Acts 2:42-47
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10
Psalm 23
Homily by Fr R Christopher Heying
I have a picture in my office of Father Carl Wayne Babcock.
Father Babcock served as a parish priest in Arkansas and as a teacher at the Episcopal school in Mississippi where I would later meet Cindy.
During his time in Arkansas, he took an interest in helping the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees and over the course of the next several years had some 140 Vietnamese living in his own home for various lengths of time while they moved toward self-sufficiency.
When I was a freshman at the University of North Texas, Father Babcock began as the Episcopal chaplain. Being active in the Episcopal campus ministry and taking survey classes in the Old and New Testaments from him, I got to know him well. In my senior year, I lived with him together with a lovely Vietnamese couple whom he had taken in.
He was one of those brilliant people who despite his humble manner seemed to know an amazing amount about ever so much. When he was in seminary, he had been able to live for a time in Jerusalem (where he picked up Modern Hebrew), in France (where he perfected his French), and in Oxford, before returning to finish his Master’s of Divinity at Seabury Western.
A perpetual student he would later go on to earn an additional master’s degrees in counseling, bolstering native gifts with study. He just had the knack for counseling, for being “fully present” when you spoke with him, a way of making you believe that your hangnail was a matter of genuine concern not only to him and maybe even to God.
His life was one of considerable suffering.
Though something of an anglo-catholic conservative, he was twice divorced and dealt with kidney failure and acute nausea which he chose to treat with a strict diet rather than dialysis, which at the time was estimated to give one only some five years. He quite literally turned green as toxins accrued. But you wouldn’t have known it from talking with him.
He didn’t speak much about himself, with the exception of his amazing stories that would have us rolling in laughter, even as he quietly slipped away to deal with his nausea.
Because of his radical acceptance of others, his gentle wisdom, and keen humor, those who knew him, and those to whom he ministered loved him. But to some church functionaries who were not so secure, he may have been perceived as something of a threat. And they may have questioned his very intentional practice of eschewing politics and worldly security, often joking that he was in the midst of writing his magnum opus, Downward Mobility.
That fictional work, however, became all too real when during my senior year right after getting that kidney transplant we had all been praying for, the bishop eliminated his position as college chaplain, leaving Father Babcock at the mercy of those of us who raised funds so that he could pay at least for a while the premiums on his life-sustaining health insurance.
Assisting in a parish on Sundays, Father Babcock ended up taking a position at an inner-city treatment facility working with prostitutes and drug addicts whereby he was able to accrue the 2000 hours required for certification as a licensed professional counselor. He eventually opened his own practice, specializing in counseling trauma victims.
Many, if not most, of his clients were poor and often had no insurance. For the next seven years as a counselor until his death in early 1994, Father Babcock himself lived well below the poverty line, often telling me that he felt God was calling him to a life of radical simplicity so that he might better relate to those to whom he ministered.
Addressing the clergy not long ago, Pope Francis urged them to be “shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.” In too many ways to enumerate here, Father Babcock was a shepherd living with the smell of the sheep, and his patience under affliction was not fodder for bitterness but food for the soul and a life increasingly dependent upon God and God’s people.
In the midst of such poverty, God’s grace so freely flowed through him that we came more fully to know the love of the Good Shepherd.
At Father Babcock’s funeral Mass, the priest began his homily with a stark reminder to an overflowing crowd that we had not come that day to canonize Father Babcock and that Father Babcock was not himself the Good Shepherd.
Those called to be priests are to be pastors in such a way that points to the Good Shepherd. That’s what Jesus is—the fulfillment of God’s promise to come and be the Good Shepherd of you and me, where there is one flock, one shepherd.
We are to use our gifts in such a way that we point the way to the one who is the light of the world, the bread of heaven, the resurrection. All of us in our broken humanity, even those as holy as Father Babcock, inevitably fall short, a stark reminder that we ourselves are the not the way put we point the way to the one who is the way, the truth, the life. There is only one God and we ourselves are not God.
Despite the fact that remarkably holy men and women like Father Babcock have in fact lived in every age, it still didn’t take the church long to realize that our earthly shepherds are not themselves the Good Shepherd.
When in the fourth century some argued that the validity of the sacrament was dependent upon the personal holiness of the priest, the church thankfully declared such to be a grave heresy, stating unequivocally that the “efficacy of the sacrament is not dependent on the worthiness of the priest” for if it were, we could never know that what we take into our hands is really the Body of Christ.
We priests and pastors are all unworthy, but Jesus Christ and him alone is the Good Shepherd, the true minister of the sacrament.
I loved Father Babcock. He was a true man of God, a model priest, a holy man, and a true saint.
His picture in my office is an ever-present reminder of the high calling to be a faithful priest and pastor, a reminder that I have still much growing to do along the way.
It is also a reminder that even as I strive myself to be a faithful priest and pastor, my vocation as a Christian pastor (and I can always use your timely reminders) is ultimately to point the way to the one who is the Good Shepherd of the flock, to point the way to the one who calls us each by name, to point the way to the one who in the midst of whatever befalls us in this life keeps us safe and always fills our cups to overflowing.