Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 4 th Sunday in Lent, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector I was speaking to a parishioner last Sunday who was on hand to greet folks who might not have heard about the recent church closures. She came in with a big smile on her face and was talking about how beautiful it was outside. Snow creasing the mountains’ folds. Sky’s too blue to be true blue. Heel scuff of cloud shoving off east. First buds stippling the maples. Crocuses unfolding by the side door, a buttery yellow. And the chickadees’ spring song threaded through it all. She called it a, “God Wink.” A moment when she came to herself and saw with eyes washed clean the world charged with God’s presence. My kids call it “God Spotting.” It’s a little practice of keeping your eyes peeled and your heart open, of stepping into possibility and the capacity to be surprised. “Where’d you spot God today?” I’ll ask. “Well, Scarlet forgot her lunch, so...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 3 Lent, year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector It’s a heart-breaking picture. This nameless Samaritan woman who has three strikes against her—as a woman, as a member of a despised, outcast race, and as someone who’s been married five times and is living with a man she’s not married to—is trudging to the well in the heat of the noonday sun. It’s a picture of isolation and shame as she lugs her water jug to the well all by herself at a time when the other women of her community have the luxury of remaining indoors. So complete is her isolation that with the sun directly overhead, she doesn’t even have her own shadow for company. I think of all those people who have experienced similar kinds of shaming in their lives, who because of the color of their skin, their country of origin, their sex, gender, or sexual orientation, their social class find themselves trudging alone, day after day, to the well of e...

A Meditation for Evensong Psalm 84 The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector I thought for this evening’s short meditation, we could look together at Psalm 84 and ponder what counsel it might have to offer for our Lenten Journey together—the journey into love, the pilgrimage to the Temple of the Heart, the putting on of the mind of Christ. One of the questions I ask myself on a regular basis throughout the day actually comes from this psalm—“In whose house am I dwelling right now?” I find that it has the capacity to wake me up from my distracted slumber and interrupt the mechanical autopilot of drifting through life like one of George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead . Pausing, asking the question, and waiting for it to be answered is like a stick in the spokes of the thinking mind that rushes this way and that: pre-living what hasn’t happened yet and re-living what’s already happened. In the meantime, our precious, unrepeatable, fleeting life passes u...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 2 Lent, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector In today’s gospel we have two potent images of possibility that drive the entire encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus: night and rebirth. Night is that time when things lose their crispness and their sharp edges. The usual certainties of daytime slowly drain away as the sun dips behind the mountains. The daylight world of logic, of either-or, shades into ambiguity and paradox, both-and. Rebirth entails a kind of shedding, a dropping away of the scales from our eyes, an unstopping of our ears that something new, something a little more like the love we see revealed in the person of Jesus might break in, take hold, and fashion us. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Some scholars will tell you that Nicodemus has had a full schedule and this is only time he get on Jesus’ calendar. Or they’ll tell you that Nicodemus is sneaking away by night because, as a lea...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Ash Wednesday The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector  It’s easy in our fast-paced, information-saturated, consumer-driven culture of getting and spending to just get swept along from one thing to the next, to lurch from one crisis to the next, to limp from one tweet to the next. There’s a powerful momentum to our contemporary life that mitigates against self-reflection, the inward turn, the sacred pause of being present to the presence, and the risk is that we just skate across the surface of our lives without pausing to ask why we’re here, what the purpose of the short span of days we have allotted to us might be, what it means to be a truly human human being.  Our readings for today are filled with admittedly rather stark reminders of the fleeting nature of existence. Moths and rust. Dust. Withered grasses. Faded flowers the wind blows away leaving not a s...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 1 st Sunday in Lent, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector It’s interesting that immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan by John, where the entire assembly hears the earth-shattering proclamation of belovedeness—“This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”—Jesus is led into the desert by the Spirit to face the three temptations by Satan. Only after Jesus has faced these temptations in those forty days, does he begin his earthly ministry by calling the disciples. This isn’t just a story about Jesus, however. It’s the story of us. It speaks the basic arc and trajectory of the spiritual journey we are each called to make in the season of Lent, and throughout the short spans of days we have allotted. It all begins with belovedness. Let’s not forget that. Let’s not fall prey to the misconception that Lent is a time for indulging in that well ingrained habit of self-blame and se...

A Meditation for Evensong: Mark 10: 13-22 Cathedral Church of St. Mark The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean and Rector I always get a kick out of how our Gospel for this evening begins, “ People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.” Here’s Jesus training his disciples in the way of radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality, and what do the disciples do? They act like bouncers at a night club forming a protective ring around Jesus in order to chase away the pesky little children. This gets repeated again and again. Blind Bartimaeus is shushed at first by the disciples when he “sees” Jesus passing through town from his perch at the roadside. James and John, instead of welcoming passersby into Jesus’ healing presence spend their time arguing over who’s the greatest. But why is this? I wonder if the second part of this evening’s gospel doesn’t give us a clue. The man who runs up to Jesus want...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark 6 th Sunday after Epiphany, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector Beyond Belonging: ‘What is Jesus Christ giving me here and now?’  Alfred North Whitehead was undoubtedly a genius. With Bertrand Russel he co-wrote the monumental but little read classic of symbolic logic, Principia Mathematica . He went on to become the father of what we now know as process theology. But regarding the Bible, he was wrong on at least one count. “The total absence of humor from the Bible,” he wrote, “is one of the most singular things in all literature.” I couldn’t disagree more. The Bible is full of jokes. Or at least darkly comic situations where it’s almost impossible to suppress a rueful chuckle or sudden self-recognition in the stories of other people. One of my favorites takes place in 1 Kings where Solomon assembles the elders in order to dedicate the Temple. The ark comes in, the tent of meeting comes in...