Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12-17; John 3 1-17 The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge There’s a poem by Robert Frost called “The Death of a Hired Man” about an unreliable farmhand called Old Silas, who though no longer welcome, returns home to a certain farm to die. The farmer’s wife tells the farmer that Old Silas has come home—“’Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die:/You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’”   The farmer, sick and tired of being let down by Old Silas time and again over the years replies with single, rueful, gently mocking word, “Home.” The farmer is sick of being had. He’s tired of giving Silas second and third and fourth chances. He’s can’t see why Old Silas would even consider coming back to the farm, even if it’s just to die. The farmer, if we want to think about his relationship with Old Silas in the terms of our readings for today, is a lot like Nicodemus. The Fa...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Acts 2: 1-12, Psalm 104: 25-35, 37; Romans 8: 22-27; John 15: 26-27, 16: 4b-15 The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge “As for we who love to be astonished”—Gertrude Stein Sometimes you’ll hear the Feast of Pentecost spoken about as the birth of Church—the gathered people of God “all together in one place” proclaiming the healing, salvific, and life-giving work of Jesus each in their own tongue. In a certain sense, of course, Pentecost is the birth of the Church. It’s a miraculous, mysterious manifestation of the Holy Spirit as the embodiment of God’s all-inclusive love for everyone without exception. The rush of the violent wind fills the entire house—blowing over the quaint little all-too-human boundaries we are prone to erect between insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, the quick and the not-so quick. These Galileans, filled with the Holy Spirit are suddenly able to witness to a people from all over-- Pa...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Acts 1: 15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1; 1 John 5: 9-13; John 17: 6-19 The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge There’s something very tempting about the notion of escaping from the world. I’ve noticed, in the last few years or so, a marked up-tick in the number of television shows that follow people who have gone “off the grid” seeking to live out their lives in the wilds of Alaska. Part of the rise in popularity can be attributed to our fondness for good old-fashioned American individualism—we just can’t help ourselves when someone goes off into wilderness to test their mettle against Mother Nature in true pioneer spirit. The television executives have caught up with what Jack London was doing a hundred years ago.             But there’s another reason for the predominance of the these shows. We live in a complicated, messy world where we are fed a steady diet of violenc...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Easter 6B—Acts 10: 44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5: 1-6; John 15: 9-17 The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge In these weeks after Easter, we’ve been thinking together about what it might mean to be a people who live from the bracing freedom of the resurrection. The Acts of the Apostles, as we have seen, is really a training manual in this regard. The story of the early church—with all its squabbles and epiphanies—is our story. They, like us in this place are learning what it means to be love, to live from love and help others to recognize and celebrate their own belovedness.             Last week we celebrated the Feast of St. Mark, our patron saint here at the Cathedral and used to lections appointed for that feast to celebrate the Lion’s Roar of being a beloved child of God and its world-changing consequences. But we missed a really important story from Acts that ...