St. John's Prologue, Take Two

There is a poignancy in hearing the Prologue from John’s Gospel a second time so soon after Christmas Day. Although we are only on the fourth day of Christmas, the rest of the world seems to be moving on. Presents have been opened. Visiting loved ones have returned to their homes. Meals shared after the Christmas feast appear paltry and rather sad.

The rest of the world doesn’t seem to know how to move on. Some shops are still closed even as people take down their Christmas trees far too prematurely. The streets are quieter than they should be, and the mad rush of the secular Christmas season has faded, and those of us living in its afterglow may feel the sad denouement. It’s like a performer trying to make sense of the day after a major recital, having worked for months on a program, performed it, and then been forced to leave it behind and take up some new thing. If you are feeling a bit sad right now, you are not alone.

There is perhaps some wisdom, then, in returning to the opening words of John’s Gospel in this post-Christmas Day haze. We are better poised to hear the words afresh, even more realistically. It is meet and right that, on Christmas Day, we want to bask in the profundity of the eternal Word becoming flesh in Christ and dwelling among us. It is meet and right that we should rejoice that the God of all creation entered creation as a human, becoming like us so that we might become like God.

But today, we need to hear another side of this story. The Christmas story gives us one of the most wonderful stories imaginable, as well as one of the saddest ones. It’s very hard to hear the sorrow of the story on Christmas Eve and Day. But after the Christmas guests have gone, after the turkey has been eaten, and after the climax of weeks of preparation, we might be ready for—even needful of—spending some time with the sadness of this story.

On Christmas Eve, St. Luke portrayed something of the heartbreak in the details of Jesus’s birth because there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the inn. Jesus was born in a manger. Jesus was born to a homeless family on the move, and as we’ll find out next week, the Holy Family will travel on to Egypt before returning to Nazareth. All is not well in the local context of Jesus’s birth. But, of course, on Christmas Eve, our minds and hearts are rightly fixed on other things. We know that the baby is born, and the shepherds rejoice. And this is good news for us.

But in returning to John’s Prologue again today, our Christmas high has diminished. We have returned to the ordinariness of our lives, and we must face the heart-wrenching fact that from the beginning, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. At the height of secular Christmastide, as the eggnog was lavishly poured out and the family gathered for the feast, we easily excused ourselves for turning a blind eye to the one sleeping on the streets. We chose to forget the temporary tent encampments of opioid addicts on the streets of Kensington, just miles from our door. We couldn’t bear the thought of our solitary neighbor who had no family and was warming up a frozen dinner on Christmas Day while we were popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. But days after the feast, when some of the sadness of our own lives has returned and when we can no longer ignore this harsh reality, we may want to spend some more time with John’s Prologue. Today, of all days, we need to hear it.

And John gives it to us straight. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. These are words that should make us weep. This is far more than a family trying to find a place for a birth. This is homelessness on an epic scale. When we hear John’s version of the divine homelessness* in his Prologue, we know how the story will unfold, and that’s what makes it so sad. We know that a world that is full of lies will reject Truth himself. We know that our Savior will come among us in perfect love and will give and give and give everything he has until finally he gives his life on a cross. And yet, he doesn’t die with resentment or vowing vengeance. He dies with words of forgiveness on his lips, changing something in the energy of this world for all time.

Reflecting on John’s Prologue today, we read it with all those who have experienced rejection. We read it with those who have no homes and who have no families. We read it with those who spent Christmas alone, shivering in their cold homes, and even now are still alone. We read it with those in prison who received no visitors and with those who dread this secular season from its start just after Thanksgiving until sundown on Christmas Day. We read it with those who have lost loved ones around this time of year, and we read it with those who are depressed and on the brink of utter despair.

And suddenly, we find ourselves at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, suffering from a bit of chronological vertigo. We are looking at a man who gave everything and is now giving his life for an ungrateful people who preferred their own sin to his love. We hear him giving voice to the words he had prayed over the course of his life in the synagogue, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And we weep with him. It seems like there is an unfathomable gulf between the Father and the Son. Where is the Spirit binding them all in one?

We must stay there for a time as we recognize that this man, dying on the cross, came to his own home, and his own people, his kith and kin, received him not. He knocked on their doors, and they slammed them in his face. He still comes, knocking on the doors of the cold hearts of humankind, who prefer their own sinful comfort to the uncomfortable grace of his life-changing power.

This story is too much. It is too sad. The homelessness of the Son with nowhere to go and rest and with nowhere to lay his head is overwhelming. We are confronted with that chasm of anguish between the Son and his Father on the cross.

But today, although the words are the same ones we heard on Christmas Day, a new, surprising move is made. We are not hearing the same old story. There is some real wisdom in the choice of Scripture readings for Christmas Day and today. We hear this primal story in its fullness, with grace upon grace opening it up for us, because the story goes on. John assures us that the story does not end with a homeless Savior, wandering the earth with nowhere to rest. The story doesn’t end with the Son dying on the cross and leaving unalterable sadness behind. The story goes on because John tells us that the Son who was rejected by his own people now abides in the bosom of his Father. He always was in the bosom of the Father, and he always shall be.

This may be good news for the Son of God, but what about for us? We may be reassured that Christ has a home with the Father after all. We may be comforted that the perceived separation between Father and Son on the cross is no separation at all, because the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit were all there bound together in love in that moment of anguish.

But what about us? What about those who have no homes? What about the perpetually lonely? What about the persecuted and the poor and the starving? What about those of us in this church today who are grieving? Is there good news for us?

To find our good news, we would have to jump ahead to the Last Supper, which seems a bit odd on this day, but there we shall go. St. John himself is at the side of our Lord, resting his head close to the chest of Jesus in a moment of searing betrayal by Judas. And suddenly, we have found our good news. It has been worth waiting for. John the Beloved Disciple points the way for us. The Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head has made the entire world his home, even the pockets of betrayal. And although the world rejected him and still rejects him, he persists in coming to us, like a shepherd going after the lost sheep. The slaughtered lamb becomes the Shepherd of the sheep. He invites us to recline next to him, to rest our head on his chest.

The story may be complete, but it is not yet over, for our Lord will continue to knock on the doors of our hearts, begging us to let him in. And when we do, all our weariness, sadness, loneliness, and forsakenness will be handed over to him because he will transform it. We will draw close to him as he has drawn close to us. We will hear his heartbeat, and in doing so, we will hear the heartbeat of God. And in that moment, we will have found our true home.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday after Christmas Day
December 28, 2025        

*Samuel Wells speaks of the “homelessness of God” in his book A Future That’s Bigger than the Past: Catalysing Kingdom Communities (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2019), p. 114.

On and Off the Page

The late author and Episcopalian Madeleine L’Engle once explained how the characters in her novels came to life in a way that surprised her. In the process of writing, she found that the characters, which were figments of her own imagination, took on a life of their own. They were not simply marionettes held captive by the strings of her mind. Her imagination was actually prompted by the characters themselves as her writing unfolded. Characters started off as one thing and ended up as something wholly different.[1]

This may explain why some authors, when writing a series of novels, go on to write prequels. In the author’s chronological time, prequels are written later than the novels they precede in fictive time. The characters in a novel have expanded beyond the bounds of the author’s creative impulse, and so the prequels become necessary to flesh out these fictional characters who seem to have come alive and leapt off the page.

Something like this is happening on Christmas Day when we hear the Prologue from John’s Gospel, but in this case, the character is real, more real than our reality. Only last evening, we heard the birth narrative from Luke’s Gospel, which focuses on Jesus’s birth to Mary and Joseph in a stable in Bethlehem. We know that this mysterious birth happens in a historical moment in time.

But the morning after, St. John, writing after St. Luke, takes us back to the beginning. Indeed, John takes us back before the beginning. Before the beginning is eternity, when the Word was with the Father and the Spirit, before anything was. Eternity is life off the page, and it can hardly be expressed in writing. It’s as if John is compelled to give greater depth to this person called Jesus of Nazareth.

St. John takes us off the page, before there even was a page. Off the page, the eternal Word who would take on flesh in Jesus, existed in loving relationship with the Father and the Spirit. And John tells us that the Son wasn’t simply with the Father; he was towards the Father, positioned in love and relationship towards the One he would later, on the page, call Abba and who, by the power of the Spirit, we can call Abba, too.

John knows that only by understanding the Word off the page can we truly understand him on the page. On the page, we can so easily imagine the Word made flesh as a superhuman or mere ethical model for our own lives. On the page, Jesus can appear to be a mere pawn of the Father, masquerading as having true freedom but really designed to be protected from the temptations and finitude of true humanity. But John assures us that in Jesus, God’s pen hits the pages of this life as Jesus, the author of our salvation, enters human time. The mind of God plays itself out on the pages of human history. And then, John takes us off the page, because only off the page can we fully learn who Jesus is and who we are called to be.

Off the page, our true home is in the eternal heart of God. John reminds us that when there was nothing, all that exists came into being. God spoke a word, and there was light. From out of darkness, light came forth to illumine the world. Light doesn’t drown out the darkness. Light comes to us in the darkness. In the beginning, when all things came to exist from the creative heart of God, God called it good. No, God called it all very good. And for those of us who live on the pages of this world, where there often seems to be a gaping absence of this good, John reminds us of our origins. In the beginning it was good. It was very good.

But it might seem that John’s Gospel is encouraging us to jump off the page before our time. In the horrors of life on the page, it may very well be tempting to leap off the page into the goodness of eternity, to be done with this life on the page and to enter a better life off the page. But that is not John’s way. John tells us that when the eternal Word takes on human flesh, eternity hits the page. And when eternity hits the page, the perfectly creative life of God exists in human time. And when this happens, our flawed and sorrowful existence on the page is imbued with the possibility of another story, God’s story. Our story is not signed, sealed, and delivered. Our story is still being written in the mind of God.

And this changes our future forever. This makes the impossible possible, and heaven breaks into this life. When eternity hits the pages of this world, its dull edges begin to shine again, and goodness appears amid evil. When eternity hits the pages of this world, the limitations of our skeptical imaginations are shattered by the infinite possibilities of God. When eternity hits the pages of this world, our fatalistic pessimism is expanded into a hopeful story that is taking on a new, creative life of its own. In ages past, before the Word became flesh, God’s holy word came to humankind through the prophets and in the reading of the Scriptures. But when the eternal Word hit the pages of this life, our existence and our story were changed forever so that one day we could leap off the page into the eternal heart of God.

On this quiet, intimate Christmas morning, I wish all who are not here could see that their own stories are so much more than the unwrapping of presents and the fleeting comfort found in the giving and receiving of gifts. Their stories are far more than broken relationships, despair, and hopelessness. For those who cannot see the light this Christmas, there is a deeper message that St. John is offering them, too. Off the page, there is abundant life that is ours to receive, and in Jesus, that life has also touched the page. That life is here, now, available for the taking. It’s as if, in this life on the page, mere words have become eternally infused images and sounds, as if the characters and scenes are coming alive and made present in our reality. Off the page, in the mind of God there are still possibilities for our life that have not yet been realized. And on the page, those possibilities still remain for us to discover so that we may be fully alive.

The Son of God has leapt onto the pages of this life, bringing with him eternal life, and because Jesus has come to save us, because he has lived among us and died and risen for us, the story on this page is always being written. We are not victims of fate. We are carefully crafted pens in the hand of the creative author of our salvation, who enables us to find light and life in our own unfinished stories.

On this Christmas morn, rejoice with me that there is a prologue to the dreary frustration of life on the page, a prologue that shows us our origins and our destiny in goodness. Rejoice with me that even in the shadow of death on the page, true life is ready to burst forth in radiant light. Rejoice with me that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. His skin hit the skin of the pages of this earthly life. Rejoice with me that one day we, too, shall leap off the pages of this life and into the eternal arms of God, where our song will go on forever.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 25, 2025       

[1] In Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1980). This image is also taken up and developed in Seeds of Faith by Mark A. McIntosh and Frank T. Griswold (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022).

The Message that Can't Remain Hidden

It may be that this year during your Christmas shopping or on the radio, you heard a less familiar song ring out.

There’s a star in the East on Christmas morn;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
It will lead to the place where the Christ was born;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

Follow, follow; Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

Follow the Star of Bethlehem;

Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

It goes on:

Leave your sheep, and leave your lambs;

Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
Leave your ewes and leave your rams;

Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

And it concludes:

If you take good heed to the angel’s words;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow;
You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herds;
Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

On the surface, these words are a beloved African American spiritual, composed and sung by enslaved Africans as they longed for freedom. But below the surface, there’s something more. Below the surface, like many of these spirituals, there’s a coded language. Those on the outside didn’t know this code, but those on the inside knew exactly what it meant. They were sound theologians, too.

Enslaved persons understood the code because they never forgot that God had freed the Israelites from Egypt. They understood that bodies of water were associated with deliverance. They knew that although the Promised Land often seemed like a pipedream in the wilderness, God didn’t forsake the promise to bring the Israelites to their true home.

So, when the spiritual says, Rise up, shepherds, and follow, it could be that the real message was for enslaved persons to shake off the shackles of bondage and escape, following the star to freedom. It could be that leaving the sheep and the ewes and the rams meant leaving the labor of oppression to discover a new home of emancipation. That freedom was well worth forgetting the flocks and the herds.

The genius of such spirituals was that on the surface, the language was straightforward theology. But for those who knew Christ, for those who knew what God had done and could do, the language was so much more. It was both a practical summons to freedom and to believe that freedom was possible.

Because we’ve heard the Christmas story so often and because well-meaning but simplistic Christmas pageants have shaped our understanding of this story, we have become immune to its depth. We know the surface of it, but according to St. Luke, there is more than meets the eye. A careful reader of Luke’s birth narrative will soon realize that this is a story that is told in code.

It’s a different kind of code than that found in African American spirituals. But there is an implied message in Luke’s Gospel to the underdogs of the ancient Roman empire. There’s a proclamation to the poor and the meek and the lowly that a King has come who is far greater than any emperor. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.

Our first clue is that the story features characters who often fly below the radar. An unwed mother and her betrothed from a peasant village journey not to Jerusalem for a birth but to the hamlet of Bethlehem. This is the city of David, that fallible, unpredictable king of old. And besides all this, the Savior, the Messiah, will be adopted into his lineage of all kinds of surprising and questionable characters.

But it keeps going. The angels appear to shepherds, poor field laborers who are on the outskirts of the village. The glory of the Lord shines around them. Wouldn’t those poor Jewish shepherds, despite their lack of education, have known that God’s glory led the Israelites through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? Wouldn’t they have remembered that God’s glory was always filling the Temple in ancient times? So, the message from the angels ensconced in a surrounding cloud of glory was no mere accident. And what about a child, a Savior, being born of a virgin? Didn’t the prophet Isaiah have something to say about this so many years before? There seem to be many clues in this story, a story that appears to be written in code. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.

With no offense to Christmas pageants and the Hallmark channel, if we scratch the Christmas story a bit more, we are neck deep in irony. God takes on human flesh under the auspices of an imperial edict but flying well below the radar of that census. The God who can’t be contained within human time or thought is part of a worldwide registration, and yet this God can’t be imprisoned within numbers and data.

It’s as if in this marvelous and familiar story, there’s a code for those with ears to hear. For the lowly and downtrodden, like the shepherds and the Holy Family, the code makes sense. They know that God has a rich history of rescuing the oppressed. God has a long, storied history of standing up for the underdog. And so, when the lowly shepherds hear the chorus of angels, they immediately head to Bethlehem to see the thing that has taken place. They believe it’s possible. They believe it has happened, and they want to behold this mystery. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.     

And when Mary hears what has happened to the shepherds, she, too, understands the code. God’s words announced to her by the angel Gabriel have come true. She has been pondering them in her heart. She continues to treasure these words, cogitating on them. The mystery will live on.

We might very well ask, though, why a God who comes in Christ to reveal himself would do so in code. Why would God come among us furtively and unpredictably? But maybe that’s the point. For enslaved people of the nineteenth century, a coded spiritual was both practically necessary for their own safety and theologically necessary for their hope. But for the meek of Jesus’s day, it may have been a bit different. They, too, were sound theologians. They knew what God could do because of what God had already done. They were expectant and ready for God to do a new thing. And this made them especially receptive to God’s good news proclaimed in this surprising birth of the Messiah. The lowly were the ones who could crack the code. Among what better persons could God come to dwell?

But this is not how the story ends, for if this were all there were to it, the story would be no more than a vindictive slap in the face of oppressive powers, and God’s revelation is never vengeful. It can never remain secret and hidden like a gnostic prophecy. God’s pronouncements and good news are always meant to be shared and proclaimed to the ends of the earth, to all people, oppressed and oppressors alike. And so, the shepherds run to Bethlehem to share their encounter with the angels. And then, having seen the Christ child face to face, they go forth yet again, glorifying and praising God. The message may come in code, but it never stays hidden. It cannot remain hidden. Rise up, shepherds, and follow. Follow the Star of Bethlehem.

Even in our own day, the code is waiting to be cracked. For those of us who know the whole story, the bands of cloth shrouding the infant Child are also his grave clothes. There's much more to this story than a historical account of our Savior’s birth. If we remember the history of our God’s many deeds of old, we can break the code in our own day.

When Christ appears to us, in the poor, in the suffering, in the oppressed, in the lonely, and in our own impoverished hearts, we must rise up and follow the Star of Bethlehem to make these things known to a world that is oblivious to the code. Although God’s good news may need a code to sneak in through the chokeholds of the ungodly powers of our own day, the good news can never survive only in cryptic prophecies. It must be shared to the ends of the earth.

Those who know the scriptures will know that this Savior really is the One long expected who still comes among us and who could only come among us as one who is poor, homeless, and meek. But those in imperial power, those with armies of military might, will miss who the Savior is precisely because of his gentleness, precisely because of his poverty, precisely because he came in such an unpredicted way. It remains for those of us who know the astounding possibilities of God to break the code and tell the good news.

Which is why we might take comfort in yet one more Christmas spiritual. Go, go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere; go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born! Down in a lowly manger the humble Christ was born, and God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn! Go and tell it, everywhere, that the humble Savior who came to us in code has been decoded by our joyful proclamation. And this Savior who has come, still comes among us, and he always comes to save!

 Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ
December 24, 2025        

Impossibilities Made Possible

If you were told as a child not to turn around in church, for just a moment, be rebellious and break that rule of ecclesiastical etiquette. Turn around to look at the stained-glass window on the far back wall of the church. It’s on the same side as the pulpit. If you can’t see it, then look at it after Mass. I’ll describe it for you. It’s one of the most interesting windows in this church, and there are many spectacular windows here. But this window is particularly special not because of its style or inherent beauty, but because of what it says.

The scene is Joseph’s carpenter shop in Nazareth. Try, if you can, to ignore the unrealistic portrayal of Joseph, Jesus, and Mary as white, blond-headed individuals. As I said, this window is striking not in its realism or beauty but in its theological impact. Joseph is holding a wooden cross that is in the process of being constructed. It’s not yet finished. There’s wood everywhere: blocks of wood lying around and shavings on the floor. The cross leans against a wooden worktable, and Joseph holds a hammer.

Jesus himself uses one knee to hold down another piece of wood. He holds a saw in the other hand. The piece of wood that he saws is resting on a tree stump. There’s so much wood here! Is that stump an allusion to the root of Jesse? In a move that would give most parents a real scare, Jesus saws the piece of wood with one hand while not looking at it! Jesus is, instead, gazing upon the cross. He is also wearing a red tunic. That seems symbolic, too.

The Blessed Mother watches this whole scene. She is robed in blue, her standard color, as is Joseph. But Joseph looks at the cross. And Jesus seems to be staring at the cross, too, with a sense of awe and trepidation. Joseph’s much older face appears to take in the cross with a sense of poignancy and sadness.

To one who reads the Bible as if in a straight line, this window is preposterous. To one who writes scripts for Christmas pageants, the scene is an uncomfortable distraction from Hallmark card renderings of sheep, oxen, and a family cuddling in a stable. No one wants the cross in Jesus’s childhood. But this window is theologically real and true. It doesn’t sugarcoat theology, and it expresses something true that we have lost in our obsession with historical-critical readings of the Bible and in our imposition of human time onto God’s time. This window tells us that from the earliest stages of Jesus’s life, the cross was already there.

If we can begin to accept that Scripture is not only to be read forwards but also backwards, we might begin to understand what this window is telling us. And we might begin to comprehend something of St. Matthew’s birth narrative. If we are reading Matthew’s Gospel linearly, then we might be rather cynical of the way Matthew uses Scripture from the Old Testament. Matthew tells us that Jesus’s conception by the power of the Holy Spirit and without normal marital relations is the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Isaiah, who once said that a virgin would conceive and bear a son, who would be named Emmanuel.

“Of course he would say that,” the skeptic would say, rolling their eyes. Matthew is simply misusing words from Isaiah, who had no idea that Jesus would be the Messiah and be born of a virgin. But is it that simple? Are we really able to understand the mind of God that easily? And if the story doesn’t simply go from beginning to end as we are wont to read it, could it be that Matthew’s understanding of Isaiah’s words wasn’t a retroactive imposition of a foreign meaning onto Isaiah’s words? Maybe Matthew’s interpretation of Isaiah’s prophecy could be exactly true. Maybe, in God’s mysterious providence, Isaiah, without knowing about Jesus, was able to give voice to something that God would make possible many centuries later. Why is that so difficult to believe?

And while we’re at it, what about all those other wonderful but easily overlooked details in Matthew’s birth narrative? If we’re talking about a God who gives possibility where we only see impossibility, then anything is possible! The details of this story matter. That may very well be Matthew’s interpretation, but what if Matthew’s interpretation, guided by the Holy Spirit, is precisely what is real and true?

Matthew’s emphasis on Joseph in his birth narrative is telling, as opposed to Luke’s emphasis on Mary. Matthew shows that Jesus is from the lineage of David, and that’s important because David was Israel’s king who was promised an unconditional covenant with God. He was also a deeply flawed man, and that’s significant, too, although it’s a story for another day. And Joseph, of all things, is not so stubborn and skeptical as to wake up from a dream and truly believe that God had spoken to him through an angel. Joseph is so unconditionally open and trusting that he changes the whole course of his actions based on that one dream.

And the details keep on coming. Jesus’s name is given by God, but it requires Joseph’s obedience to name him. Jesus’s name recalls Joshua, who led God’s people into the Promised Land after their exile in Egypt and wilderness wanderings. Jesus’s name means “he saves.” “Of course,” the skeptic would say with a sarcastic tone. “We know that Jesus saves, so of course, that’s his name.” Another eye roll ensues. But what if God really intended that, as Matthew suggests? What if that crucial detail of Jesus’s name is necessary to connect Jesus’s story with the entirety of Israel’s story of salvation?

And what about the virgin birth? Think of all the women before Mary who gave birth as a surprise gift from God. Think of what this idea of a miraculous birth signals about God. With God, anything is possible! But for the many skeptics who continue to scoff at Jesus’s virgin birth, Jesus’s conception is just another rejection of modern science. Or is it?

And what about that name Emmanuel, which Isaiah foretold whose very meaning expresses the ultimate hope of the Christmas story? God is with us. Yes, God has always been with us. God has always been with his people, and so why wouldn’t God choose to save humanity in the most intimate and human way possible, by taking on human flesh?

It seems that the real issue here is understanding God’s providence in tandem with our own freedom. We struggle enough with the two natures of Christ, his full divinity and full humanity, mainly because we imagine divinity as being in competition with humanity. But this is not the way it works. If divinity is something surprising and mysterious and beyond our comprehension, then indeed with God, anything is possible, and that possibility comes to fruition in human time with our cooperation.

The rational skeptic dismisses the lovely details of Matthew’s birth narrative, the fulfillments of prophecy, the specially crafted names, the surprising virgin birth, and the whole connection to the lineage of David. If these are true, the rationalist says, then God has forced the divine story upon humanity’s story. But au contraire! we might say. If God has offered all the possibilities in this birth narrative that Matthew shows have come true, it doesn’t mean that God has stifled our freedom. It means that the characters in this story are so open to God’s will that they understand how God wishes things to be. God isn’t forcing his will on people. God is offering possibilities, and it’s up to the different characters to discern those possibilities. With God, anything is possible!

What if the virgin birth is necessary for us to preserve a sense of God’s possibilities in a world of impossibilities? Sinning is so ordinary for us fallible humans that something extraordinary is necessary to save us from them. Jesus is necessary, born of a virgin, of the lineage of David, and connected intrinsically to the hope of Israel as foretold by Isaiah. And that’s why Matthew’s birth narrative seems to make so much sense while also keeping us humble in our assessment of God’s limitless possibilities.

If we were to write a Christmas pageant script in this age of demystification, we would have to write one that could never be acted out. This script would be all about the surprising details that show God’s possibilities in an age of impossibilities. This script wouldn’t be afraid to show that our God is not too ashamed to come among us in the womb of an unwed mother. This script would acknowledge that our God could make use of perfectly chosen names that convey the perfection of hope for us. This script could be equally comfortable with a stained-glass window showing a cross in Joseph’s carpenter shop, as well as believing that maybe Isaiah was inadvertently onto something that would take place centuries later. Above all, this Christmas pageant script would show us that, in a world of logic and banal malaise, God’s possibilities always exceed what we think is impossible. But the ending of this Christmas story is left in our hands: we can take a leap of faith in believing in God’s possibility, or we can choose the path of cold reason. May we, like Joseph, be so open to the unpredictability of God that even a dream can reveal the astounding possibilities of God.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 21, 2025

Looking for Crocuses

There’s a phrase we use when we’re not sure about the outcome of something. We’ll see, we say. Would you like to join us for dinner this weekend? you ask a friend. We’ll see, they say. Read between the lines: I’m holding out for a better offer, and if that doesn’t work out, then maybe I’ll accept your invitation. We’ll see. It’s a frustrating response, which expresses neither hope for the future nor an unqualified no. It’s aggravating in its noncommittal status. Maybe that will happen, or maybe it won’t. We’ll see.

If any phrase can sum up the season of Advent, it’s we’ll see. Every year at this time, we’re told to wait. And I don’t mean waiting for Jesus to come at Christmas. We know that will happen, and we know when that will happen. I don’t mean the waiting for Christ’s Second Coming, either. We know that will happen even if we don’t know when. It’s the daily waiting that’s the most frustrating. We’ll see. We’ll see if that job is offered to us. We’ll see if the cancer will go into remission. We’ll see if the money holds out for another month. We’ll see if those nations will actually turn their swords into ploughshares. We’ll see.

The present is the most difficult time in which to live. And so, it often helps to look back. I recently had such an experience. I was waiting with impatience and frustration for the next move in my life. And the waiting was hard. It was hard for me to give up control. It was hard for me not to know what would happen in a few months’ time. In some sense, that experience felt like an exile, a time of loneliness and separation from the comfort of knowing. I was in a wilderness of insecurity and desperately longing for security. I was confronted with a large, exasperating we’ll see.

And then, amid the barren desert through which I traveled, I spied a crocus. If I understand crocuses correctly, their stems are largely underground, and the flowers grow close to the ground. So, when crocuses blossom, they’re a surprise. This is what it was like for me recently when in my wilderness wandering, searching for some sign of hope, a violet crocus sprang up before me in a monolithic wasteland devoid of color.

It wasn’t a literal crocus, of course. It was a word passed on to me by a loved one. “I had an overwhelming sense the other night,” she said, “that everything is going to be okay. God is going to take care of you. It’s hard to wait, but if you wait, you will not be disappointed.”

It’s not that I didn’t know this before those words were uttered. I knew this deep in my heart, but it was so difficult to trust my own heart. I needed a visible sign, a crocus in the desert, telling me, “Be strong, do not fear! God will come and save you.” Those encouraging words reassured me that my time of exile had a shelf life. At some point—and only God knows when—a straight, direct highway would be paved through the lonely desert, and I would return home.

Chapter 35 of the Book of Isaiah not only mentions that the desert shall rejoice and blossom like a crocus, as if on a whim and as a surprise. Isaiah 35 is a metaphorical crocus in this vast prophetic book. You don’t need to know that chapter 35 probably dates from the time of the Babylonian exile, but it helps to know this. A chapter from centuries later is plopped down into an earlier chapter to give hope. No sooner is chapter 35 finished than we’re told that the king of Assyria, in the eight century BC, came into the land of Judah to capture them. This is long before the Babylonian exile, but it’s a blow to God’s people. God’s people are about to move into a wild desert, with little comfort and with a lot of fear. Chapter 35 is a crocus in the desert, telling God’s people not to give up.

The author of chapter 35 knows something that the people in the eighth century BC didn’t know. The author is writing from a vantage point of exile, centuries later. But the author knows that the story is not over. Not we’ll see, but you’ll see, he says. God isn’t finished with you yet. God will not leave you in exile, fear, and distress. God will bring you home. You’ll see, not we’ll see. Just wait.

Isaiah 35 is like a crocus in the desert, reiterating the promise made throughout the generations to God’s people. You’ll see God’s loving hand. It’s the promise made to Noah and his family on the ark, a promise that God would never again destroy the beloved creatures made in his image. You’ll see. It’s the promise made to Abraham and Sarah, that they would indeed see the beginning of a long line of descendants who would be a blessing to the ends of the earth. You’ll see. It’s the promise made to the Israelites in Egypt, as they labored under Pharaoh’s cruel oppression. You’ll see. It’s the promise made to them in their wilderness wanderings as they journeyed to the Promised Land. When the food ran out, manna appeared, like crocuses in the vast desert. You’ll see. And finally, it’s the promise made to God’s people as they saw their Lord hanging on a cross. On the barren wood of that cross, a crocus would spring forth in new life, a new creation, as Jesus was raised from the dead. This isn’t we’ll see, but you’ll see. It’s a definite promise. We may not know the hour it will happen, but we know it will happen because God has always been faithful.

This crocus of hope springs up before John the Baptist in his imprisonment. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” he asks Jesus. In reply, Jesus urges him to look for the crocuses. See that the blind receive their sight, that the lame walk, that those with skin diseases are cleansed, that the deaf hear, that the dead are raised, and that the poor have good news brought to them. Look for the crocuses. Not we’ll see or even you’ll see but behold, now among you, the visible signs of the kingdom of heaven are springing up.

It’s only natural that amid the desert, we might long for things to be different. I have certainly asked myself, why God couldn’t let me know exactly what the plan is for my future. Surely, we continue to ask why the weapons of war haven’t been put down or the shootings don’t stop, or why refugees still wander the earth looking for safety, or why those with plenty don’t have more concern for those who constantly go without. We’ll see, seems to be the implicit answer, and it might very well anger us.

But unlike God’s people looking for crocuses in the desert of the eighth and sixth centuries BC, we know something that can change our perspective. We know that on a barren cross, new life sprang up in glory. We know that the anticipated Messiah has come, and that his coming was both unexpected and misunderstood. We know that our salvation didn’t come through military might or a heavy-handed transformation of deserts into places of rejoicing. We know that our Messiah, the One who has come, is coming, and will come again, appears in our lives in a different way, bringing hope.

We know that we can’t truly meet him except in the deserts of our lives. We must find him in the thirsty places and in the parched lands, for there we will find him in those who suffer. We must find Christ in our own loneliness and despair because Jesus knew those very places himself, and a disciple isn’t greater than the master. We must search for Christ among the homeless, for Christ was once homeless, too. We must be brave enough to go into the deep darkness, for Christ is the Light of the world that came intentionally into the world’s darkness.

God’s message is not we’ll see but you’ll see. It will happen. Christ will come again. Christ will meet us in our worst moments and loneliest exiles. The way of the cross is one of self-denial, discipline, and self-sacrifice. But God doesn’t leave us comfortless. For the Holy Spirit comes, daily, strewing crocuses along the way, signs of hope and reassurance that the story isn’t yet finished. Not only us, but all of creation will come alive when this King comes to reign. The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom. We shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. And so, on the way, through the desert, we go. But for now, we must be content to wait, trust, and always keep our eyes open, constantly looking for crocuses.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday of Advent
December 14, 2025

A Message Worth Hearing

The best teachers are those who know the most about their students. If a student is capable but lazy, the good teacher understands that it might be necessary to exert some pressure on the student to help him realize his full potential. A complacent student needs a wake-up call. And this might necessitate some direct, blunt—even harsh—words from the teacher, not harsh words said in anger, but honest words said in love.

Alternatively, there is the more sensitive and diligent student. This student is overscrupulous, always completing the work set before her, always attending class, never sleeping during lectures. This student can still benefit from some direction, but she is more prone to feeling ashamed or judged by overly critical words. A thoughtful teacher will adjust her words to reflect that student’s personality. Such is the mark of an excellent teacher.

St. Gregory the Great, living in the 6th century, applied this wisdom to the pastor of a congregation. A wise priest, he suggested, would be gentle with those who are gentle in spirit, urging them towards holiness through encouragement and mild exhortation. But for a recalcitrant, spiritually lazy parishioner, the same priest would be more direct and blunter. A good priest and pastor, St. Gregory believed, would be able to navigate many personalities and many spiritual dispositions. In our own age, which is easily offended by direct speech, it might be helpful to learn to hear messages in more ways than one.

I think that John the Baptist, with all his ruggedness and wild mannerisms understands the need to tailor the message of good news to different groups of people. Some of the people who come to him in the wilderness understand his message of repentance. On the surface, it’s not a condemnatory or offensive message. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. That’s actually remarkably good news. Can you imagine anything better? Those whose lives are changed by the invitation to repentance come to John at the Jordan River, and he baptizes them.

But then, John’s personality shifts on a dime. When he sees the Pharisees and the Sadducees coming to him, venom pours out of his mouth. You can almost see his pulsating neck veins and red face. You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? This group is full of the ultra-religious who like their religion neat and tidy. We, too, know this type, which transcends all religions. They are the inordinately dutiful who are good at adhering to the letter of the law but neglecting the spirit of it. They are the contemporary Christians who are complacent in their favored status and who judge non-conformers harshly.

One would suspect that such folks are the most adequate candidates for John’s baptism. But John smells a rat. Like a wise pastor, he knows that the Pharisees and Sadducees do not understand the heart of his baptism. His baptism is not based on privileged right of spiritual lineage or on being dutiful. His baptism is not an external rite that has no bearing our own inner lives. His baptism is a baptism for the repentance of sins. His baptism necessitates an about-face, a change of direction, a change of heart. To undergo John’s baptism, one must feel compunction and be cut to the heart.

John’s harsher words are directed to the spiritually complacent with a perfunctory view of salvation. Some of the most rigorously practiced religion can be the most spiritually lazy, practiced by those who hear what they want to hear but who need a wake-up call. And John gives it to them. Terrifying images of judgment spew forth from his lips, replete with sharp objects and fire. The last word we hear from his lips today is about an unquenchable fire.

So, which side of John do we need to hear today? We are not alike in this room. I know for a fact that we all bring different histories to this church. Some of us were brought up on a steady spiritual diet of fire and brimstone language. It doesn’t take us long to begin to feel on our skin the lick of flames from an eternal hell. It doesn’t take us long to feel terror at being chosen or being damned. It’s very difficult to hear John’s words and not feel repulsed, or at the very least, worried all over again, with unpleasant memories dredged up from Sunday School classrooms of the past.

But there are also some of us who grew up with no talk of sin. We heard a lot about God’s love—and thanks be to God for that, but it was considered unpopular, even uncouth, to mention sin or judgment. We have seen the fruits of that reticence in vapid proclamations from pulpits, empty pews, and careless lives. We know what it’s like when the Gospel message loses its meaty substance. And because of this spiritual coddling, we have become a bit spiritually lazy, picking and choosing what we want and rejecting what we don’t want from the buffet in front of us.

So, which side of John do we need to hear today? Truth be told, our dispositions might vary from day to day. On one day, we might be sensitive, fragile, and run the risk of being spiritually harmed if we listen too closely to John’s words to the Pharisees and Sadducees. But on another, when we have gotten lazy about our prayer and commitments to the Church, we would benefit from John’s wake-up call. At times, only the harshest of proclamations seems to get our attention. So, which is it that you need today? Fierce John or gentle John?

Only you can decide. But there is one thing that is clear beneath all John’s words, whether fierce or gentle. And that is nothing less than the heart of the Gospel. If John cared nothing for the Gospel, his words might have been much milder in tone to the Pharisees and Sadducees. But John cares, and we should care, too.

John’s cry in the wilderness was true in those ancient days, and it’s still true today. The kingdom of heaven has drawn near. We are not so much moving towards it as it is moving towards us. It’s nearer than we can imagine. As St. Augustine of Hippo said, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Repentance convicts us when we are going in the wrong direction. We are bowing to our golden calves on our many hill altars, and we simply cannot see that the one, true, living God has drawn near to us. Christ is alive. He’s alive in you, and he’s alive in me. And because we are so often unaware of this reality or are spiritually lazy, someone must wake us up. On some days, it might be fierce John. On others, it’s simply a vivid reminder that when we are drawn into despair, the God who created us, sustains us, and has redeemed us is nearer to us than we are too ourselves. Repent! The kingdom of God has drawn near. Wake up! Jesus is alive within you.

Perhaps those who are complacent with their Christian stature need to hear John’s words in their brutal honesty, to prevent them from scaring other people into shame and exempting themselves from God’s judgment. And perhaps those of us who are traumatized by manipulative religion need to understand that not talking about sin and judgment isn’t the answer either, nor is avoiding difficult speech. No matter what our experience is, the kingdom of God has drawn near. God is already among us. God has already chosen us to bear fruit for the kingdom of God.

The ax is lying at the root of the tree, but lest we forget, remember that the tree has not yet been cut down. The chaff and the wheat are being separated as we speak, but the chaff has not yet been burned up. God’s fire is a purifying fire. It is unquenchable in its desire to refine us and try us as silver is tried, not for us to suffer and live in shame, but for us to live in God.

What words of John do you need to hear today? Only you will know. But whatever message you take away, know this: The kingdom of heaven has drawn near. God is closer to you than you can comprehend. And Jesus’s Gospel has come, is coming, and will come to bring good news to the poor, relief to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. However, you choose to hear it, above all, hear it well. For no matter how the message is delivered, this Gospel is something we need to hear.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday of Advent
December 7, 2025      

Left Behind

I suspect that many of us have a long list of questions that we want our Lord to answer when we meet him face to face. We could start with the Bible itself. Lord, tell us why God didn’t lead the people of Israel directly to the Promised Land. Why did they have to go the long way there? Tell us, Lord, why it was necessary for Joseph to be thrown into a pit by his brothers and then sold into slavery, all so that God’s people could eventually find a place of refuge in Egypt. Lord, tell us why the eyes of the disciples walking on the road to Emmaus were kept from recognizing Jesus.

Tell us, Lord, why we can’t know the day or the hour that the Son of Man will come again? Why is it that not even the Son himself claimed to know? And please tell us, Lord, which of the two women grinding meal and which of the two men working in the field were saved and which were condemned? Or do we already think we know the answer to that question?

Of course, many Christians do think they know the answer. In the rapture, those taken away are whisked off to a land of paradise, while the evil ones are left with the hell of this earth. But maybe this isn’t so clear after all. Do we really know the answer to that question? Are we really supposed to know?

It doesn’t seem that we are supposed to know. And sometimes, not knowing is precisely the point. Often, there is a supreme gift in not knowing. No one wants to know whether they will develop some horrible disease later in life. No one really wants to know how and when they will die. If we knew all those things, life would be one endless worry.

And some in the Church have banked precisely on this tactic of fear. If the ones left behind are the bad ones, then what better way to encourage good behavior than to stir up anxiety by coopting Jesus’s words. After all, if the owner of the house had known exactly when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. We must be ready, too, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Such fear mongering should make us uneasy, though. According to Scripture, love is the opposite of fear. To obey God’s commandments and live virtuously simply out of fear is the height of spiritual immaturity. And centuries of wielding the stick instead of the carrot hasn’t done a lot of good for the Church. Frankly, it has done more harm than good. What is the answer, then? Are those left behind the good ones or the bad ones? Can we ever know? And if we can’t ever know, does it really matter? Is knowing the answer really the point?

Let’s try, if we can, to dispel all fear from our minds for just a moment. Let’s try to read the passage from Matthew’s Gospel without elevating our blood pressure. Let’s try to imagine how Jesus is offering us a lovely gift in telling us that we will not know when his Second Coming will be. Let’s try to find some good news in this confounding passage.

The truth is that, for now, we are all left behind. Our Lord has come, and he has gone to the right hand of the Father. We are all left behind, and that is not a bad thing. Jesus’s departure was never presented as a doomsday affair, although the disciples were certainly bereft in the immediate aftermath of his ascension. Indeed, John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus’s departure from earth was a gift, so that his followers would be given the power of his Spirit to enable them to do works even greater than he had done. Maybe being left behind and not knowing the future, for now, is a holy opportunity to live as if we are alive rather than asleep. And that is a good thing.

It seems no coincidence that all the passages surrounding today’s Gospel passage have to do with what we do in this life. They are about being spiritually proactive. They are about moving from words and ideas to deeds and actions. They are all about spiritual work and making the most of the present time. Jesus tells of a faithful and wise slave whom a master has put in charge of his household. That slave who is working when the master comes home is considered blessed. The one who takes advantage of the master’s delay in coming home and behaves badly is condemned.

Only five young women of the ten who took lamps to meet the bridegroom were considered wise, because they had the good sense to bring oil with them. The others were unprepared. The servant who hid the one talent given to him by his master was judged harshly because, out of fear, he hoarded the talent and didn’t invest it. And Jesus says that the ones who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the imprisoned do all those things to him. It seems that what we do in this life has everything to do with entering the kingdom of God. Maybe being left behind is not such a bad thing after all.

Those who want nothing more than to be raptured away from this world often care nothing about this world. But this is the world that Jesus came to save. This is the world into which he was born, upon whose soil he walked, whose people he healed and taught, and in which he suffered and died, all so that this world might be saved. Maybe being left behind isn’t such a bad thing after all, because loving and caring for this world and the people of this world is precisely the point. Perhaps this is why Jesus doesn’t want us to know the day or the hour when he will come again.

But right now, the world is asleep. It is a time of great malaise, even within the Church. People are walking around and breathing and going about their daily tasks, but they appear lifeless. Many simply want to escape the hell of this world. They want to be raptured. They are numb from the anxieties of this world. They are plain tired of putting their trust in gods that will never take care of them. They are repelled by centuries of the Church wielding the stick. But there is also great hope, and there is hunger, too. Many are hungry for love, and they are also hungry for a Church that expects something from them because that is good news for those of us left behind.

For those of us left behind, the good news is that Jesus will come again. He will bring God’s kingdom to earth. There will be judgment, and that will be a gift because it will mean that God’s kingship is the only kingship that matters. And in that kingdom, there will no longer be any thirsty or poor or oppressed or forsaken. Christ will be all in all.

But for now, those of us left behind must wake up from our sleep. We must open our eyes and do the work that Jesus has called us to do. Now is the moment for us to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.

Not knowing when Jesus will come again is what directs our attention to the world that Jesus came to save. It fixes our eyes on the stomachs that are empty and the lost who need to be found and the weeping who need to be comforted. It animates our very souls so that we are alive in Christ, radiating the joy of a Gospel that is the world’s healing balm. Those of us who are left behind for now are not condemned but chosen and called, called to resuscitate an apathetic and aimless generation that needs the healing power of Christ.

We are left behind, and we don’t know the day or the hour that the Son of Man will appear again in glory. We don’t know why this world has to be the way it is sometimes. We don’t know whether at the Second Coming those taken away or those left behind are the good or the bad ones. But truth be told, it doesn’t really matter. We’re not meant to know. But what we do know for sure is this: Christ will come again, and it will be the best thing this world has ever known. The only question is: will we be awake and ready?

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
November 30, 2025

Down to the Studs

Have you ever tried to think about nothing? My first experience was in a high school English class when the teacher invited us to try, for one minute, to think about nothing. Hardly ten seconds had passed before my mind was wandering off in all kinds of directions. Distractions abounded.

It was some years later that I discovered the practice of contemplative prayer, in which the point is not so much to think about nothing but to pray without words. The pray-er sits in silence, and when the distracting thoughts come—and they always will—one does not engage or judge the thoughts. The pray-er returns to a prayer word, a holy word that can be uttered gently as an invitation into silence. This silence is God’s first language, according to St. John of the Cross. And it was John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and other mystics of the Church who knew the rigors of contemplative prayer. Such prayer strips the pray-er down to the studs, so to speak, where nothing is left but a naked reliance on God alone. In that land of uncertainty, which can’t be controlled by our efforts, all that we have suppressed in our attempts to hide from God rises to the surface. Tears often well up, too. There is nowhere to hide, and in discovering that painful reality, the pray-er also discovers God in the depths of the heart.

It is to this deepest place of the heart that Jesus takes us in the apocalyptic passage towards the end of Luke’s Gospel. This is not, however, the usual way of reading the passage. But if we read it spiritually, we can imagine Jesus leading us through the practice of prayer, way down into the depths of our being, where God speaks and, where we can only listen to God after being reduced to silence.

The usual way of reading Jesus’s apocalyptic discourse is with anxiety and fear as an obsession with the end times. All the talk of wars and insurrections, of nations rising against nations, of earthquakes, persecutions, famines, and plagues is, frankly, terrifying. But even before such horrors, Jesus’s disciples will be arrested, persecuted, and thrown into prison. Those who love Jesus will be hated, even by their blood relatives. Hearing this passage provokes many distractions, like trying to think about nothing.

And this is why the typical way of reading the passage becomes a quest for certainty and specifics. It asks the same question that Jesus was asked when he predicted the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. When will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place? To this Jesus responds, “do not be led astray.” Jesus, it seems, is inviting us to navigate these very real, worldly distractions not with fear or anxiety, but with confident silence and a focused journey into the deepest regions of the heart.

The destruction of the Temple was indeed a real event. One can see the remains of that event even today in Jerusalem. But there is something more going on in Jesus’s dramatic discourse. The destruction of the Temple is also a spiritual image for us. In Christ, allegiances to places, things, and ways of being are reoriented around him. Jesus becomes the temple. Jesus becomes our focus. Jesus becomes our worship. And now, through the power of the Spirit, the temple can be found everywhere, especially in our hearts.

Beware that you are not led astray, Jesus says, for many will come in my name and say, I am. They will hijack the divine name for their illicit purposes. From the moment Jesus uttered those words even until the present day, many will lure us into idolatry claiming to be I am. Earthly rulers will come, saying, I am the one who will look out for you. But do not go after them, Jesus says. The allure of money will come saying, I am the security of your future and the certainty of your prosperity. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Anxiety will come saying, I am the one to worship because I will help you prepare for what lies ahead. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Succes and power will come saying, I am the way to fame and recognition that you have always longed for. But do not go after them, Jesus says. Many false idols will come, masquerading as angels of light, blasphemously laying claim to the divine name and urging us to worship them. But we should not go after them.

All these false idols and shallow promises are the root of so much of the evil that reigns in our own day. They are real, but they are distractions from our true calling. And Jesus invites us not to fall under their sway but to follow his summons into the depths of our hearts, into silence, where something else is to be found.

And if we make it far enough through this apocalyptic passage despite our fear and anxiety of what is to come, Jesus leads us to a place of great comfort. It is a place that is found in the very midst of troubles and distractions. In that place, suffering cannot be divorced from glory. Life cannot be separated from death. Sacrifice cannot be pulled apart from gain. And in that confounding truth, the pearl of the Gospel shines, even as the world is turned upside down.

In our perseverance through wars, unrest, natural disasters, and persecutions, we journey to the depths of the heart, to the place of silence. And from out of that place of silence and godly focus in the midst of chaos rises an opportunity to testify. For too long, we have assumed that prosperity and success are signs of God’s favor. But in the cross-shaped life of following our Lord, things are not quite so simple. In the places where all chaos is breaking loose, we have an opportunity to testify to the good news in Christ. Jesus calls us into that forbidden country, and we must be brave enough to go there.

But what shall we say? What can we say to a world hostile to the Gospel because it has lost trust in the Church? What can we say from ground zero of war, societal injustice, and biting division? How can we speak a Gospel whose very nature is humble suffering in the face of Christian triumphalism?

In the face of this gaping question, we are left with silence. We can only learn what we are to say when we are brought to the land of no words and have relinquished all our attempts to control what we say and do. It is there in that lonely, silent place that we are given the best news imaginable. It is there that Jesus himself will give us the words to say and a wisdom that none of our opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. It is there in that deep place of the heart, where all our idols have been razed to the ground and we are left with nothing but a pure, unrelenting love of God, that we can truly understand that not a hair of our heads will perish because by our endurance, we have gained our souls. We have gained true life, not by our own efforts but by letting God speak within us.

Today’s Gospel passage would not be the most obvious choice for Commitment Sunday. Thankfully, the passages have been chosen by the community of the Church. But nevertheless, we have been given an extraordinary gift from Luke’s Gospel. We are reminded of Jesus’s call not to follow the distractions and false idols of this age. We are invited to journey, with great endurance, through the tempting lures toward earthly success, fame, wealth, power, and security. In giving sacrificially of ourselves to God, we are letting God strip us down to the studs, where every false pretense, worry, anxiety, and unholy desire is refined in the purifying fire of the Holy Spirit so that nothing is left but a single-minded loyalty to the One who will give us true life.

Whether we like it or not, all the visible distractions of our own lives, all our human conceit, all our desire for control, and all the projects of our hubris will come crumbling down at some point. Not one stone of them will be left upon another. But in the silence of their destruction, a new sound is heard. It is the murmuring of God doing a new thing. And in the painful loss of all that we have worshipped and held dear, something new rises. From the tomb emerges a prayerful patience and a silent waiting for a word from God, who will equip us with the right words to speak in this age of desolation. In the place of all our fears, anxieties, and earthly hopes dashed to the ground will rise a total trust that each of our hairs are counted by God. And through such enduring trust, one day, we will find our souls.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
November 16, 2025        

Irrational Hope

I know someone who, from a young age, understood very clearly what his vocation was. God was calling him to serve as a church musician. As a child, he stated unequivocally to his family that his vocation was to serve God from the organ console and through directing choirs. Now, his grandfather, as a financial planner, was a practical man. That was not a bad thing in and of itself, for he instructed his family in the important habits of using money wisely, saving for retirement, and giving to the church. But as a practical man, he was a bit concerned about his grandson’s presumed vocation. And so, one day he pulled the child’s mother aside. He said to her, “I notice that your son likes the finer things in life, but he also wants to be a church musician. I’m concerned about how those two loves will work together.” Later, when the boy heard about his grandfather’s words of concern, his response was clear and simple. “Mama, don’t you think that if God wants me to serve him in the church, he’ll take care of me?” After that, no one dared to ask him another question.

After Jesus responds to the Sadducees in today’s Gospel, no one dared to ask him another question either. The Sadducees question the reality of the resurrection and hope to demonstrate that such belief is utterly foolish. But Jesus, looking to Scripture, says that to God, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive, for God is God not of the dead but of the living. And this response silences the scribes and presumably the Sadducees, too.

We may well rejoice in Jesus’s vindication of resurrection life in the face of rational skepticism. As usual, Jesus dispels the arguments of his opponents. But if we dig deeper, I suspect that in each of us there’s more of the skeptical Sadducee than we might like to admit. We may have found the story of the boy vigorously defending his vocation as a church musician to be charming, but in the same breath, we might also be inclined to write it off as youthful, naïve sensibility. Is there not some part of us that has a very real fear of handing our practical well-being and financial security over to God?

The questions and cynicism of the Sadducees reflect the concerns of their age, but those concerns manifest themselves in different ways in our own day. The practice of levirate marriage commanded by ancient law was a means of ensuring the security of biological lineage and the family name. It was a way of controlling something that we can’t always cddontrol. In such an arrangement the widow was no more than a piece of property used to secure that genealogical future. For those who didn’t believe in a resurrection from the dead, the only way to preserve one’s memory and legacy was through biological kin. Hence, the Sadducees grill Jesus with a preposterous question about which of the seven brothers will be the husband of the widow in the resurrection.

But Jesus counters stone cold reason with the irrational belief in a resurrection life. Jesus contrasts this rational age where humans must control their legacy and where death is the end of the story with an irrational age in which all are alive in God, where death is not the end of the story, and where we ultimately can’t control gifts from God.

Jesus asks for us to believe and live in a way that seems excessive to our logical, rational world. In such a world, it’s excessive to ask us to put our hope in a life that we can’t see or have certainty about. It’s excessive to live in this age as if we’re in the next age. It’s excessive not to reject this world but, instead, live in it with a transformed understanding of what God can do. It’s excessive to believe that death isn’t the end of the story. It’s excessive to put God at the center of our lives, when that means not being anxious about all the practical considerations of this age. It’s all simply too much according to the rationality of this age.

We inhabit an age of reason, which is a tiresome legacy of the Enlightenment period. And this legacy of rationalizing has become our excuse to quietly ignore the demands that Jesus makes on us. It’s too difficult, we say. Indeed, it does exceed anything we are prepared to do and believe. But that’s only because God always surpasses our expectations. God always loves more than we can imagine he would love. God always forgives people we ourselves are not prepared to forgive. God always provides for us even when we seem to lack basic necessities. God always makes things new that have grown old. And that’s too much for our finite brains to comprehend.

The questions of the Sadducees aren’t bad questions, nor are our own practical questions bad. They’re just simply the wrong questions to ask of God. They’re wrong because, thankfully, God doesn’t operate in our paradigm of finite resources and scarcity. They’re the wrong questions because God always transcends even our grandest hopes and does far more than we can ask or imagine.

Every week in the Nicene Creed, we profess belief in the resurrection of the dead, but then we sometimes proceed to live as if we don’t. To us, an innocent, childlike belief that God will take care of us if we follow his call seems like a nice idea but highly impractical. To us, it’s irrational to believe that our present day’s searing injustice isn’t actually evidence for God’s lack of concern for humanity. To us, to give of ourselves, our time, and our money to God and neighbor is an exorbitant ask when there are so many other competing demands. To our age of reason, to persist hopefully in the face of so much anxiety and fear is as foolish as imagining whose wife the widow will be in resurrection life.

But amid the very real atrocities of our cold, rational age and amid the convincing voices of scarcity that assail us every day, we can easily forget that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. We can even become so obsessed with resurrection life that we forget how to live in this life. When Jesus says that God is God not of the dead but of the living, he means that to God all are alive, those who have physically died and those of us who still breathe on this earth. And if that’s the case, then resurrection life impinges even on this frail earthly existence. If Jesus came to give us abundant life, then we must live as if it were so. Even in this life, the Christian struggle is to embrace irrational hope in the face of rational despair.

Yes, Jesus asks for too much, because in this frail existence, all we try to give will fall short of what we’re capable of giving. And yet, we try. Jesus asks us to integrate our lives so that in all we do, sacred and secular, we’re alive to God. Jesus asks us to give of ourselves, our souls and bodies, not as if it’s excessive but as if it’s not enough. And in doing so, we begin to learn something of the God who gives perfectly of himself in love.

In days of old, Christians lived irrationally every day of their lives, facing literal death to follow Christ. In our own day, we may not face literal death to follow Jesus, but we face a challenge that might seem as insurmountable as martyrdom. If we live as if we’re truly and fully alive in God, then we will live deeply against the grain of this world. If we believe in resurrection life, then we will live and breathe an irrational hope that others will scorn with rational skepticism.

Jesus does ask a lot of us, for he asks us to be fully alive in a world that’s dead and lifeless. He asks us to trust that even when the tired, old enemies of fear and anxiety assault us, God is stronger than they are. Jesus asks us to have faith that when our resources seem too finite God is granting us infinite abundance. Jesus asks us to have the innocent, pure hope of a child who is convinced that if God is calling us to do something, he will always take care of us. Yes, in our rational world, Jesus is asking quite a lot of us. But in the irrationality of the age to come, whatever our hopes and dreams may be, God will always exceed them.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
November 9, 2025

To Be One, Too

Some time ago, on a dreary gray morning, I was on my way to run an errand, and I was nervous and agitated. A few hours in my future, I would officiate at a liturgy in the presence of someone who felt like an enemy to me. I had never met the person. The person had never personally offended me. But I was deeply unsettled at the thought of being in the same room as this person.

As I headed to my destination, I was stewing about what to do. I realized that I couldn’t muster alone the courage to make it through the liturgy. I was also fearful and anxious, so I was praying for God to help me. As I passed a hospital, I recalled that it was where my former spiritual director had been born. He had died only a few months before, and I was bereft of his spiritual guidance and still mourning his death. Pray for me, I uttered in my heart, addressing my friend in Christ who was continuing on his spiritual journey in the next life. Pray for me.

I knew he would, and I knew that I could benefit from his prayers. He had been a leader in the Church himself, guiding God’s people during a painful and difficult time. He had faced death threats over his decisions, which were rooted in love, however unpopular to some they were. He had known the heart-wrenching pain of trying to hold a fractured Church together. But he had embodied kindness and gentleness in the face of persecution. What more appropriate person could I ask to pray for me? He had persisted in love in the face of his enemies. Surely, his prayers would come to my aid.

And they did. After the service that morning, the person I was so afraid of meeting spoke to me. And to my discomfort at the time, the person embraced me. In hindsight I wonder, was this a gift? Was God speaking to me through this person, urging me to rise above petty resentment? Perhaps this was precisely how my prayers that day were answered, however unsettling and surprising the answer may have been.

Look above you at the stained-glass windows on either side of the nave. From your position in the pews, it’s very hard to make out the faces of that motley cloud of witnesses, much less identify who they are. I have often thought of those stained-glass windows as a cloud of witnesses hovering above us, praying for and with us, even watching over us in love. But I also wish that they were on eye level. I wish they seemed as approachable to us as my former spiritual director did on that day some years ago. I wish the saints depicted in glass above us would stand on the level ground with us, as Jesus does in Luke’s Gospel. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, they are delivered on a level place, unlike Matthew’s Gospel, where they are preached on a mountain. And so, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus looks up at his disciples before pronouncing his blessings and woes. Standing on the level ground before them, he looks right into their eyes.

And accordingly, Luke’s Beatitudes speak of real, concrete situations. The poor are those who are literally struggling to survive. The hungry are literally those who wonder where their next meal will come from. The sorrowful are suffering right here and now. The persecuted are those who dare to speak a word of the gospel to a world positioned against the gospel. These are real people and real problems.

For this reason, I wish the saints above us were more approachable. Don’t you want to see their faces? Don’t you want to see what they’re wearing? Don’t you want to imagine what their faces are saying about the lives they lived, with all their tangible problems? It’s far too easy for us to spiritualize the saints, to place them on pedestals, to make them superhuman. But the truth is that these saints were human and sinful and imperfect, just like us. As the hymn tells us, “you can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea, for the saints of God are just folk like me.”[1] Do you mean to be one, too?

These saints are both like us and perhaps unlike us, which might inspire us to be more like them. These saints, revered by the Church, known and unknown, are ones who have lived against the grain of the world. They are ones who have embodied in their fallible human lives Jesus’s commands to go above and beyond the comfortable and the usual tit-for-tat behavior of this world.

The saints have exceeded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The saints have not only loved those who love them. They have loved their enemies. They blessed those who cursed them and prayed for those who abused them. They gave not just an inch but went the extra mile in love, mercy, and compassion. In short, the saints have shown forth in human time something of the infinitely bountiful and perfect love of almighty God.

But we still live in the now of the Beatitudes, where the poor only get poorer and the comfortable ignore their plight, where hungry bellies are the consequence of too many well-sated people, where the tears have not yet been wiped away from the eyes of all people, where cruel words are returned for cruel words, where it's popular to hate our enemies, and where many go above and beyond in violence and hatred rather than in love. And even while we muddle through this now of the present, the lives of the saints rise above the surface of this unjust world like a topographical relief showing us another way. In the lives of the saints, we catch glimpses of an alternative reality that is the kingdom of God, our promised inheritance. Meanwhile, in this now of the present, we wait with hope and eager longing for this kingdom to be fully realized.

I do wish those saints hovering above us were one level down, on this level place among us, so we could see more visibly their humanity. I wish they could come alive from those fragments of colored glass to tell us their stories. I wish we could hear their voices saying, yes, you can be one, too. Like you, we were poor and watched the poor suffer. We knew searing hunger and wept over empty stomachs. And yet, we lived with eyes and hearts towards that other reality, towards the kingdom of God. We lived as if there were abundance and not scarcity, love and not hate, hope and not fear.

Perhaps those saints would show us that God’s justice is far more than a balancing of the scales. God’s justice is not simply putting a woe on one side of the scale to balance out a blessing. God’s justice is not afflicting the rich and contented and powerful just to even out the score. For then, it would not be mere justice but crude retribution. Perhaps the saints would tell us that God’s justice requires going above and beyond the normal call of duty. And this means that in heavenly terms, loss is gain and gain is loss.

I suspect the saints would tell us that when aspiring to holiness and saintliness seems superhuman, Jesus offers us good news. The holy ordinariness of Christian living shines forth in doing things, in training to be virtuous in action, so that one day, yes, we might be saints, too.

In a world that urges us to cancel those with whom we disagree and hate our enemies, Jesus and the saints call us to pray for those who hate us, to love them beyond subjective emotion by acting as if we loved them. Jesus and the saints call us to return every evil word or action or curse with a good, kind, holy response. In all that we do, we are seeking to be some small echo of that One who on the cross went above and beyond, giving his life for those who would hate him, forgiving those who persecuted him.

In just a few minutes, Sloane will go into the water of the font, the same water that saints have passed through in ages past. She will die to an old way of life and rise to a new one that goes above and beyond in love. And all of us will make a promise to go above and beyond in supporting her, a promise that we should endeavor to keep for the rest of our lives. It’s a seemingly impossible task, but today, of all days, we remember that we’re never alone in this journey. As I learned on that gray day some time ago, an entire cloud of witnesses who have known the trials and tribulations of this life are right next to us on this level place, supporting us, praying for us, some are named and some remain unnamed. “You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea, for the saints of God are just folk like me.” And blessedly, by the grace of God, you and I can be one, too.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Sunday in the Octave of All Saints’ Day
November 2, 2025

[1] “I sing a song of the saints of God” by Lesbia Scott, Hymn 293 in The Hymnal 1982

Change from the Inside Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praying in the Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Whole Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Variant of the King James Version translation

A Gift to be Received

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing the Gap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whom Will We Serve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Love that Never Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sit Down for Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resting in Christ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down the Ladder and into Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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