Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 21, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector Becoming the Beloved Community “To some God and Jesus may appeal in a way other than to us: some may come to faith in God and to love, without a conscious attachment to Jesus. Both nature and good men [sic] besides Jesus may lead us to God. They who seek God with all their hearts must, however, some day on their way meet Jesus.”        --Weingel and Widgery, Jesus in the 19th Century and After   In our highly individualized, consumer culture there is a tendency to think of everything in terms of how it affects “me.” Faith as the relationship between an entire people, the entire human family, with the living God gets recast (especially after Descartes) as a purely individualized affair, a private decision one person makes in the depths of her heart. Now, of course, there is an individual element to religious faith. Each of us has to speak our “yes” to God not o

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 19, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector In the Jewish tradition, there is a long history of what they call midrash --a creative interpretation of canonical scripture that seeks to make sense of the apparent contradictions of scripture. It’s a thoughtful, prayerful standing under scripture that uses the memory, reason, imagination, and lived experience of God to offer non-literal interpretations of scripture that stand alongside the accepted, canonical reading. One of my favorite midrashes comes from our story from the Hebrew Bible today. Moses and the people of Israel have crossed the Red Sea between two towering walls of water and the shoreline is clustered with the dead corpses of the Egyptian army--soldiers in their armor, horses, chariots, broken spears and shields scattered on the sands in the lapping waves.  While the Israelites rejoice at their sudden and miraculous deliverance from slavery

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 17, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector One of my favorite paintings of the Annunciation is by Botticelli. It depicts Mary climbing a staircase and casting a surprised glance over her shoulder at the Archangel Gabriel who has made a sudden appearance at the foot of the stairs. There is no shortage of versions of the Annunciation and most of them portray Mary looking straight on at Gabriel as if she’s been expecting him all along. The element of surprise, of sacred interruption, is downplayed. But in Botticelli’s version, the surprise and interruption carry the day. Mary is in the midst of an ordinary, everyday activity--climbing a staircase--and yet she has the wherewithal, the flexibility, the responsive adaptiveness to drop what she is doing and make room for this strange other whose message turns her world and her idea of herself upside down.  If we start reading scripture with an eye towards s