Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In sermons here before I’ve brought up the concept of prolepsis—the forshortening of time. This is something more than foreshadowing, something in the present hinting at the future in a text. Rather it is the future reality impinging on the present reality, invading wherever one happens to be in time as we perceive it. I’ve mentioned it before in relation to Christ’s transfiguration, and we see the phenomenon today in the lesson from Acts.

We tend to think of the sermon of the apostles in which the native languages of each listener was heard as a discrete miracle in which God suspended the laws of nature to effect the special purpose of converting the hearers to Christ, and it is that. But then we tend to ignore the content of Peter’s explanation. He quotes from the Book of the Prophet Joel, with plenty of rather spooky imagery of prophecy and celestial signs. Hear those words again:

In the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days
I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in the heaven above
and signs on the earth beneath,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned into darkness
and the moon into blood,
before the day of the Lord comes,
the great and manifest day.
And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

The Pentecostal moment is an evangelistic blessing for sure, but it is also an eschatological “inbreaking.” “In the last days” these things shall take place. Peter’s implication is that the last days were manifestly present on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, nearly two thousand years ago.

There is an assumption which is almost taken for granted in modern biblical criticism that we see in the New Testament’s development a transition from intense apocalyptic expectation to a more attenuated, deferred hope as generations passed and Jesus had still not returned. There is surely some of that (it’s probably why Paul had to write two epistles to the Thessalonians, each dealing with the proper approach to Christ’s return and what might be experienced as a delay). We may, however, make too much of this dynamic when we forget the strange nature of God’s interaction with time. It should make perfect sense, however counter-intuitive its implications may seem, that God existing outside of time means that he can do funny things with it. Chief among these is to fold it round us in such a way that we may experience the future in the present, that, in other words, the Last Day and the Coming Kingdom, is both “already” and “not yet”.

Our Lord said “the Kingdom of God is among you,” and I suspect he was saying something more radical and substantive than that the virtues of the Kingdom were reflected by the disciples in how they lived. (Frequently they didn’t succeed in that, anyway.) Still less was he saying that they or we have the power to effect the Kingdom by modeling our lives or our society in some particular way, as laudable as attempts at that may be. Rather, I think he was saying that the eschatological reality which we will one day experience in eternity had broken into the present and onto the beloved community such that it was and is the Body of Christ on earth.

And this is why it is so appropriate that we will welcome this morning into that body its newest member, Jacob. It is a sweet and happy thing, yes, but it is something much deeper and stranger. It is, in fact ominous in the sense that word held before it shifted to having a more pejorative connotation in contemporary English. It’s positively otherworldly, a sort of eldritch initiation, binding the human soul to death in Christ Jesus and thus to life in his eternal habitations, not just on Judgment Day, but here and now.

This a lot spookier than just “getting the baby done”, but it’s profoundly liberating, knowing that with the application of a little water and the name of God and the right intention, the Holy Spirit not only comes among us, but transports us, so that we are, metaphysically speaking, already citizens of heaven.

In this morning’s epistle Paul reminds us that the Spirit gives manifold gifts, that each is valuable, but that which particular gift a Christian manifests is not as significant as the source, who is infinitely significant. We do not know what sort of person the grown-up Jacob McConnell will be, what sorts of gifts he may use in service to the Gospel, but he will drink of the same Spirit that we have done, and that is enough to make the spiritual body healthy and whole. And so will we eat and drink again of that same spirit in sharing Christ’s Body and Blood, itself good spiritual medicine. And what’s more, each of these is a fulfillment of the Prophet Joel as St. Peter proclaimed it, a breaking in of the Kingdom of God, here in these last days, as foretaste and promise of what great things are to come.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I am too old and probably too self-serious to have appreciated it, but I have a goddaughter who was just the right age to become obsessed with the Disney movie Frozen, and in particular the song “Let It Go.” One critic referred to the song as “musical crack” which “sends kids into altered states” which I can confirm anecdotally. I’m not sure if the message of the song is meant to be “be yourself” in the way that young people should hear or if it’s more like “you have no obligation whatsoever to respect social norms and the reasonable expectations of your fellows” which I think is not a great message at this time in our common life. Either interpretation could stand up, but probably best for all of us if I don’t spend any time subjecting you to my analysis of a cultural product that is beyond my ken.

I did read a book last week, though, which gets at a similar question of letting go—Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun. I particularly love literature that deals with philosophical questions of identity and perspective and metaphysical issues like “what is the soul?” and this book had all that, which is why I read it, but it also focused, in my reading anyway, on this moral and spiritual issue of “letting go” (particularly in parent-child relationships, but in other ways, too). I won’t spoil the book; it’s a good read, and I commend it to you. Ishiguro is a lot less whithholding than in some of his other novels, and he gives a lot of “grist for the mill” in dealing with some pretty heartbreaking stuff.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about this difficult issue of “letting go”, which presents itself in at least three ways in the lessons assigned for this Sunday after the Ascension. I’ll take them in ascending order of difficulty, at least as I see it, though your ranking may be quite different from mine.

First, the very first verse of our lesson from Acts. The disciples have spent forty days seeing the risen Lord come in and out among them, they were all witnesses to what is not just the greatest miracle of all time, but what we might think of as a happening beyond even the term “miracle.” (For what it’s worth, I’d class the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection as sui generis occurrences, so glorious that even the category “miracle” is insufficient.) So they are witnesses to something indescribably great, and yet what is the question they ask on the last occasion they’ll have to speak with Jesus before he goes to the Father? “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It’s not “how shall we get by without you?” (He had warned them he was leaving.) It’s not “how shall we pattern our lives as we await your return?” It’s not “any last pro-tips for evangelism, since that’s the mission you have set for us?” No. “We have this political problem. We don’t like the Romans and we were really hoping you’d be our king? I know you said your kingdom is not of this world, but can’t you be a little flexible on that one?”

What I’m about to say is not to diminish the fact that Christians are called to work for the common good. We should be good citizens, not quietists. Christian ethics can and should be applied insofar as our lives intersect with the political realm. All that said, I believe that if one’s Christian identity can be reduced to a political party or platform, then something has gone very wrong. Namely, we have set up a false soteriology, a misguided view of salvation, which holds that the promises of the Gospel are to be achieved by human effort in establishing a particular civic order. This has been attempted over and over again throughout the church’s history, along both what we might anachronistically term “conservative” and “liberal” lines, and the Kingdom of God, it turns out, never managed to get perfectly established on earth.

I’m aware that I’m not preaching before the United Nations or a joint session of Congress this morning, but this can affect each of us. I know people whose spiritual well-being seems entirely dependent on whatever is happening politically (in the world, in our nation, in one’s community) at any given moment. I know people(not in this parish, by the way, but who knows) whom I’d rather not ask “what is your prayer life like?” because I worry the answer would be something like “well going to this march or holding this listening session is a sort of prayer.” It might be, but it seems to me that you’ve got to get on your knees and talk honestly with the Creator of the Universe sometimes, too. So, the first thing I’d suggest trying to let go is the belief (implicit or explicit) that all our hope is to be founded in human efforts at establishing a more just society. We should hope and pray and work for that, but it’s ultimately not the Kingdom of God we’re building here.

Second, and more difficult in my experience, we should try to let go of anxiety. “Cast all your anxieties on [God],” wrote St. Peter in today’s epistle, “for he cares about you.” I am fully aware that just saying “don’t worry” is mostly unhelpful, even if that is followed up with good evidence for why the worst case scenario is unlikely. Some of you know that I have a relationship with a schizophrenic man, Bruce, and that while my legal obligation is simply to handle his finances, the actual responsibility I have goes much deeper and touches every aspect of his life. So, I have learned the hard way that saying “calm down” to someone in a psychotic state does not work. Actually, it rarely works for someone fully in his or her right mind.

The only advice I can give as far as this goes, is “stay prayed up” and know that you are being prayed for. For all their blundering and the myopia which led them to use their last chance to ask Jesus for a political solution, the disciples finally seemed to get it, as they returned from Olivet and went directly to the upper room to devote themselves to prayer with each other and with our Lord’s Blessed mother. The more frequently and consistently I pray, the less nervous I find I am about the changes and chances of life. It just works. And you are being prayed for. Among the handful of things I pray for in the wee hours every morning, before I’ve had sufficient coffee to actually pray morning prayer formally, is for this parish, and that includes each of you and all your troubles and concerns. I bet there are others praying for you on a regular basis. I know that our Lord Jesus Christ is; he is ever making intercession to the Father on your behalf, and he says as much in his high priestly prayer, part of which we heard as this morning’s Gospel. Fully integrating the knowledge of this blessed, comforting truth may, in time, be enough to let it go.

Finally, most difficult of all perhaps, even more difficult than letting go anxiety as it relates to our own lives, is trusting other people enough to live as adult Christians, free moral agents, people who are going to make mistakes and sometimes surprise us by demonstrating that they know more about themselves and the world than we do. Maybe that’s just a “me problem”; I try not to be paternalistic, but I realize that this can be my natural modus operandi, and I don’t even have children (perhaps for the best, then).

Because I don’t have children, and my only frame of reference is found in literature like Klara and the Sun, and particularly since I have lots of opinions that nobody signed up to be subjected to, I’ll not get into the most fraught manifestation of this need to “let go”—namely, how to calibrate that against a host of other concerns during a person’s journey through adolescence and into adulthood. (Plus, even though I’m of the right age to have adolescent children I’m very much behind the times; if I wanted to go to the mall, my parents would say “take the bus”, but now there are no malls, there are no buses here, and if there were you might get CPS called on you for letting junior go on one by himself!) I will simply say that this difficulty applies to all sorts of relationships, the whole web of complicated obligations that every human being has with his or her fellows. Just from a personal standpoint, as some sort of spiritual leader, I find the line between proferring wise and reasonable advice when it’s sought and trying to impose my will on somebody when I think I know better can be dangerously fine.

Here, I think, as ever, the model can be found in our Lord. We may think of the Ascension as the moment when the disciples had to let Jesus go (or rather, let go of relating with him as they previously had done). But it seems to me that it is just as much (if not more) about Jesus letting the Apostles go. He would always be with them in an important, spiritual sense, and we’ll celebrate next week the fact that he had a further provision for them, the Holy Spirit, to keep them on the right track. But no longer was it just as simple as telling Peter or Philip or Thomas or the others to straighten up and fly right the moment they said or did something silly or counterproductive. Jesus had to let them go, to make their mistakes, to learn from them, to pray for his help, and to get on with it as mature disciples, shepherds of his beloved flock, sent out to spread the Good News. We are in this together, we are the body of Christ, but none of us is the head, so we don’t get to control the whole body, even if we think we’d do it better.

And just like problems one and two, just like the danger of placing our hope for salvation where it doesn’t belong and just like getting over our anxious cares and worries, the best approach here, I think, is simply to pray, by yourself and with others. Staying grounded in the glory of God, which now that he is ascended illuminates every inch of the earth and every corner of the human heart, is not a matter of being good or becoming a spiritual athlete. The capital “S” saints got partway there during their mortal pilgrimage, and were the happier for it, but all of us need simply to say our prayers and read our bibles and try to be regular and honest and vulnerable in our approach to the one who loves us and will give us all we need. As for the rest, if you can, let it go.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Most of you are accustomed to hearing me hold forth on theological propositions on which I have strong feelings one way or the other, but this morning I want to confess to a matter—or rather a constellation of issues—of some importance about which I am absolutely ambivalent, namely, prevenient grace and the extent to which it operates. In layman’s terms, the question is whether and in what manner may the activity of the Holy Spirit in one who has not yet accepted the fullness of Truth as we have received it in Christ Jesus be made manifest, and does this activity (if it is possible to begin with) enable some expression of divine wisdom without necessarily leading inexorably to something like Christian conversion.

There are a couple of reasons this thorny issue has presented itself to me this week. First it’s because of what I’ve been reading. I mentioned last week that I was rereading The Confessions, and if Augustine isn’t directly quoting scripture, he’s constantly alluding, both explicitly and implicitly, to ideas from Plato as filtered through Plotinus. I’m also, some of you know, in a reading group taking a year-long slog through Heinrich Bullinger’s magnum opus, the Dekaden, and the portion I read this week, quoted liberally from Ovid and Horace and Vergil. Bullinger was no crypto-pagan. He was a very serious, sometimes severe Swiss protestant reformer, and while he’d insist that scripture alone was the source of saving wisdom, he didn’t balk at finding wisdom elsewhere, too, even among the unregenerate. And of course the theologian most influential to yours truly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is most famous for his use of the thought of Aristotle for informing his summation of all philosophy and theology.

The other reason for my thinking through this issue is this week’s lesson from The Acts of the Apostles. Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus reinterprets an obscure idol as a portent of the God of Israel and of Christ. To what degree is his statement “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” sarcastic and to what degree is it sincere? I suspect it may be a little of both. (Perhaps Paul is ambivalent about this issue, just as I confessed that I am.) Paul certainly condemns the superstition of the Athenian pagans, here, and he states in no uncertain terms that having now heard of Christ, they can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.

That said, this scene strikes me as something more than Paul simply “baptizing” some pagan symbol, Christianizing it because it is close to hand and a useful evangelistic prop (though, no doubt that’s part of it). Those who read my newsletter article this month will know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, so I don’t think you need to suffer scruples over Christmas trees or Easter eggs or anything. But it seems to me that Paul may be going a step further, laying open the possibility that some little shard at least of Christian knowledge may by providence be revealed in some pre-Christian ideas and practices. Perhaps a few pieces of the puzzle, if only a God-given impulse to seek after truth, is present before the full explication of the Gospel.

Perhaps my ambivalence here is not so much with that proposition, but more with how it can be misconstrued or misapplied. I do not believe it useful (and I do believe it sometimes to be positively dangerous) to see ourselves as customers at some sort of “divine delicatessen” picking what one likes from a seemingly unlimited number of options. You may like grape jelly, liverwurst, stilton, and capers but you wouldn’t put them all on the same sandwich, presumably. Religions make non-cotenable truth claims and moral demands on us, and Christianity is, in a sense, a closed and coherent system. Being a closed system doesn’t mean that we should be closed-minded. One can exercise judgment without being judgmental, but exercise judgment we must.

So, I don’t believe wisdom in non-Christian ideologies which contradicts Christian truth to be possible. Carefully comparing and contrasting can be an interesting enterprise, and it can sometimes illuminate what it is we hold to be good and true, but I often worry that while “comparative religion” might be reckoned a sort of “graduate seminar” for those who are sufficiently grounded in his or her own tradition, we sometimes take it up the first semester of the freshman year of life. I’m committed to the proposition that in order to get our theology straight we should really stick to scripture and the church’s tradition and to praying for asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate our study of the same.

My cranky disclaimer out of the way, though, can we recognize the stirring of the impulse toward true religion in those who do not yet believe, in those who have lost their faith, and perhaps even in ourselves when we’ve spiritually wandered and dabbled. I think so, and perhaps this is part of what it means when we say we’ve been made in the image of God. Sometimes this is a long road with a lot of turns. I mentioned St. Augustine who had to try out Manichaeism and a more pagan-inflected neopaganism before finding the Faith. A few months ago I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth, who’s latest book I read earlier this year, who from irreligion became wiccan for a while before converting to Orthodox Christianity.

I wonder sometimes if the biggest hurdle in our postmodern age is not scientific skepticism but something like its opposite, namely the assumption in our society (bred by the fact that more than a thousand years of “Christendom” is now, for better or worse, coming to an end in the West), that Christianity is tame or vanilla or “basic” in the slang sense of that word. Perhaps it’s just too familiar, or we’ve made too many assumptions, because I’m here to tell you that Christianity is pretty strange when viewed objectively, and that’s one of our greatest strengths. We make metaphysical claims about eternity and truth and totality and situate them in a particular space and time, in a corner of first century Judea which could not be more foreign to us. And those of us Christians who worship in a way which is different from how the average American consumes culture and information (through popular music and screens of varying sizes as balkanized individuals) makes us even stranger.

Now, I’m the opposite of a hipster (you may have noticed) but maybe we need to highjack the approach they’ve taken in places like Portland and Austin and start making “Keep Christianity Weird” stickers and signs. I think this is a powerful counterpoint to the fragmented, consumptive, bland society in which we find ourselves in the modern Western world.

You see, I guess I do believe that whether or not Plotinus or Aristotle or the crowd of the Areopagus were crypto-proto-Christians, so many (perhaps most) of our fellows have this impulse which has led them to worship at the altar of an unnamed God. They are looking for connection, for rootedness, for something of substance and these are God-given urges. Too often the Athenian superstition takes hold, and we mistake something else (social media, success, a substance) as the offering by which we appease this idol, but are left even more bereft than when we arrived.

Here, the sense of St. Paul’s words can be our reply. I perceive that in every way you are very religious. You are in search of a great prize, a blessing. And yet you are flailing and failing. You have identified the goal, even if you’ve not made it explicit, because it is the same thing men and women have been searching for since the beginning. But you have not discerned the means. God has given you the desire, and he does not give us the desire for anything that is truly good without making a way to capture the prize. You desire stability in an ever-shifting world. You desire meaning among a people who have embraced nihilism in the guise of self-actualization. You desire wisdom while we are all amusing ourselves to death. Above all, you desire love—genuine unconditional love no matter how unlovely you falsely believe yourself to be. Here these things are to be found. God has led you to the door. You need only knock and it will open.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.