Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Christ the King, Year B The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge “My Kingdom is not from this world…” The Feast of Christ the King is a tricky one. For people stuffed to the gills with top-down, unilateral power, patriarchy, and hierarchy, talk of “kings” and “kingdoms” can seem like just another instance of an outmoded Christianity whose relevance has long since passed. If we think of Jesus and the Kingdom of God in the same way we think of earthly kings and kingdoms this is indeed the case. But before we erase all reference to the Kings and Kingdoms from Holy Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer, we have to ask whether the kind of king we see enacted in the person of Jesus accords with our common of picture of how kings behave. If we spend a little time examining kings and kingdoms through the lens of Jesus’ life, through the lens of self-emptying, sacrificial love, we discover that the Holy Scripture uses the words “king” …

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10; Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25; Mark 13:1-8 The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest in Charge Letting the Temple Fall Apart: The Spectacle of Freedom in a World of Self-Improvement
Time and again in Holy Scripture we are presented with the pattern of loss as gain, of dying in order to live, the destruction of one thing in order that the new creation might arise. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” St. John tells us. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it, “ as St. Matthew tells us. Lost sheep. Lost coins. Sometimes we hear all this talk about losing our life in order to gain it and think that it is all about something we have to accomplish under our own steam. We turn losing our life in order to gain it into another strategy of self-improvement that o…

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark All Saints, Year B The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge Last week, we spoke of the Christian life as a journey, an adventure into belovedness that we might be bearers of that same belovedness, that light, for others. In the story of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, we saw enacted the process of what it looks like to become love. Knowing ourselves to be loved in the depths of the heart, leaving behind old, limiting conceptions of self, other, and God, flinging off everything that separates us from transformative encounter with Jesus, and following Jesus down the path of becoming love, becoming a truly human human person. On this Feast of All Saints, the Church turns its attention to the deceased saints (known and unknown) of her long and storied past—men and women whose lives bear witness to a hope rooted in the gospel that proclaims God’s victory over death. In an age of war, famine, genocide, religiously motivated hatred and vi…

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Feast of All Souls, Year B The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge The Feast of All Souls is a day when we turn our attention to the faithful departed in prayer that they (and we with them) might discover through the grave not an end, but a gate to the joy of the resurrection through which, in the company of Christ, we pass to eternal life. So we remember. But, another of the purposes of All Souls is to remind of the reality of death—the facticity of our own mortality and the undeniability change. “Oh, come on. Who needs to be reminded of that?” you might ask. “Everybody knows we are going to die.” I’ll grant that somewhere, deep down, often pushed into the nether regions of our conscious awareness, is a dim recognition that someday we will die, that life is uncertain and fleeting, and that change, and chance, and loss will accompany us every step of the way. But this awareness is often too much for us to bear. We simply canno…