Words From Silence: Contemplation in a World of Action

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark The Great Vigil of Easter—Year A: Romans 6:3-11 ; Psalm 114; Matthew 28:1-10 The Reverend Canon Tyler Doherty, Canon Precentor One of the great temptations of our contemporary culture is that we can tailor the kind of information we receive to hear only what we want to hear—our Facebook pages chime with “likes” from people who think exactly like us, the news we get confirms our opinions, and the image we put forward to the world (our “online presence” as the jargon has it) is carefully groomed. As a result, many of us live in a kind of self-fabricated echo-chamber where outside voices (those people who dare to think and live differently from us) are almost non-existent.             The life of Christian discipleship—knowing ourselves to be loved by a generous God whose deepest desire is for us join, whole-heartedly and self-forgetfully, in the dance of love that is the I...

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Good Friday: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42; Psalm 22 The Reverend Canon Tyler B. Doherty I’ve always thought that if ever there were a day when words seem appallingly inadequate, it’s Good Friday. If I had my druthers, I’d let the liturgy preach itself. From the reading of the Passion Gospel, to the Solemn Collects and the singing of the  Reproaches, to the Veneration of Cross—we learn everything we need to know from how the liturgy unfolds in its spare, stripped, stinging silence. Especially on a day when most of the words that come out of peoples’ mouths in the Passion Gospel witness to being enslaved to self-deception, scapegoating rage, and murderous violence—“Crucify him!”—one more human voice hardly seems likely to make a difference. In fact, maybe feeling the compulsive need to speak, to justify oneself, is precisely what this day calls into question. Perhaps it is a day when the silence o...