Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 2nd Sunday After Epiphany, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector “What are you looking for?” is one of those big, cosmic questions that gets right to the heart of what it means to be a human being. John’s disciples see Jesus walking by and in his person they connect with their human longing for a well-lived life. A life, not of skating across the surface, but lived to the full. A life of depth, meaning, and purpose. A life that embodies the peace and joy they see radiating from this itinerant rabbi on the move who won’t even stop walking while he asks the question. The two disciples can’t articulate what it is they’re looking for. All they know is that they yearn for more. They can’t put their finger on what that more might be, what it might look like, or how they might find it, but they’ve connected with that sense of holy longing, the dawning recognition that life might just about more than they’ve...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Baptism of Our Lord, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & rector When Peter declares to the Gentiles, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” it’s easy to miss that what we are experiencing in these lines is a conversion no less significant the conversion of Saul. It signifies a profound shift in Peter’s whole way of seeing and being in world, one that gives a glimpse into where God was calling the nascent church in its earliest days and where God is still calling us as faithful followers of Jesus today. You remember the story. Peter goes up onto the roof to pray. He’s hungry and wants something to eat. While the kosher meal is being prepared he falls into a trance and sees the “heavens opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered by its four corners.” In the sheet are all kinds of animals, and reptiles and birds of the air, and he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St.   Mark Feast of the Epiphany The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector I remember the first time I saw a firefly as a young child. It was up in Georgian Bay, three or four hours north of Toronto—a land of water, rock, and pine, spiced with the trill of loon calls at dusk. We were gathered around a campfire, watching the sparks float up and disappear into the wash of the Milky Way that sluiced overhead. At the edge of our little campsite I saw what I thought at first was an ember. I left my spot on a rock and went to investigate. This was no ordinary ember I quickly realized. It was something I’d never seen before—it looped and danced and winked with a lemony glow and vanished into the woods. These were the heady days of Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone , so I hitched up my belt, tightened the strap of my imaginary pith helmet and set off in hot pursuit. The firefly wound its way through the forest as I trip...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark The Second Sunday after Christmas The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector Herod is nervous. Fearful. And, as it says in our Gospel, “all of Jerusalem with him.” Fear is contagious, and the little child born in a manger is striking fear into the hearts of everyone. What’s going on? It’s a story as old as time. Human beings, when confronted with love come among us, boundary-crossing love that reveals itself as the embrace of the last, the least, the lost, and left behind, shakes things up. And the powerful elites, the ruling classes who benefit from the existing social order and reap its rewards, don’t like things being shaken up. The way things are, in their minds, is just fine. This Jesus, even as a baby with a strange entourage of Wise Men from the east, is a rabble-rouser who threatens to spoil the good thing Herod and his gang have going. Rowan Williams, in his reading of the crucifixion, writes that “When...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Christmas Eve The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector “In those days,” our Gospel begins, “a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world be registered.” So used are we to hearing these words—perhaps in the voice of Linus from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts —that we forget that what we actually get in St. Luke’s narrative is a powerful depiction of two ways, two decrees: one that stamps our names in the book of worldly power and domination, and one that scribes our names in the book of love. Emperor Augustus wants money for his coffers. He needs people to register so they can be taxed to maintain his regime of conquest, domination, and keeping people in line. He demands obeisance. Groveling. Deference. His decree is that the Emperor—empire, power, control, and orderliness enforced at the tip of a spear—be the axis around which the world turns. The Emperor’s decree comes from the perceived center of the...