Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Advent 4, Year B The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector Why did God choose to become incarnate in the person of Jesus? What’s the purpose of the incarnation? With all the pageantry surrounding the Christmas season, it’s easy for the essentials of the Christian story to fade behind a flurry of gift buying and tree decoration. Remember those lines from 2 Peter , “ by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature” (1:4). The mission of Jesus is to open a way for human beings, all human beings (gay, straight, black, white, male, female, rich or poor), to share in the life of God. We’re startled when we hear a Father of the Church like Athanasius say something like, “God became human so that human beings might become God.” It sounds a little heretical to our mode...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Advent 3, Year B The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector One of the basic ways to understand the Christian life is that it is all about the transmission of the light. God sends God’s only son into the world as the light to enlighten the nations so that humankind might recognize what it means to be a truly human human being, what it means to fulfill our meaning and purpose on earth as boundary-crossing love. We are made for union and communion with the Beautiful, the Good, and the True--with God our loving creator. We are made to enjoy life in God, to participate in God in spirit, soul, and body. It is through surrendering to God--letting God live God’s life in and through us--that we discover the peace, joy, happiness and abundance that is life in God and God alone. We see the light. We become the light. We share that light with others with open hands. That’s one of the reasons for all the rather gloomy, apocaly...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Feast of All Saints The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector We often think of saints as those few, rare, heroic Christian souls who exemplify remarkable degrees of holiness--the Mother Teresas, the John of the Crosses, the Julian of Norwiches, the Sojourner Truths. Of course, there are people who are just different, who show us in the shape of their lives what it means to be “like Christ” in this life. People say that about St. Francis, in fact. That he was reputed to be the most Christ-like person since the time of Jesus. To encounter St. Francis was to get a glimpse of what it might have been like to be in the presence of Jesus himself. Our highly individualistic culture tends to feed this picture of sanctity as a solitary affair, the heroism of a few, select spiritual geniuses who spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, so to speak. There’s a certain quaint romanticism to that picture, not unlike what like...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 25, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector I’ve always found it curious that after the entire sweep of the Exodus narrative--from Moses being pulled out of the reed basket in the waters of the Nile, to his near-lynching at the hands of irritated and thirsty Israelites, to the manna and the quail and water from the rock, to his glimpse of God’s hind parts from his vantage point in the cleft of the rock--should end with Moses only glimpsing the Promised Land from afar. As it says in Deuteronomy, “The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’” Huh?  To add insult to injury, Moses promptly drops dead even though his eyes are still good and he is still spry at a youthful 120. And to top it all off, the greatest of all the prophets is...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 24, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector Over the past weeks we’ve been journeying with Israelites out of slavery into eventual freedom in the Promised land, the good and broad land, the land of milk and honey. It’s a journey through which God fashions for Godself a people, a people who will be beacon of justice, peace, and mercy to the world. Rooted and grounded in the experiential knowledge of beauty, truth, and goodness of God, they are slowly shaped into a people who know that God is for, with, and ahead of them. They come to realize, in fits and starts, that even in a place of apparent barrenness and lack, God provides. They come to learn that fear doesn’t have to have the final word. They come to see that what they put at the center of their lives, that to which they give ultimate concern and ultimate worth, determines the kind of lives they’ll lead.  When fear, scarcity, and lack ar...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 22, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector One of the most interesting details about the whole debacle under Aaron while Moses is up the mountain is that it takes place in an in-between time. Moses, we read, is delayed . There is an uncomfortable pause in the action that up to this point has been coming thick and fast: walls of water at the Red Sea, Miriam singing her heart out, clouds by day, pillars of fire by night, manna from heaven, water from the rock. It’s been graciousness, provision, and abundance on full display. But now, the Israelites have to wait. Moses is taking a little too long for their liking. And in Moses’ absence things go wildly off-the-rails. Blaise Pascal, way back in the 1600s wrote, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” What we do in those in-between times, is as important, perhaps more important, than what we do w...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 22, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector One of the ways to understand the difference Jesus makes in our lives is to look at the crucifixion through the lens of scapegoating violence. Scapegoating is as old as time. Indeed, theologian James Alison refers to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel as the “foundational murder” of the human race--the tragic outcome of the deluded notion that by expunging an apparent rival (who is actually our brother) from the face of the earth we can secure for ourselves the peace, abundance, and divine favor our hearts are literally made for. We think, in our upside-down, human-all-too-human way that the recognition of the gift of our belovedness--free, unmerited, and undeserved--can somehow be earned through casting out and exclusion. We think that the peace for which we are made, the original peaceableness of all things coming into being in a non-competitive and non-r...