lot of change in the near future, and none of us really knows what things will look like a year from now. There’s far too much prognostication in the media, which is less than helpful. Everyone has a theory about the past, and too many have predictions about the future. But regardless of where you stand politically and how you voted, we’re probably all a bit surprised about our current situation. And that should be deeply humbling. It’s time to sit down for a while.

It’s not so strange that Jesus and his disciples are sitting down on the Mount of Olives when he describes the demise of the Jerusalem Temple in graphic detail. The disciples have no sooner marveled at the majesty of the Temple than Jesus bursts their bubble. It will all be thrown down. Can you hear the disciples’ thoughts? Thanks, Jesus. Couldn’t I have had one more minute to marvel at this wonder of the world? But Jesus gives the disciples no time. The fall of the Temple was an unimaginable tragedy of epic proportions. The Temple was the center of the disciples’ spiritual universe, where God was believed to be most vividly present. It was the place of true worship, and so, to imagine that it would one day no longer exist is news that can only be taken sitting down.

After sitting down, the disciples want to know when all this will happen. This is the age-old question. When will these things take place? It’s a horrible thing to know that destruction is in the future but not to know when it will occur. The disciples can hardly wrap their heads around a future without the Jerusalem Temple.

But Jesus isn’t finished with the bad news. False prophets will arise. They’ll claim to be the Messiah, saying I am he, certainly a blasphemous riff on the Divine Name, I AM. They will deceive people. Horrible things will happen, and it will seem as if the world is about to end. But don’t be alarmed, Jesus says. Those things are only the beginning. Imagine the disciples’ thoughts once again. Well, thanks a million, Jesus. Do you have any good news for us? So, it's a good thing the disciples are sitting down. How could they not be alarmed? The world they know is about to end. Jesus’s words must have been small comfort to the disciples, whose heads were undoubtedly spinning.

I hope you’re sitting down these days when you read your daily news. To some, it seems as if the world as we know it is about to end. I’ve met more than one person in recent years who’s convinced the end times are upon us. Things don’t sound too far removed from Jesus’s description of the final days. Wars continue to rage. The Middle East is in crisis. The worldwide economy is uncertain. Our own national discourse is in shambles. Nations rage against nations. There’ve been earthquakes and hurricanes and wildfires, and there will be others as our planet’s climate becomes more unstable. I hope you’re sitting down, because Jesus says this is only the beginning.

But there’s something else about the posture of Jesus and his disciples as he breaks this astounding news to them. While it’s a good thing that they’re sitting down to process the shocking news, Jesus is sitting down with them because he’s teaching. It’s the classic posture of a teacher in ancient times. He sits and teaches. Jesus and the disciples are sitting directly across from Jerusalem. They can marvel at its majesty. They can hear its hustle and bustle. They can feel God’s presence in the holiest place on earth. Now, as they gaze upon its beauty and ponder its destruction, Jesus sits and teaches. And the disciples sit and listen.

Picking up from where today’s passage ends, Jesus will go on to describe the cataclysmic events that will take place. But the time of that final hour isn’t for us to know, despite years of arrogant and futile predictions. Knowing the future isn’t so important. What’s important is being in the present moment, sitting down, and listening to Christ, our Teacher.

I wish we’d kept reading beyond the end of today’s Gospel, because just a few verses later, Jesus says something remarkable. I believe his words are the good news we should receive today in this moment when our future seems so uncertain. Hear his words: “when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.” Wow. It’s worth sitting down for that news, too.

At this very moment, the world outside the Church has very little good news to share. Very few people, regardless of their political stance, believe that things should or will stay the same. The state of our world seems unpredictable and beyond our control. Social media has compounded our tendency to talk too much. Much of what’s on the television and internet is hyperbolized beyond belief. In a supposedly more sophisticated time, our ability to speak and think with nuance has winnowed away. And because we’ve put too much trust in people and agendas and institutions outside the Church, we’re shattered when those golden calves let us down. But the truth is that they never could do what they initially promised, and so, it’s easy to see only disaster in our future. We need to sit down to cope with it.

So, we should sit down, stop talking and arguing, and listen. Now is a precious moment for the Church. If the Church is living into her vocation, she won’t be taught by the world but by God. She’ll sit down in the face of worldly predictions of disaster, perhaps stunned but also trusting that all isn’t lost. We’re in desperate need of teaching by God. Through the mighty power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ is still our true Teacher. And it’s time for us to be his students.

At some point, as our nation and our world try to sort themselves out, we as Christ’s living body on earth will need to act. We don’t yet know what crises we’ll face. We don’t know what kind of trials we’ll have to weather. We don’t know in what ways the Church’s mettle will be tested. But we do know this: Jesus tells us not to be alarmed, even when our world seems to be falling apart. Jesus tells us not to be distracted by false prophets, charlatan messiahs, and dramatic naysayers. And Jesus tells us that in our hour of need, the Holy Spirit will show us exactly what to do. In the meantime, the Church needs to be strong, patient, and ready.

This is but the beginning of the birth-pangs, but don’t be alarmed. There are things we can do, and more than anything, perhaps that is comforting to us. We’ll continue to show up here, week after week, to be fed and nourished with the Body and Blood of the One who is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. We’ll come here when we’re devastated by bad news, and we’ll sit down to be taught by God. We’ll strive to model the Gospel values we profess for an aimless world. We’ll love each other with a love that transcends partisan politics. We’ll hold one another accountable to grow into spiritual maturity. We’ll say our prayers. We’ll be faithful. We’ll never give up on hope. Yes, now is the moment for the Church to listen and receive wisdom from God.

And then, when we are brought to trial and our faith is sorely tested, we’ll be ready. We’ll have been fortified by those moments of silence and listening, where we sat before the feet of our Teacher. In our hour of need, whenever it may occur and however trying it may be, the Holy Spirit will show us what to do. The Holy Spirit will give us the right words to say. The Holy Spirit will help us respond faithfully to a world that needs the Church.

But until then, we’ll sit down and pray and listen and wait. We won’t be alarmed. We’ll resist anxiety. We’ll be aware and prepared, but more than anything else, we’ll put all our hope and trust in the resurrection that’s at the heart of our faith. And because Jesus has risen from the dead in the face of death, we trust that one day, even though our world seems to be ending, we’ll no longer need to sit down. It will finally be our moment to rise up in hope.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost
November 17, 2024

The Greatest Gift of All

At first glance, it might seem like today’s Gospel reading were chosen precisely for Commitment Sunday, when we make our pledge commitments of money to support ministry here at Good Shepherd. But it’s not so. I don’t choose the readings. At another glance, it might seem as if this reading were chosen to respond to a nation in the aftermath of a contentious election. But it’s not so. As I said, I don’t choose the readings. Today, God has given us a living word spoken to each of us at this moment in time. And we need it.

But beware. Our temptation on this day will be to sit across from the Temple treasury, watching the poor widow as she puts in all the money she has, and we might be inclined to watch and evaluate—indeed, to judge—her situation. Look at the poor widow, we could say. She’s alone, marginalized, forsaken, and there she is donating the last of her savings to an institution that will take her money despite her poverty. Poor widow, we will say. Poor, poor widow.

We could read Jesus’s words in this way. We could imagine some pity in his voice as he says, poor widow. We could sit and feel sorry for the widow and rage against injustice. But if we were not in this church today, ready with our pledge cards to place in the collection plate, we could be sitting across the street, watching everyone enter the church. Poor, poor people, some might say. They’re giving everything they can to the Church, a Church that throughout history and even today in some quarters, has caused great harm. We could take this stance. But I don’t think we should.

We could choose to take the cynical view, as some commentators have, that the story of the widow’s mite is nothing more than an indictment of systems of power and the exploitation of the vulnerable. And while there could be some truth in that view, we can read this story as something more, too. This widow is poor, but she’s not poor. She powerful. She’s a walking example of hope.

I’m quite tempted to give her a name. There are far too many women in the Bible that have no names. But oddly, the case of this poor widow is one in which I think she is best left unnamed because it highlights even more vividly her marginal state. And to leave her unnamed means that every single one of us can be right there with her, putting all that we have and are into the coffers of the treasury.

Although we know the Temple would later be tragically destroyed, almost certainly the poor widow doesn’t know what will happen. So, here she is donating all she has to something that will soon be gone. We don’t know if the widow thinks of herself as exploited. All we know—and frankly, all that really matters—is that she still puts in all the money she has. She doesn’t just put in her meager store of money. She puts in her whole life. Her money isn’t just money. It represents everything she is. It symbolizes her whole self.

I suppose the widow could have put something else into the coffers. Metaphorically, she could have put in anger or resentment at her situation. She could have put in harsh words for the systems of the world that have taken advantage of her plight. But she doesn’t. She puts in her whole living, no matter how foolish it seems. Surely this must mean that she has incredible hope. She must hope in God’s power to right wrongs. She must believe that corruption won’t be the final word. Even if the Temple is one day demolished, and even if religious structures need reform, her financial gift isn’t a waste. Precisely because of her poverty, she’s able to put in an abundance of hope.

Her gift, we know, makes little sound in the coffers of the treasury. Others give in a flamboyant way that probably doesn’t hurt their pocketbooks too much. Their large coins ring and clang in the coffers. But the widow’s gift hardly makes a clink even though it’s the greatest gift of all. It’s the greatest gift because it's offered even though giving seems futile. In desperate times, hope can ring hollow or make hardly a sound. And yet, Jesus tells us that it’s the greatest gift of all.

Many who aren’t here in this church with us might question why we are here. They might question our gifts. Why are we giving not only our money but our whole selves to the Church as it seems to wither on the vine? Why are we putting all our trust in the Church when the world around us seems to be falling apart? What difference can our witness make in the face of so much evil? How can a few meager coins make such a difference?

But today, the risen Christ, speaking to us by the power of the Holy Spirit through God’s living word, sits across from the treasury, pointing out the poor widow to us, not out of pity and condescension, but to instruct us to go to her just as he ultimately went to the depths of hell to save us all. Get up from your seat of judgment, removed from this woman, and go stand with her, Jesus says. The risen Christ is exhorting us to move from a place of privileged pity of the poor to accept and embrace our own poverty. Jesus is urging us to go and stand with the woman and to dig deep into our hearts to face our own emptiness. Jesus has a call for the Church today, in a moment when some are hurting and some are rejoicing. Jesus is asking us as the Church to give not out of our abundance, which is the prerogative of only some, but to give out of our poverty, which is the condition of us all.

This kind of profuse, even reckless, giving is qualitatively different from what we see around us. This kind of giving happens not from a place of power or fear. It’s not giving to gain something. It’s not giving to compensate for those who can’t give as much. It’s not giving to assuage our guilt. It’s not giving even to expect specific results. It’s a kind of giving that can only come when we stand with and as the poor rather than over and against them.

This kind of giving believes that small things matter. This kind of giving trusts that even in the face of overwhelming anxiety in a divided nation, all hope isn’t lost. This kind of giving believes that even a Church supposedly in decline can be used by God to bring justice and righteousness back to the world when governments can’t or won’t.

In this fraught moment, the Devil, eerily known as the Adversary and Deceiver, is betting that we will be overcome with despair and that we’ll see former icons of trust as ones doomed to destruction. We could say this about our government. We could say this about the Church. But I don’t think we should. The Devil is also betting that our gifts will seem too small, like two copper coins in a vast treasury box. The Devil is also taking a gamble on our tendency to turn on one another in judgment. But Jesus has encouraged us not to pity those who give out of hope in desperate times. Jesus is asking us to stand right with them and look within ourselves to find the hope that lies dormant there.

Each of us must reach down as deep as we can into our hearts and find rock bottom. We must find those places of despair or hopelessness or material poverty or spiritual poverty or fear or anxiety, and then we must give from out of that poverty. We will not give more fear and anxiety or hopelessness or contented pride or money from our abundance. We must give our whole lives, in hope, out of our poverty.

We must put our lives on the line to stand for the Gospel values that we profess as part of our faith. We must throw everything we have and are into standing with those who have no one to stand up for them. We must stand on the same level plain with the poor widow and throw every ounce of hope into something that would otherwise appear useless and futile, because in such a time as this, our shared poverty is what unites us.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, that poor widow is us. She has no name because she is us, and we are her. She holds nothing back, and neither should we. Every meager effort that we can make is worth far more than anything we give out of our abundance.

So, beloved, come with me. Let’s stop our judging and go stand with the widow. Let’s take a reckless chance on hope. Let’s give freely and generously of a currency that seems so meager these days. Let’s give our whole lives to selfless love, justice, righteousness, and peace. Jesus is asking us, what will you give? And when we’ve reached down into the emptiest place of our souls, we’ll find exactly what we need to give with abandon. And although it may make the faintest of sounds as we throw it into the coffers, it’s the greatest gift of all. 

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
November 10, 2024

Remember

Have you ever had one of those dreams where something marvelous is about to happen, where you can just about touch it and realize it, and then suddenly the alarm goes off? You’ve won the Booker Prize or the piano concerto competition. You’re walking towards the awards platform with a huge smile on your face, and then, the alarm goes off. It's a bit like driving hours and hours in your car to Toronto for a much-needed vacation, arriving at Lake Ontario, spying the city skyline, and then realizing that you must drive another two hours around the lake to get to your destination. The goal is so close you can smell it, but you’re not quite there yet.

Can you imagine what it would have been like for Moses on Mount Nebo looking over into the Promised Land? For forty long years, he led an ornery group of people from Egypt through the wilderness to this mountain, only to die there and never enter the land himself. Scripture tells us that somehow Moses didn’t keep faith with God in the wilderness as he shepherded the Israelites into freedom. Was he so frustrated with that recalcitrant band of people that he doubted if God could bring them to the Promised Land? We don’t know, but we do know that Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land.

Now, on the verge of the Promised Land, knowing he won’t enter, Moses gives instructions to the people he’s led all these years in the wilderness. Surely, some of them were only the ancestors of the original lot that crossed the Red Sea into freedom. So many had died on the way. How many, I wonder, died doubting whether God’s people would ever reach their destination? But finally, the remaining lot of travelers are on the verge of seeing the land of which they had long dreamed, and Moses comforts them. Remember, Moses says, if indirectly, all that your God has done for you. Remember all those things. Never forget them. And you will be fine. If you remember these things, you’ll prosper and flourish. Your God is with you.

There’s something about keeping our eyes on the prize that might motivate good behavior. But Moses knows that once the people arrive at their destination, they’ll forget. When things are going well, we usually forget to remember and be thankful. On Mount Nebo, Moses offers a humility check to the people. Remember what God has done for you, even in the best of times. Never take it for granted. Tell it to your children and to their children’s children. Never forget. They can see the Promised Land. They can almost taste its milk and honey. They’re on the border. They aren’t very far from realizing their dream. . .

Jesus and the scribe are also on a border, looking into the future. Jesus is staring his passion and death and resurrection in the face, now that he’s entered Jerusalem for the final time in triumph. The scribe approaches Jesus after he’s weathered a series of intense questionings by the chief priests, scribes, and elders. And when this scribe asks Jesus about the greatest commandment, Jesus has one eye on glory and one eye on the uncertain past, when Moses stood on Mount Nebo.

Remember, Jesus says. Remember that great commandment, which Moses gave to the people so long ago, but which everyone seems to have forgotten again. Love God. Also, love yourself, and love your  neighbor. There’s nothing more important than this. If you remember one thing, remember this. You’re not far from the kingdom of God. Can’t you taste its milk and honey? Can’t you see its glory?

Here we, too, are on a border. At every Mass, it’s as if we’re on Mount Nebo with Moses and the people, looking over into the Promised Land. It’s so close we can almost touch it. Our taste buds water as we think of the milk and honey in our future. They’re so pleasing and delectable and sweet.

But perhaps this day, there’s a bitter taste that has crept into our mouths. It’s as if we’ve awoken from a bad dream. We thought we were on the verge of the Promised Land, but the alarm has gone off and we are face-to-face with reality. And while the reality might seem unprecedented, it’s really a variation on all those obstacles that confronted the people of God in their wilderness journey so many years ago.

An intractable roadblock is in the way of our journey, and we don’t know what to do. For the Israelites, they were hungry and couldn’t find food. They grumbled at Moses and God. They doubted. They gave up hope. And then they were thirsty because they had traveled for so long, and the desert was dry. And they complained again, and they blamed God. They made a golden calf because they became impatient waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain. Every time they turned around, something seemed to be in the way.

We must remember their story in relation to ours. Remember that God provided manna in the desert. Remember that God told Moses to strike the rock with his staff to provide water for the people. Remember that God forgave them and gave them the Ten Commandments again after they’d betrayed him. Remember that God never forsook his people. And he will not forsake us either.

But all around us, there’s a searing collective amnesia. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to work with one another rather than against one another. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to welcome the stranger into our midst. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to care for more than number one. We’re standing on a border, looking into a future that could be wonderful again. We can almost taste the milk and honey, but sin is in the way. We can see that it’s nothing new under the sun. Proud stubbornness. Willful obstinacy. Closed-minded tribalism. Rampant violence. Hateful speech. They’re back, and we seem helpless before them. Has God forsaken us? Will we die in the wilderness without ever seeing the Promised Land again?

So, like the scribe coming to Jesus amid conflict and argumentative rancor, we come to Jesus this day and ask, we plead before God’s altar, which commandment is the first of all? And the risen Christ says, don’t you remember? Remember now with me. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. Nothing is more important than this. And if we realize that, we won’t be far from the kingdom of God.

And what a gift this is, because remembering is something we can do. It’s an act of the will, and it should arouse our hope. So, we remember. We remember that our ancestors in faith saw themselves as part of the human family. They provided hospitality for the stranger. They didn’t reap the harvest of their lands to the edges; they left what was on the border for the needy. We remember that when our ancestors in faith were slaves in Egypt, Pharaoh’s cruel oppression couldn’t withstand God’s compassionate liberation. We remember that when our forebears in faith were weeping in Babylon with no song to sing, God brought them back to their native land to sing once again. We remember that when humanity had forgotten to remember once again, God sent his only Son to embody in human flesh the meaning of the great commandment that we should never forget. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. It’s one commandment. Remember it, and you won’t be far from the kingdom of God.

At this moment in time, it’s almost painful to remember. The kingdom of God seems at once so near and yet so far away that we’re prone to lose hope. The solution seems so simple. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. And yet, we know it’s so very difficult.

It's so hard to maintain our faith during times like these. But the only way to conquer despair is to regain hope by remembering. Remember that great commandment that the Lord God gave us so long ago. Here, on the border, as we can smell the milk and honey of that Promised Land, remember what God has told us in Jesus. Love God. Love self. Love neighbor. Teach this to your children. Talk about it always in your house and outside your house. Remember it before bed and when you rise in the morning. Bind these beautiful words on your person by living them out. Write them on the walls of your homes and on your doorposts. Write them on your lives. Never forget them. And then remember, that although the kingdom of God at times seems so very far away, if we hope and pray and, above all, love as Jesus tells us, we’re not so very far from the kingdom of God. It’s just on the other side.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
November 3, 2024

Come and See

Grief is an elusive emotion. When we grieve, we never know when the tears might come. We can never really predict what might open the floodgates of our eyes. I recall attending the Requiem Mass of a friend some years ago. He was a wonderful singer in my spouse’s church choir, and he died of cancer when he was far too young. He was always the life of the party, always smiling, always eliciting laughs with his buoyant humor. He was a gem of a person.

At his Requiem, the tears came at an unexpected moment. The choir was singing Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the Requiem Mass, which we’ll hear tomorrow. And my spouse, eyes full of tears, leaned over to me and explained that our friend had auditioned for his choir with that very piece. And the floodgates of my eyes opened.

The unspoken thought was this isn’t the way it was supposed be. A man who was only in his fifties, gifted in so many ways and loved by so many, shouldn’t be dead. We shouldn’t have been there at his funeral so soon, listening to a piece of music that he’d once sung so beautifully. A portion of the Requiem Mass in live time brought back a poignant memory of that same Mass sung in an audition years ago. And the tears came.

There’s a moment like this in John’s Gospel when the tears come for Jesus. It’s a striking moment because nowhere else in the Gospels do we read that Jesus weeps. It’s a profound reminder of our Lord sharing a human emotion that we all know so well. But what is it that elicits Jesus’s tears? Why does he cry at this moment rather than before? Remember that he had known for several days that Lazarus was ill, and he delayed his departure for Bethany. So, why does he cry when he finally arrives? What opens the floodgates of Jesus’s eyes?

Three words do: come and see. Have you heard these words before? They’re the words Jesus himself says to those first disciples who decide to follow him. Rabbi, where are you staying? Come and see, Jesus says. And when Philip finds Nathanael and tells him that he has found the Messiah, and when Nathanael crudely asks whether anything good can come out of Nazareth, Philip says, Come and see. And when the Samaritan woman at the well has encountered the compassionate love of Jesus and runs into the city to tell others about him, she says, Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Come and see.

Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus weeps at these words? It’s not the way things are supposed to be. When Jesus asks where they have laid Lazarus’s dead body, they invite him to come and see. No, this isn’t the way things are supposed to be. Jesus’s beautiful words have been stolen by death. Come and see is supposed to be the invitation to life. Come and see the one who is life. Come and see the one who is the light of the world. Come and see the one who knows all his sheep by name and whose voice the sheep will follow away from death. Come and see the one who knows everything about us and gives his life to draw the whole world to the Father. Come and see the one who is the way, the truth, and the life. Come and see the one who is the bread of life and who feeds us with life. Come and see.

But in Bethany, Jesus is invited to come and see death. It’s not the way things are supposed to be. In this cruel distortion of circumstances and dastardly coopting of words, the One who has come to bring life to the world must go and stare death in the face. Death has stolen his words. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be.

We know this perverse invitation, too. We’re not supposed to have to watch our loved ones suffer or die. We’re not supposed to watch the violence of death take them away from us. We’re not supposed to be taunted with a mocking invitation, come and see, come and see the violence, the mass shootings, the hateful political rhetoric, the loss of innocence in our children, the betrayals of the Church, the never-ending war in the Middle East, the starving faces of the poor. But this, alas, is the perpetual summons as we live here and now in this broken, sinful world.

It’s not the way things are supposed to be. So, on All Saints’ Day, for a time, the veil between this world and the next parts briefly, especially in this Eucharistic feast, and another invitation is issued from beyond the veil by the beloved saints in Christ, who are in the nearer presence of God. Come and see, that there’s something else. Come and see that the heart of God, seen vividly in Jesus’s presence before Lazarus’s tomb, breaks at the reality of death. Death and all its enslaving powers are impostors. Even though we will die one day, we’re, nevertheless, made for life. And on this day, the saints call us to life. Come and see.

In the sign performed by Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb, Lazarus is raised, not resurrected. He will one day die again, but for a moment, Jesus parts the veil between earth and heaven and shows how things should be. Lazarus, come out! Walk out of your tomb. Be set free from the grip of death, which is not how things are supposed to be. And to his friends, Jesus says, Unbind him and let him go. Let him cross the Red Sea. Let him walk from death to life. Let him come and see life itself. Let him walk towards the resurrection and the life.

Tonight, we don’t run from death. Despite the world’s attempts to the contrary, we can’t escape it. Tonight, we acknowledge that another invitation greets us with a truth that death can’t take away. The saints are witnesses to this. They have journeyed through the gates of death. They have experienced its ugliness. And yet, they are still alive—truly alive—at this very moment, rejoicing and singing and worshiping with us.

They beckon to us from the nearer presence of God. Come and see that all pain and suffering are gone. Come and see that true life is nothing but ceaseless worship. Come and see that what seems like death in the present–all the world’s troubles, the searing divisions among us, the hatred, the egregious individualism–all those are put to rest in heaven, where it’s unceasing, united praise. Come and see. Unbind yourself and be set free.

So, beloved in Christ, come and see. Come with me to the altar. Come with me and raise your voices in song with the great cloud of witnesses who sing forever. Unbind yourself and let go of all that is holding you back from life. And should your eyes shed a tear, know that something far greater awaits us, and that in our true home, God will wipe every tear from our eyes.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
All Saints’ Day
November 1, 2024

Cross-Tinted Glasses

Recently, I was thinking of my late PawPaw. Maybe it’s because All Souls’ Day is approaching, but I also thought of him when reading about Bartimaeus. PawPaw had a way of seeing life that I always admired. My maternal grandfather grew up dirt poor in south central Louisiana. Cajun French was his first language, and he was no stranger to tragedy and life’s difficulties. At the height of the Great Depression, his father took his own life when PawPaw was just fourteen years old, and from then on, he had to pull himself up by his bootstraps and carry on. When you’ve reached rock bottom, there’s only one place to go other than death, and that’s up.

PawPaw worked hard on a farm even while attending school. Even as a teenager, he had a role to play in the survival of his family, and there was no question that they were going to survive. Eventually, PawPaw moved to southeast Texas, where I grew up, to start a new life and find a career as a carpenter in the oil refinery business. He was a brilliant carpenter. He could make beautiful things out of any scrap of wood.

I didn’t know much about my PawPaw’s sad childhood until later in life, which said a lot about him. He never complained about his life. He never wallowed in self-pity. He just got on with things, because I think he loved life. Watching him cook and build everything from cabinets to houses, I would never have known how much despair my grandpa must have had to rise above to survive. PawPaw didn’t just have a natural inclination to work hard; I think he had a profound sense of faith in God. He saw possibility where others would have seen only impossibility.

I’m convinced that PawPaw’s belief in what was possible was both the direct result of his faith in God and his experience with poverty. The two go together. He had a favorite saying to redirect discouragement or despair. If someone started to fret or worry (as my grandmother was wont to do), or if something wasn’t going your way, he’d say, “don’t fuss; call Gus.” Gus was his father’s name. I’m not really sure what that saying meant, but I understood the “don’t fuss” part.

PawPaw was generous. He would fix things for widows who had no one to help them. He built the house I grew up in. And since he lived next door to us, he was constantly cooking up Cajun dishes and bringing them next door for us to enjoy: crab stew, etouffee, and beignets. But given his background, he would also make dishes out of things we wouldn’t normally want to touch. He would bring over gamey venison sausage and one time, a turkey stew, with a note left on it that said, “Don’t knock it until you try it.” He knew that my family and I would wrinkle our noses and try to dump the food down the drain. I’m sure he knew that was just our privileged perspective, not having lived through a depression or through the challenges he had, where you simply didn’t throw out food.

I thought of my PawPaw when reading about blind Bartimaeus because my PawPaw had a way of seeing things. I don’t think my PawPaw saw the world from a perspective of scarcity. I think he saw abundance where most of us would have been afraid of scarcity. I don’t think PawPaw really complained all that much because growing up on the poverty line in south central Louisiana, he didn’t have time to complain. His own personal story and his own faith in God, allowed him to see as others couldn’t see. And in hindsight, that’s a gift to me.

Of course, the story of blind Bartimaeus is all about seeing. But Mark the evangelist, for all his terse and breathless style of storytelling, isn’t content simply to present Bartimaeus as a raw example of Jesus’s power to heal. Jesus does heal Bartimaeus, but in typical Markan fashion, there’s irony at work, too. Bartimaeus is healed on the verge of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, the final stretch of his earthly life. Bartimaeus is healed as one on the margins. Bartimaeus not only regains his physical sight; he sees spiritually in a way that most people in the Gospel have been incapable of until this point.

Bartimaeus pleads for Jesus’s mercy after James and John have arrogantly asked for seats of glory in the kingdom. It’s precisely because Bartimaeus is poor and blind and on the margins—literally sitting by the roadside—that he can see in a way no one else can see, just like my PawPaw could see possibilities in a life that would seem limited and impoverished to others.

Bartimaeus is the one that no one else could see or would want to see. His is the voice that is silenced by the crowd because he’s a mere distraction to Jesus’s journey forward. His is the voice of so many in our own day who cry out, although most people don’t hear them. His is the voice of those we speak over because they challenge our comfort or distract us from pursuing greatness. His is the voice of the refugee who sees the potential for freedom in this nation—in a way that we might not—but who faces potential deportation. His is the voice of the store clerk who barely receives minimum wage and works three jobs but always has a smile for you because she doesn’t just look at you; she sees you. Bartimaeus sees in a way that many in his own world can’t see.

And it’s for him that Jesus stops dead in his tracks. It’s this blind beggar who’s literally on the margins who finally sees in the way that Jesus has been inviting everyone to see. Bartimaeus sees not with rose-tinted glasses of pollyannish optimism but with cross-tinted glasses of hope. A beggar by the roadside has no choice but to see everything through the lens of the cross, even if the cross is still in the future.

Finally, it all makes sense! All Jesus’s talk about dying to self and about suffering and self-denial and about the first being last and the last being first finally makes sense, and we learn it from the faith of a blind beggar sitting by the roadside. Following Jesus isn’t about a willing acquisition of suffering. It’s about looking up at the world from the lowest vantage point imaginable. It’s about kneeling at the foot of the cross and looking up at our Savior there, suffering so that we might live. It’s about seeing him look at you and really seeing you and also reaching his arms out wide to embrace the entire world and not just you. It’s about seeing all of creation through cross-tinted glasses.

It's no wonder that when we go to the poor, we find Christ. And when each of us recognizes our own poverty, we can’t help but see differently. Because each of us is poor, no matter how much we wish to stifle that thought. We’re all poor in different ways, but being poor, whether materially or spiritually, is one way in which we find our shared humanity.

The more we run away from the poor, the more we run away from our truest selves, and the more we’ll try to look at the world with rose-tinted glasses rather than with cross-tinted glasses. But everything changes when we see through the lens of the cross. We see gratitude rather than disappointment. We see failures as opportunities for spiritual maturity. We see scraggly scraps of wood as a beautiful house for someone. We see money not as something to hoard but as something to give. We see our own parish’s struggles as yet another opportunity to notice where God is redirecting our gaze to do the work he’s called us to do.

When we see with cross-tinted glasses, we learn that loss and poverty aren’t so much misfortune to be avoided but the very heart of the Gospel’s good news. It’s out of death that life comes. It’s on the cross that we find glory. It’s on the margins that we find our Lord, redirecting our gaze to the manifold possibilities for resurrection life in our midst.

I can’t imagine my PawPaw without his sad and difficult past, even while I wouldn’t wish that past on anyone. But because of that past, he could see with cross-tinted glasses in a way that I couldn’t as a child who had everything I needed and was privileged in so many ways.

And then there’s Bartimaeus, a visible sign—a sacramental one, if you will—that believing is seeing. Bartimaeus shows us how to see the world through cross-tinted glasses. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is seeing through the eyes of faith that even when our voice is silenced, God always hears us and sees us. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is trusting that when everything seems to have fallen apart, God can and will build something new.

In every moment of our lives, in our prayer and in our work and in our play, the risen Christ asks us, What do you want me to do for you? And of all the things we can ask of him, there’s yet one thing that we all need. And so, with Bartimaeus, we ask him, “Master, let me receive my sight.” And we jump up from our place of despair, we leave everything we have behind, and we follow him, all the way to the cross, and then all the way to glory.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
October 27, 2024

On the Way to the Kingdom

Over the summer, I was visiting my twin nephews, and they asked me to play the card game “Go Fish” with them, which I hadn’t played in decades. My nephews are five years old, so they were learning the game in stages. And they were in the intermediate stage, which meant that they were playing with modified rules.

We each had our distribution of cards, but instead of concealing them from the other players, we put them down so we could see each other’s cards. As I said, my nephews were gradually learning to play the game as adults would. If you recall, in “Go Fish,” you ask someone whether they have a certain type of card in their pile so that you can collect all the cards of that type, something known as a “book.” If the other players don’t have the type of card you want, you must “go fish” from the center pile, drawing a card and hoping it might be what you need. Once all the cards in the center pile are gone, the player with the most “books” wins. In my nephews’ version of the game, the books were all animals of various sorts: lions, elephants, monkeys, octopuses.

Now, my nephews are incredibly sweet and kind, and they have big hearts. They’re unusually effusive in how they show that love to others. Watching them play and interact with the world around them, your heart aches for the days of such innocence. But as they are getting older, they’re also beginning to learn what the world outside their loving home is like. And it’s, sadly, not the game they’re used to.

Much to my fascination, our seemingly low-risk game of “Go Fish” was a visible marker of my nephews’ transition from loving innocence to survival in a high-stakes world. At some point in the game, I looked at my nephew Mack’s cards and realized that I wanted to acquire another octopus. This would have put me closer to earning the book I needed to win. You see, I was definitely playing to win, but I don’t think that Mack fully understood that. I’m not entirely sure that he was playing to win, or at least not in the way that I was.

“Mack, I said, do you have an octopus?” I looked at him with an impish grin. And his face fell, and then he began to cry. “But I want the purple octopus.” There was a dilemma. I only see my nephews about twice a year. I don’t have quite enough uncle collateral to compete with tears. So, I caved. I gave in and let him keep the purple octopus, and I asked for another animal.

A bit later, in the kitchen with my sister-in-law, I explained what had happened. “Well,” she said, “at some point, he needs to learn that he can’t always win.” She was right. But I still wasn’t willing to risk all my uncle collateral on that game of “Go Fish.” In his beautiful childish innocence, my nephew didn’t yet understand how adults play games. For him, the game was more about having the kinds of cards he wanted, especially the ones with purple octopuses on them. For me, with several decades of trying to survive in a jaded world of competition, I was playing the game to win.

The disciples James and John are used to that same world of competition. They’re in a place of spiritual transition when they come to Jesus and ask him to grant them whatever they want. It’s a bold request, and it’s also full of spiritual naivete at best and spiritual ignorance at worst. Remember that they’re on a journey, and this is significant. For some time now, they’ve been walking along the way with Jesus, both literally on the way to Jerusalem and metaphorically towards the cross. And for the third time, Jesus announces his future passion and suffering, and yet one more time, the disciples opt for selective hearing and change the subject. The truth is that they don’t want to recognize that they must suffer, too, and give things up to follow Jesus, because doing those things is the only way to follow him in an unjust world where you can’t play the game and always retain your purple octopuses. Jesus says he must suffer and die and be raised on the third day, and the disciples respond with the equivalent of “isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning?”

James and John, and all the other disciples, are spiritually in transition. They’ve made a discernible commitment to follow Jesus by leaving their former lives and even their families, but they still don’t want to own up to what the ultimate cost of discipleship will be. They think they’ve paid the cost already, but it’s only just begun.

Jesus, they say, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Their habitual language is that of the world, of competition and of quests for success, status, and rank. They’re beginning to learn that it’s no small feat to live as Jesus’s disciples in a world oriented around domination, power, and wealth.

And so, Jesus can only speak to them in the language of the world in which they live. The disciples are struggling with how to hold onto the bliss of being close to Jesus in discipleship while living in a hard, cruel world that will eventually kill him and some of them. Jesus must translate the way of discipleship through the terms of this world, the world in which the disciples and we must inevitably live.

It's a world in which everyone is assigned a number, and following Jesus in a world of inequity and injustice will mean going to the back of the line. Following Jesus in a cut-throat world will mean sacrificing greatness and success for faithfulness and humble service. Following Jesus in an unmerciful world will mean giving up our individualism for the sake of the benefit of all.

This is our dilemma, too. We, like those early disciples, want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want glory without the cross. We want baptism without the commitment. We want union with Jesus without unity with others. We want salvation without too much change in our lives. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? We are! is our hasty reply, but we struggle to live with one foot in the kingdom of God, where a game is just a game, and the other foot in this world, where games are about fighting your way to the top.

In this earthly life, we’re always in via, on the way, with Jesus. We must go back and forth between speaking that primal language of love where we catch glimpses of the unity that God desires for us and the harsh language of this world which ranks us from greatest to least. And this is partly why Jesus’s words sound so harsh. It sounds as if Jesus is speaking the language of the world when he says, “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” It sounds as if he’s ranking everyone. But it only sounds that way to those of us who live in this world because that’s the way our world speaks.

In a world of competition, to give up success sounds like failure. In a world oriented around money, to give sacrificially seems like financial foolishness. In a world full of violence, to give one’s life for another seems like nothing but stark, cold death. But our true native language is the language of the kingdom of God, which we can only glimpses in fits and starts in this life. And in that language, a game doesn’t need to be played to win. A game can be played simply to delight in purple octopuses, which God will freely give. In that kingdom, there’s no competition. There’s simply wonder and love.

Jesus came to part the veil and show us what lies on the other side, where there’s no sorrow or sighing. There’s only life and joy and delight. It’s a perpetual feast. It’s the hope of glory. For now, though, we’re left with our earthly games and the language of this world. And we must live in this world as faithfully as we can while hanging onto the beauty of that glorious kingdom of which Jesus has given us a foretaste. We savor purple octopuses when we find them. And we also know that we must give them up sometimes because in this life, things are imperfect and unfair.

We also know that when Jesus gives us words that seem harsh and difficult, we must translate them from this world’s language into the language of the kingdom of God. And in that kingdom, our earthly gain is heavenly loss. But our earthly loss is our heavenly gain. In God’s kingdom, sharing in the cup of Christ’s Blood is a death to our sinful ways, but it’s also a feasting on the joy of forgiveness and love that reign eternally in heaven. In that kingdom, our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection is a painful relinquishment of our self-centeredness, but it's also a rising to a new shared life of glory. In this life’s journey, we might be last in line and slave of all, but in the kingdom of God, there are no lines and no slaves but only fellowship and rejoicing. We can simply delight in purple octopuses. And in that life, we will live forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
October 20, 2024

The Language of Love

During the pandemic, we became more adept at communicating with our eyes. At first, with masks covering part of our faces, it was difficult to tell whether the cashier at the grocery store was angry or delighted that you just smacked eighty-five food items down on the conveyor belt—unless you paid attention to the cashier’s eyes. If the eyebrows were slightly raised, she might be smiling. If they were furrowed and scrunched up, he might have been annoyed. Those masks, annoying as they may have been, pressed us to look beyond mouths and noses for emotional clues.

Married couples understand eye communication, don’t they? If you’ve been together long enough, you don’t need words to communicate; you can use your eyes. You can read the worry in your spouse’s eyes when no one else is likely to notice. You’ll observe the twinkle of amusement at a dinner party, although it’s disguised to everyone else at the table. You’ll see your beloved’s sadness and joy there, too, based on the circumstances. And even when it’s just the two of you, words are often unnecessary. A look can convey more than a thousand words.

Jesus says everything with just one look at the man with many possessions who kneels before him. It’s a striking and rare example in Scripture in which we’re invited to look into Jesus’s eyes. What was the color of his eyes? What was the shape of his mouth? What intangible, ineffable glint was present in his eyes as he looked upon the man before him? What did Jesus see in that man that Scriptural details don’t tell us? Jesus’s look, we could say, was worth more than a thousand words. His look was worth everything.

In Jesus’s long, loving look there must have been such delight in the man as a child of God. Jesus could see past his obsequiousness in kneeling before him and calling him “good teacher.” Jesus would have seen the man’s earnest desire to find salvation. Jesus would have noticed the man’s wealth on display in his clothing, for he had many possessions. Jesus would have observed the man’s diligence in keeping the commandments and in trying to be good. Surely, this faithfulness would have evinced a sparkle of joy in Jesus’s eyes.

But complicating that hint of pleasure, there would also have been some sorrow and sadness in Jesus’s long, loving look. He must have known that something was lacking in that man, and I suppose his heart broke for him. Jesus would have understood how difficult it would be for this man to give up the one thing that had shaped his identity until this point: his possessions. Jesus would have looked upon the man lovingly and yet with pity, realizing that it would be nearly impossible for him to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.

That’s the world in which the man lives. It’s the world in which we live, too. We live in the world of transaction, and we have become so fluent in its language for so long that to speak another language is like a middle-ager trying to learn a foreign language. It’s almost impossible on our own terms. Oh, that we could go back in time and be like a little child, the one whom Jesus embraces just before encountering the man with many things. Oh, that we could learn the language of love again.

The man sees Jesus’s long, loving look at him, but perhaps he only sees it as judgment. He certainly sees it as loss, because Jesus’s long, loving look is immediately followed by a crushing blow to the man’s eager hope for salvation. It makes little difference that he’s kept all the commandments since his youth and that he’s been diligent and faithful and pious. He still lacks one thing. He has too many possessions, and to follow Jesus, he must sell them, give the money to the poor, and then follow Jesus. The man must give up the very thing around which his life and identity have been constructed. And this is when his own countenance falls. This must be the moment when he looks away from Jesus’s long, loving look and stares at the ground before he walks away.

But if he’d only lifted his eyes instead of walking away, he would have seen the same long, loving look from the face of our Lord. It’s the look that never turns away from us. While there may have been judgment in confronting that look of love, Jesus wasn’t looking upon him with judgment, only with love. But when your only language is the language of transaction, the look of love might seem like cruel condemnation.

It's too easy to explain away the man’s problem as a universal problem with wealth. Undoubtedly, for this particular man—as for many people—his possessions are his peculiar problem. He’s lived so long in a world of transaction that he believes everything can be bought or earned. Everything can be measured or bartered in a tit-for-tat system. And strings could be attached to his wealth, too. Maybe he could use his wealth for charitable purposes, serving as a benefactor to those in need. And wouldn’t that gain him salvation points? And by keeping all the commandments, wouldn’t he be assured of eternal life? Surely, he must be justified in expecting to inherit eternal life.

And it’s in this posture that he kneels before Jesus, possibly expecting to be justified in what he’s already done. This man is proficient in doing¸for doing is the character system of the language of transaction. And should he have failed to do something, Jesus can definitely tell him what that final thing is that he needs to do to inherit eternal life.

Jesus does tell him to do something, but in a way, it’s not about doing at all. Jesus explains what the man lacks in order to receive the gift of eternal life. Jesus offers not an immediate answer to the man’s quest for the assurance of salvation. He gives him a long, loving look, a look that points to something eternal, worth more than a thousand words. This love isn’t something that can ever be bought, because it preceded our habits of transaction. There’s nothing we can do to win this love. It’s pure gift from our heavenly Father, something that we can only receive. And receiving may be the most difficult thing of all.

For the man with many possessions, his acquisitions are the primary obstacles in his life that prevent him from basking in God’s long, loving look. And this is why it’s so difficult to enter the kingdom of God when we’re attached to wealth and material things. Wealth is inherently structured around a language of transaction. Unless we can gaze back at God’s long, loving look, it will be impossible for us to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.

But it’s not only the wealthy who will struggle to enter the kingdom of God. We all will, and Jesus affirms that. For each of us, there’s something that will stand between us and God’s long, loving look. It may be our pride. It may be our resentment. It may be our covetousness or envy or desire for success. It may even be our own perpetual self-effacement. All these things will make it nearly impossible to enter the kingdom of God. But of course, finding eternal life is not impossible, because with God, all things are possible.

The face of Christ looking with love upon the man with many possessions was the face of God in earthly time inviting the entire world to speak the language of love instead of the language of transaction. God’s long, loving look summons us from transaction to trust, from grasping to receiving, from possessing to giving. And so, while we can never earn that love because it’s always available to us, there’s one thing we can do to receive that love with greater ease. We do it not because it will earn us something. We do it to empty ourselves, as an echo of Christ’s own self-emptying, so that God can fill us with his abiding love.

We give. We give selflessly and generously. We give recklessly. We let go of everything that has taken hold of our lives. In the Mass, we offer our selves, our souls and bodies to God so he can return them to us and eventually to the world, redeemed and made whole. We give sacrificially of our money because that emblem of the transactional world may be the most visible impediment to receiving God’s love. We give not to receive but because only in giving can we receive.

It’s so very difficult to enter the kingdom of God, but it’s not impossible because anything is possible with God. Our countenance may at first fall when we realize what we must relinquish to find eternal life. But if we hold our gaze high and look up, we will find there the gift that’s eternally present for us to receive. It’s the long, loving look that dispels all fear of not having enough or not measuring up or not being enough. In that long, loving look, we recognize what we lack, but we’re also assured that no matter what we must give up, something far greater is ours to receive. And when we are able to receive it, we’ll finally speak the language of love.

Sermon by Father Kyle
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 13, 2024