Author: John Drymon

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

Several weeks ago at our adult Sunday School class we were looking at the deuterocanonical book of Baruch, and the issue of the typological reading of scripture arose. I’ve mentioned this in sermons before, but as a reminder, there is an ancient and venerable tradition within the church of reading certain element of the Old Testament (“types”) as reflections of being fulfilled more perfectly in elements seen in the New Testament (“antitypes”). So, Jonah’s three days in the fish and his regurgitation onto dry land is a type of Christ’s three days in the tomb and his Resurrection. Noah’s ark which protected a faithful family and enough animals to repopulate the earth after the flood is a type of the Church and her ministry in expectation of Christ’s second coming. Examples could be provided ad nauseam.

Anyway, this came up in our class because I suggested that Baruch’s understanding of the Law as being a physical manifestation which bore the Wisdom of God can be seen as a type of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who literally bore the Wisdom of God, the Divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ himself. More than any New Testament figure with the exception of Jesus himself, the Mother of our Lord has probably been the most frequent subject of such typological readings. She is Eve. She is Jacob’s ladder, she is the Ark of the Covenant. She is (as I said in another recent class) the warrior Judith, from the priestly family of Levi, who manages to both maintain her purity and defeat the enemy.

There is another image of the Blessed Virgin which I am embarrassed to say had not occurred to me until just this week. I take this as a reminder that despite a pretty good theological education and a commitment over the last fifteen-plus years to continue learning and meditating on scripture, sometimes I have “gaps” with regard to even seemingly obvious points. I just read a book lent to me that was written by Fr. Thomas Hopko, the late dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in New York, in large part based on some of the work of his more famous predecessor as dean and his father-in-law, Alexander Schmemann, titled The Winter Pascha. Anyway, Fr. Hopko highlights one Old Testament type of Mary which is apparently very important and well-known within Easter Christianity, but which, as I said, had not occurred to me before. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the burning bush.

In the third chapter of the Book of Exodus, Moses is tending his father-in-law’s flock near Mount Horeb when he comes across a bush, actually a bramble (in Hebrew seneh, a word only used in the bible in reference to this one bush). Some believe this is a pun on Sinai (another name for Mount Horeb, used particularly in the text when Moses returns to receive the Law. Perhaps, on the other hand, the point is that this is a fruit-bearing bush. I think maybe that it’s both. Anyway, the bush is on fire, but the fire does not consume it. It is miraculously kept from burning to ash. And out of the bush the actual voice of God speaks to Moses, and thee are at least two important things he tells him–one, God is going to deliver his people from slavery in Egypt, and two, God has a proper name. That name is YHVH–I am that I am. The God of Israel is the one who exists, and in whom everything that is subsists.

In like manner, Our Lady holds within her womb none other than God himself. The power of God being infinite, maybe this particular pregnancy should not be physically possible.

I remember a very stupid playground debate in which my chums and I engaged as pre-teens, probably because it was current in our favorite form of literature–could Lois Lane actually carry Superman’s child to term, or would it kill her. Does amniotic fluid block out the rays of our yellow sun, keeping Superboy’s kryptonian powers latent until after live birth? I can only justify having this debate with my friends because we were actually nine or ten years old instead of forty-year-olds accessing internet message boards from computers in our parents’ basements.

From a practical standpoint, child-bearing can be a medically dangerous prospect even today, and much more so in the ancient world. There is no perfect metaphor for Mary’s miraculous pregnancy if we’re using purely materialist terms, but forget our silly childhood comic book debate and consider the current world-record holder for the most live-births, Gosiame Thamara Sithole, a woman from Pretoria who had decuplets (that is, ten children) at once a few years ago. Half of them were born “naturally” and five by caesarian section. It is perhaps a miracle that Ms. Sithole and all ten babies survived this for nine months and then survived delivery itself, but without a medical procedure (which existed in the first century, but certainly would not have been available in a cattle shed to a poor Jewish family) it is almost certain that some of the children and probably the mother could not have survived this. And these were normal babies, not the God of all creation! The fruitful bramble was set on fire by the presence of God himself within, and yet, miraculously, it was not consumed.

And just as the voice of the eternal God spoke to Moses from the bush to tell him both his mission and his identity, so did the Holy Spirit give the Blessed Virgin words which she couldn’t merely speak, but rather sing to his glory. Just as the Great I Am promised Moses that he would set his people free, so does Mary foretell that her Son has come to free all people.

There is a sense here in which the Blessed Virgin is the model for all Christians. I love to say that Mary is a model for priests, in that our vocation is primarily about bringing Christ into the world bodily in the Sacrament (and this is to my mind, the best argument in favor women’s ordination, though that is another sermon). But more to the point, she is a model for all Christians everywhere who bear God in themselves in a non-biological but no-less literal way. And the Spirit of Christ which we bear is a fire which consumes not ourselves but our selfishness. He enables us to bear that fire of love and to do what Mary did–to glorify God, to proclaim his desire to free us all from sin and death and the powers and principalities of this world.

Note well, in her Magnificat, Our Lady does not say that she is doing these things. Indeed, if she couldn’t we have no chance. Rather, she proclaims that God has done them, and is doing them, and will accomplish them at the last. As we approach once again the great feast, the celebration of the Nativity, let it be our care and delight to do the same. To bear God and his message of redemption to all who have not heard it, to sing with joy for what he has already accomplished, to pray with ever more fervor that all things will be brought to perfection in him. And let us be ever mindful of our responsibilities to those whom Our Lord, yet in the womb, gave to his Blessed Mother for particular care–the humble, the meek, the hungry, the poor–not because we have it within ourselves to change the world, but because Our Lord has changed it, is changing it, will change it to their benefit, and in humble acts of service to them, we are reflecting ever so weakly, the perfect power of the God who has come among us to free all men and women from every bond.

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

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

Live now in utter delight, O Jerusalem, living in complete happiness and satisfaction; for God has removed all your lawless deeds and of necessity has rescued you from the power of the foe, to whom you were subjected in paying the penalty of punishment. The Lord will now be in your midst, showing his kingship by his care for you, so that trouble will no longer be able to approach you.

Thus wrote Theodore of Mopsuestia in his early fifth century commentary on the passage from Zephaniah we heard a few minutes ago. I’ve been interested in this early biblical scholar for many years, perhaps because we in seminary we habitually referred to him by a sobriquet which he certainly would have rejected–Teddy the Mop. In all seriousness, Theodore of Mopsuestia is one of those figures from the patristic era, like Origen of Alexandria, whom it is difficult to classify as either clearly Orthodox (like, say, Augustine or Gregory the Great) or clearly heretical (like Arius and Nestorius and the rest). So, relying on old Teddy the Mop for insight into our Old Testament lesson feels a bit transgressive.

That said, I couldn’t help myself, because of one word in that brief passage with which I began this sermon–necessity. Theodore writes that it was of necessity that God rescue his people from the power of their foe. The Greek word here is αναγκη, which implies what in philosophy we call logical entailment. Simply put, he is not writing here about God’s people (whether they be Jews or Christians) being in need, but rather that God’s very nature means that he needed to help them. This seems at first blush to imply something we may think is theologically out of bounds–namely, that God is subject to a power beyond himself (in this case, the very concept of logical consistency), that his hand is somehow forced. This brings up all sorts of concerns, from Plato’s famous “Euthyphro Dilemma”–is something good because the gods demand it or do the gods demand it because it’s good–to more popular paradoxes–could God create a rock so big that even he couldn’t lift it? We might be tempted to say that Theodore of Mopsuestia was a step away from heresy already, so just ignore it, but I think that would be too easy. We have here a potentially important insight into God’s saving activity, so let’s tarry just a moment, pondering the mystery.

What I think the Platonic view of divinity and even the pop-philosophy “God with a big rock” view miss is that they begin with an assumption that God is fundamentally a philosophical concept rather than a person. This is not to say that there is no place in Christian theology for understanding God in these terms. The classical “attributes of God” (omnipotence, immutability, simplicity, and so forth) can be helpful guard-rails, keeping us from creating a god in our own image, which would be precisely the sort of idolatry against which Zephaniah himself contended. Even so, if that’s all we have, then God is merely “the ground of being” or “the ultimate concern.” That is to say that God is essentially a metaphysical concept. Now, perhaps you are capable of having a relationship with a concept, but I’m not. I can only have relationships with people.

The view everywhere and at all times held by both Christians and Jews is that God is, indeed, a person. And what is a person if not a moral agent, one with a will more or less in congruence with “the Good”? What distinguishes the agency of God from that of mortals (from ours) is that it and “the Good” are coterminous. In other words, God cannot but act in perfect righteousness and justice and mercy and love.

But is this placing a limit on God? I would contend that it is not. Rather it is simply the recognition that we can know some things about God’s personality–his personhood–because he has told us about himself. Don’t let any of my college professors know I said this, but revelation is prior to philosophical commitments, and the latter must be held more loosely than the former. Put another way, and at the risk of being charged with anti-intellectualism, Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Gottfried Leibniz and all the rest are great as far as they go, but all their insights must be judged against a Sunday School song–“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

So, to return at last to the Prophet Zephaniah and to Teddy the Mop: what we know, what we can found our hope upon, is that salvation and eternal life, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to be a light to the nations, the justification of God’s ancient, chosen people and all we who have been grafted on like a wild olive shoot is a certainty. It is God’s very nature both to keep his promises and to provide even more. He cannot do otherwise. He cannot, we might say, make a rock so big that he can’t lift it and this, it turns out, is a feature rather than a bug of the logic of his metaphysical subsistence. His property is always to have mercy.

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

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

I think it’s easy for us not to appreciate how radical Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist is, how counterintuitive a prophet this seemingly crazy man in the desert would have been.

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

This is an incredibly subversive way to begin the Christmas story. Perhaps if we translate this into contemporary terms, the point will be clearer… In the fourth year of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Mike DeWine was governor of Ohio, and Anne Jolly was Bishop of Ohio and John Drymon was Rector of Trinity, Findlay, the word of God came to a seemingly mentally deranged nobody out in a corn field in Putnam County.

You see, with John the Baptist, God’s message was not coming through the expected channels, through the institutions set up to be the agents of God (in the case of the high priests) or through those in positions of temporal power, such as the Emperor or the Governor. Rather, the message of God, the call to repentance, was coming from this strange figure, this apparent madman, John, to whom few of us, if we were honest with ourselves, would have probably listened.

Now, John the Baptist was subversive in a manner wholly different from the cultural subversion which we’ve come to see in our day and age. Whether we’re talking about radical religious traditionalists or militant atheists, about far right or far left political movements, about this team or that, the spirit of our age seems obsessed with labels dependent on a combination of personal autonomy above all else and a simplistic moral dichotomy between the goodies and the baddies, in which the former is anybody who agrees with me about everything and the latter are those who disagree with me about anything.

John the Baptist was not the personification of some Ancient Judean zeitgeist. He was not countercultural in a way to which our contemporary sensibilities would apply. He was not even anti-establishment in the same way that either the anti-Roman zealots or the pro-Roman collaborators of his own day were. He was much weirder even than that.

In Matthew’s account we read “the same John had his raiment of camels hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” This was almost as strange a way to dress and eat in those days as it would be now. What’s more, John didn’t go to the temple or to one of the gates of Jerusalem to preach his message where it might be heard by those with some political or economic power. He remained in the desert.

This would have been reckoned very strange by the people of the first century, even the counter-cultural people of the time, who would have been used to self-proclaimed prophets. John was not like them, but those with any sense of history would have recognized that he fit the bill, as it were, a great deal more closely than these other so-called prophets.

It had been more than four-hundred years since a legitimate, canonical prophet had preached in Judea, but if one were to look back at those Old Testament prophets, one would notice the similarities between them and John. John’s message was not self-promoting, as were the sermons of first-century pseudo-prophets, who claimed a messianic identity for themselves. Rather, John, like the legitimate prophets of the Old Testament, pointed away from himself and always to another, namely Jesus, as the longed-for Messiah. Like so many of the Old Testament prophets, chiefly Amos, John arose from obscurity to take on the prophetic vocation. And his message, like those prophets of old was not “feel good.” His was a message of repentance and of apocalyptic expectation–preparation for the day of the Lord. This reminds one of the legitimate Old Testament prophets, particularly Elijah, the prophet with whom John was most readily identified.

We’ll hear more about John the Baptist next week, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But what can we learn from the little introduction to John which is this week’s Gospel? It seems to me that the most important lesson we get is that the Word of God comes to us from sources we might least expect. Certainly, we should be attentive to the normal modes in which we’ve come to experience that Word. We should be attentive to the Scriptures and to the teachings of Church Fathers and Councils and even (to a lesser extent) to trusted religious leaders in our own day. But sometimes, and maybe more than just sometimes if we’re paying attention, the grace and love of God is made even more apparent, presents itself even more tangibly, in unexpected ways from the people we least expect.

Of course, this must always be judged in the context of the deposit of faith–weighed against first Scripture, then Church tradition, and then our rational capacity as beings made in the image of God. We mustn’t fall prey to charlatans, to wolves in sheep’s clothing, or to use a Japanese idiom I just learned this week which makes more sense to me personally (since I deal with neither sheep nor wolves) a “neko o kaburu”, one whose put a cat on one’s head. Now that is a winsome image of one to whom I might be inappropriately drawn to trust and follow. So perhaps the corollary to applying scripture, tradition, and reason (in that order) is to beware the message which we want to hear when there is a harder lesson we need to hear.

So, keep watch. Open your eyes. Look for those signs of God’s message, which both calls us to repentance and promises the sort of Grace which is not, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, “cheap.” We hear over and over again, and especially in Advent, to be watchful. Baruch tells us “look toward the East”; the Prophet Isaiah is quoted in today’s Gospel as saying “all flesh shall see the salvation of God”; we hear in an ancient Latin hymn this morning “Lo [look, behold] the Lamb, so long expected, comes with pardon down from heaven.” Let us be watchful, though, not only for Christ at his return, but for the risen Christ in our midst, right now, being made present in ways and through people we do not expect. Pray that God may give you the eyes to see his messengers for what they are, and ask Him to give you faith in the message they preach, and that John the Baptist preached, and that each of us should be preaching: namely that great message of hope in our Lord’s return, for

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

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