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. Ea...

  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...

  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 ...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 16, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector Those opening lines from today’s portion of Paul’s Letter to the Romans provide us with a thread that weaves its way through our readings: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and acceptable and perfect.” What does it mean “not to be conformed to this world?” How does not conforming to the world point the way to following Jesus? And what difference does not conforming to the world make in a time of racial reckoning, fear-mongering, and political animus? In Paul’s vocabulary, the world, like the flesh, is not about denial of our physical selves. God gave us bodies and God in Godself came among us in the flesh. God declared the creation “good.” So a proper understanding of Paul’s notions of flesh and world can’t just take the easy route of a wor...

  A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark Proper 15, Year A The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector One of the powerful things about the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is that the latter often contains a creative reworking of the former in light of the love and mercy revealed in the person of Jesus. Jesus himself doesn’t just quote, or recite scripture, he interprets it creatively in light of his intimate relationship with the Father; he improvises with it like a jazz musician playing a standard. You might recall at the beginning of Luke’s gospel, for example, where Jesus stands up in the synagogue and reads those famous mission-defining lines from Isaiah,  …[T]he scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and ...