Author: John Drymon

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

It’s sometimes hard for many twenty-first century Westerners to appreciate the taboos of other cultures past and present, and perhaps one of the most strange to some would be how we regard the creature we call “man’s best friend.” Perhaps this is less common in Findlay, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in cities in both North America and Europe, where it is nothing to see somebody’s dog in a cafe or shop. I attended a wedding a few months ago in which the couple’s dog was present which, call me a stick-in-the-mud, I thought was a bit much, but In suspect it wouldn’t have occurred as odd to about ninety-percent of those gathered.

Conversely, I’ve also spent time in places where dog-owners were at least a bit apologetic and sometimes properly secretive about having a pet dog. These were mostly Christians in Muslim countries, which may not be surprising. Islam, as I understand it, generally holds that dogs may be necessary evils if they’re used for guarding livestock or hunting, but keeping them indoors and treating them like part of the family is largely considered illicit. So the Pakistanis and Palestinians and Turks whom I’ve known to keep dogs as pets are generally seen as being too Christianized or Westernized, hence covert canine companionship is the order of the day. This isn’t unique to Islam, though. Folks in Sub-Saharan Africa, the non-Muslim parts of the Subcontinent, and East Asia (excluding Japan) are, at least as I understand it, generally not places where normal folks would keep a dog for anything other than practical purposes.

(As a side note, I am pleased to say as a cat-person, that felines are generally more acceptable in a lot of these cultures. This is not, however, universal. I remember a few years ago I hired an Amish man down in Kenton to repair our dining room table. I was waiting outside with one of his sons when I saw a cat and asked, “Oh, what is your cat’s name?” to which the child said something like, “it doesn’t have a name, English. It’s a cat.”)

Anyway, in at least some of these cultures the primary objection to dogs as pets revolves around ideas of cleanliness and purity. Dogs can be found in junk yards and roaming around the outskirts of villages, eating whatever they come upon and lying in whatever hole they find. Who would want to introduce their filth into a home!? They are outsiders, outcasts, ritually unclean and their taint is a danger to a sort of primal human urge to see the impure as dangerous.

No doubt this was the general opinion of first-century Jews, which gives some context to the exchange that Jesus has with the Syrophoenician woman in this morning’s Gospel, in which the latter is likened to a dog. We must be circumspect in how we interpret this passage. I may have seen more bad “hot takes” on this incident in sermons and commentaries than I have in regard to any other Gospel passage. Jesus is not being a racist here. Jesus is not committing that sin and being corrected by his interlocutor. This isn’t to say that Jesus did not grow in his understanding of his mission; he is fully human as well as fully divine, and an aspect of that humanity is certainly growth through prayer and discernment. But he did not sin, and if you pull at that Christological string, the whole tapestry unravels.

Rather, I believe that in this exchange, Jesus was intentionally parroting an argument he knew would be in the minds of the bystanders in order to give the Syrophoenician woman the opportunity to say what he almost certainly already believed–namely that his grace and power were gifts for those outside the fold of the people of Israel. The prevailing wisdom would have been that like a junkyard dog, a gentile was ritually polluted and polluting, that merely being in her company was dangerous. We know from the beginning of the pericope that Jesus did not want to be seen going into her house, perhaps because he wanted to get in, cast the demon out of her daughter, and get out without causing too much fuss, his time not having yet come to reveal the entire truth of his identity and mission. Being foiled in his attempt at secrecy, though, an object lesson was at hand.

To push this a bit further, I wonder if Jesus’ audience here fully understood what I think he was trying to teach. I think the implication is a great deal more radical than saying that the ritually unclean outsider should be given some consolation. Rather, I think what Jesus might be trying to imply (particularly when we understand this episode in light of everything else he said and did), is that the Syrophoenician woman understood something about herself that others could not recognize about themselves–namely, that whatever their privileges by right of birth into God’s people, they weren’t any different.

We aren’t any different, either. Whatever pride we might take in any accident of the estate in which we find ourselves–I’m a proud American, I’m a cradle Episcopalian born to countless generations of Episcopalians, I’m a pillar of the community, whatever–we are born unclean by virtue of the stain of original sin, and even with the mystical laver of Holy Baptism, we are still in constant need of God’s grace. The only difference is that those without the benefit of being in the “in-crowd” can more easily see their need for the Savior.

It’s always dangerous to say that you wish Jesus had said or did something he didn’t, so I say the following with as much humility as I can muster. I wish Jesus had punctuated this encounter by turning around to those who had seen this exchange and said, “do you think you’re better than her, then?” In all events, I think we are best served by asking ourselves that question, and I hope we can all say, “no, not really. I need Jesus just as much. I’m just as much like the dog under the table, needing crumbs of grace and mercy to get on in life.”

To return at last to dogs, considering how I opened this sermon, isn’t it fascinating that keeping them as pets, recasting them from dangerous, dirty beasts to man’s best friend, seems almost uniquely a practice endemic to those parts of the world we would once have called Christendom. Just maybe it’s because deep down, maybe unconsciously we recognize that we were once unworthy even to gather up the crumbs under God’s table, but we have been made Jesus’ best friend. Don’t tell the rectory carts but it almost makes me want to be a dog person.

+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.

So, those of you who were here last week will remember that I left you with a teaser. I know how frustrating that can be. So, as promised, here is part the second.

But first, a reminder of the ground we covered last week. A large crowd had just been fed by Jesus and decided they wanted to make him king and would do it by force if need be. They had misunderstood the message Jesus intended to communicate by feeding them. Instead of promising to feed people with regular old bread as their earthly king, Jesus meant to communicate that as the King of Heaven he would provide heavenly food, spiritual sustenance, to all who would believe in him. The difficulty the crowd had—and that we have—is in seeing past our immediate temporal concerns in order to focus on enduring spiritual matters; and the question I left you with was about how we might attain the sort of focus and vision which permits us to see things through the lens of eternity.

So that’s where we are, and that’s obviously where the crowd remained at the beginning of today’s Gospel. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus addressed them, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” And then he gives them the same charge I mentioned last week: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” In other words, try to see past your immediate concerns to that which will sustain you forever.

Now, when we think about someone who we might think has achieved this shift in focus, this appreciation of things eternal, we might be tempted to envision a caricature, and think that this is the ideal, an ideal we’ll never reach. I envision some old monk living as a hermit, totally detached from the world, spending twenty-four hours a day meditating on the divine mysteries. In fact, this caricature does not have a solid touchstone in the Christian tradition, because even those few who become hermits do so after spending years in a community with other monks, and they still rejoin that community regularly for Mass.

In any event, it does not seem to me that this is the proper method for focusing on enduring, heavenly things (at least for the vast majority of us) and I don’t think that this is what Jesus is getting at. The Christian worldview is not world-denying or body-denying. It does not reject the physical world as something we have to get beyond so that we can float about in a disinterested state. Rather we are saved in the world, and it is through our ordinary, physical, contingent existence that we find the sustaining savour of heavenly, spiritual, enduring things.

And there is one gift which we are given in the midst of this old world which more than anything under the sun accomplishes this shift in focus, and ultimately the transformation of our whole lives, that we might be a holy people. And it is found in ordinary, physical, contingent stuff. Bread and Wine. Nothing can be more common, more ordinary. On their own, just plain bread and wine sustain us and gladden our hearts. But when we raise them up before God the Father, when we give thanks for them and for the gift of His Son’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, they gain a whole new power to sustain and gladden in a very different way. They become the Body and Blood of Christ—not just in a manner of speaking, but truly—and they give us a taste, quite literally, of all that matters, of all that endures.

We have many gifts from God, many things for which to be thankful, some of them miraculous. The children of Israel were miraculously given manna in the wilderness, but in today’s Gospel Jesus said it gets even better than that. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus puts it even more bluntly: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.” Though the children of Israel ought to have been thankful for the manna, though we must remember to be thankful for all the gifts, small and great, which we receive from the beneficent hand of our Lord, the gift for which we may be most thankful is the gift of the Eucharist, for its power to sustain is eternal.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” When I administer Communion and say “the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in everlasting life” I’m not using a complex metaphor. I think most of you know that I’m not opposed to complexity or metaphors. I’m not a literal thinker or a fundamentalist by any stretch of the imagination. But on this matter, I’m being pretty direct, because I think it’s a matter on which Jesus was being pretty direct and the Church throughout its long history has until fairly recently been pretty consistent in affirming that. And of course, you’re welcome to disagree and I’m sure we can maintain the fellowship of enjoined on us by Christ in spite of it. Anyway, when I say it’s the Body of Christ, it’s because I think it is (and, of course, because that’s what the prayerbook says to say it), and when I say “keep you in everlasting life” it’s because I live in the hope that the sustenance we gain from regular reception of the Holy Communion really does have the power to preserve us, Body and Soul, into eternity.

But in addition to its mystical power to sustain, the Eucharist, if we will receive it worthily and mindfully, does succeed in refocusing our attention to heavenly things, to things which endure. This is because in eating the Bread and drinking the Wine we are partaking in the heavenly banquet. As one friend of mine once put it, probably more verbosely than he needed to do, “at the altar, we receive a foretaste of the eschatological convivium.” For all the wordiness of that phrase, it simply means that in the midst of this life we are given a taste of the life of the world to come every time we eat this Bread and drink this Wine. If we are attentive to this fact, I strongly believe that our weekly or even more frequent reception of the Eucharist will help us to “pass through things temporal so that we lose not the things eternal” as last week’s collect put it. So, may we all be thankful for Christ’s greatest gift to the Church, the Eucharist, and may we be as eager to receive of its benefits as the crowd that day on the shore of Galilee who said “Sir, give us this bread always.”

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

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

A political consultant once told his potential “client” that one of the best ways to get elected was to speak in vague generalities which over-promise what his constituents would gain should he hold office because “broken promises are often lost in a cloud of changing circumstances so that anger against you will be minimal.” In other words, promise to make all the wildest dreams of the electorate come true, even if it’s highly unlikely, because they’ll forget and at least you’ll still be in power. Lest you think this bit of cynical wisdom can be attributed to a modern, American political wag, these are in fact the words of Cicero, written in 64 B.C. Things haven’t changed much. If someone is doing a great deal of good and meeting people’s needs and garnering favour with a broad audience, we sometimes tend to assume that he or she is planning on running for some kind of powerful, political position. It’s a cynical assumption, but we nonetheless often think in those terms, and are pretty regularly correct.

This is precisely the pattern into which the crowd in today’s Gospel fell. I have heard colleagues complain about the fact that our lectionary makes us talk about bread for five weeks in a row, today being the first. How appropriate, though, considering another Roman two centuries after Cicero, Juvenal taught us that the best way for a leader to gain or retain authority was through “bread and circuses.” Jesus seemed in this morning’s Gospel like he was going to make all their social and political dreams come true. He fed a huge group of hungry people, and that’s precisely what the Israelites of the first century wanted in a political ruler. They had grown used to Roman rule with a Jewish figurehead, Herod, receiving plenty from the largesse of the empire in exchange for keeping the peace. Rarely did this largesse devolve much lower than the top tier of the Temple elite. The vast majority of Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a new king, who would overthrow the Roman Empire, dispel political and religious corruption, and reëstablish Israel as an independent, wealthy nation where everyone could be safe and well-fed and brought out of the depths of poverty.

So, when Jesus fed the five thousand, this is immediately where the collective mind of the assembled crowd went. “Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.” Israel, you might recall, had had a rough go with it as far as kings were concerned. At the establishment of the monarchy they pressured the prophet Samuel into permitting them to have a king despite God’s wish that they not have such a government. This commenced centuries of mostly bad kings who fell into moral laxity and religious unfaithfulness, up to the puppet kings of the Roman period. Slow to learn from this inglorious history, the Israelites were going to try again to make all things right by putting another politician in charge. Here was another person whom they thought would make all their wildest dreams come true.

Now Jesus could have permitted the crowd to have their way. He could have given into the kind of pride which had led others in his own day to mount attempts at gaining political control, and if he had done so he likely would have been more successful than those others, all of whom were savagely executed by the Romans. That Christ did not sin does not mean that he did not face temptation, after all.

Thank God that he did not. Thank God that instead Christ chose the path of suffering and of death which won for us the victory over sin. What Jesus realized, and what his crowd did not, was that his Kingdom was not of this world.

Something that’s really neat about the Gospel of John (which I’ve mentioned before) is that every time Jesus does something it is a sign of his identity and mission. There are two words in the New Testament that get translated as miracle, the most common of which id dynamis which simply means “a deed of power”. But in John’s Gospel, every time Jesus performs what we would call a “miracle” the word John uses is seimon which means “sign”. So, every time Jesus performs an act like he did in today’s Gospel, it’s meant to be a “sign” of who Jesus is and what he’s about.

Unfortunately, sometimes people misread the sign, or rather they can see the sign but not get the message. It is as if someone who couldn’t read saw a stop sign and thought that it simply meant “red octagons ahead”. This is what happened that day on the Sea of Galilee. The people recognized that Jesus was divulging something about himself in feeding them, they knew it was a sign, but they got the wrong message. Jesus wasn’t showing them that he could continue to give them regular old bread and fish if he were made king. He wasn’t trying to communicate that he would make all their political and physical dreams come true. Rather, he was communicating something about the tremendous power he had and has to give spiritual sustenance.

There is a danger here of getting ahead of ourselves, because next week’s Gospel reading deals with the real meaning of the sign; the enduring sustenance of which it foretells, the eating of which keeps us in eternal life, is nothing less than the Eucharist. But that is for next week’s sermon.

For now, let me leave you with a little food for thought, pun intended. The crowd believed that physical food, the bread which Jesus gave them, was a sign of generous governance in an earthly kingdom. They did not have the ability to see beyond their very tangible problems, penury and hunger being chief among them, and we can hardly blame them for that. How often, though, do we fail to see beyond the exigencies of our earthly strife to that which endure. How often do we not pray the prayer of today’s collect, that “we may so pass through things temporal, that we not lose the things eternal”? How often do we place our ultimate hope on that raise, or that benefit from the state, or whatever instead of placing our hope on the Risen Lord? I don’t mean to suggest that the “cares and occupations of this life” are not often real problems we need to deal with and pray about and seek to address as the body of Christ, and that sometimes the state may indeed play a role in, but all too often we see our salvation as being in the resolution of these issues and not in the abiding love and grace of God. The question is, what does any of us really want? Do we principally want an earthly king to fix all our immediate problems or the King of Heaven to lead the whole of creation to its consummation in Himself? Does any of us really want for nothing but earthly bread, or do we crave also the bread of heaven? If the answer is the latter, how do we fix our minds on things heavenly? How do we see beyond our immediate problems to ultimate concerns? How can we so pass through things temporal so as not to lose sight if things eternal?

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