Author: John Drymon

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

It is only once in our whole three-year lectionary that we get to hear from the Prophet Daniel, so as wonderful as this morning’s Epistle and Gospel are, I feel I should focus on this strange Old Testament book. You’re likely to have heard some more well-known incidents from the book—the fiery furnace and the lion’s den and so forth—but it’s the truly weird bits, like Daniel’s dream of the four beasts and that interesting character, the Archangel Michael, whose first appearance is in this morning’s lesson which are perhaps more interesting.

Like many hopeful tales, Daniel was written in the context of desolation. After the death of Alexander the Great the Eastern Mediterranean world got divided up to his forebears, and by the 2^nd Century B.C. the King Antiochus Epiphanes came to rule over Israel. Antiochus instituted a program of hellenization, conforming the customs of conquered peoples to the Greek standard. This included mandatory worship of the Greek pantheon rather than the God of Israel, and imprisonment or even death for those who failed to comply. Needless to say the Jews were not happy with this state of affairs, and although a number gave into Antiochus’ pressure, a faithful remnant remained true to God despite certain persecution. A goodly number, despite the personal cost, stayed true to the words of the psalmist:

Their libations of blood I will not offer,*
nor take the names of their gods upon my lips.

It was in the context of this upset that the book of Daniel was written. It’s a strange book, and in some ways out of place in the Old Testament. Large sections are written in Aramaic rather than biblical Hebrew, the only proto-canonical Old Testament book to use a more modern dialect. It was, you see, written for the people alive then to read. Daniel is neither straight prophecy nor standard history, like so many of the other books, but allegory, much like the New Testament book of Revelation.

The author of Daniel was most assuredly writing about the struggles of his people in the present, during the Greek occupation, but he placed the story in an older context, the days of the Babylonian captivity. Instead of Antiochus Epiphanes he wrote about Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar. The very present reality which was implied underneath the text would have been apparent to the faithful Jews suffering under the yoke of foreign rule, but it was not explicit enough to get the author or his readers into more trouble with their imperial overlords (just like, as you may know, John used coded language in Revelation in order to speak about the Romans without being explicit enough to get his readers crucified themselves).

And the similarities between Daniel and Revelation do not end with the fact that both are obscure and symbolic. Both books are written in the context of horrendous persecution, but both are among the most hopeful books in the bible. Revelation presents us with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth in which God has put all things right. Likewise, Daniel presents a remarkably hopeful vision in the midst of a situation which would lead most to despair:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, [it says] some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.

This is the first explicit mention in the bible of the Resurrection of the dead, the great hope which Jesus himself would define and enable. It was only in the midst of an apparently hopeless situation that the most hopeful message in the history of humankind was revealed.

So it is for so many of us. Christian mystics throughout the centuries have recognized that great hope and joy comes out of apparently hopeless situations. St. Teresa of Avilla wrote about aridity, dry periods which seem always to precede spiritual breakthroughs; St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote about the twin experiences of desolation and consolation, the former being the precursor to the latter; and St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul”, a period of pain and fear which preceded his own spiritual awakening.

This is not to say that God causes pain. God did not will that the Jews should suffer under the yoke of the Babylonians and the Greeks, that early Christians should be put to death by Rome, that all the nasty experiences that we might suffer in our lifetime should have visited us. However, God can and does use those experiences as a means for revealing his glory and love. Just as Jesus said to his disciples in today’s Gospel: “do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come… This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” May we, then, recognize that in the midst of our own troubles, God is still at work, bringing about a new and better creation; let us pray for patience in the midst of these trials, knowing that at the end of every death comes the light of resurrection.

+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.

Some of you know that Annie and I enjoy the theater, but only a few hundred years ago this might have been a scandal. The theater was considered borderline unacceptable by many church people, and actors were considered the worst of the worst. There is a famous church in New York, the church of the Transfiguration, which made quite a splash by permitting theatre-folk into their church. Actors were reckoned a lowly bunch, and the bad rap didn’t start with John Wilkes Booth or even the bawdy seventeenth century plays that the puritans had banned before the Restoration. In fact, the idea that acting was a most disreputable profession can be traced back at least to the ancient Greeks, who coined an interesting word for play-actors: hupokrites. Hypocrites.

I don’t share this little lesson in etymology to deplore the theatre, which, like I said, I quite enjoy, but to help flesh out what we’re up against with the sin Jesus warns against in today’s Gospel. “Beware of the scribes,” he said, “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

You see, hypocrisy is like malicious play-acting, putting on a performance whose audience doesn’t know is a show, for an undetermined but usually high cost of admission. And when the subject matter of said performance is religious, the deception is dangerous indeed.

And, what’s worse, the actors in the charade that is religious hypocrisy can be very good, so good that their tactics are only seen once tremendous damage has already been done. Religious hypocrites have gone from devouring widows’ houses to committing horrible acts of violence, physical and spiritual, against the weakest among us. And it’s not only the so-called “crazies”, the cult leaders of the world, but even sometimes clergy from more putatively respectable religions. “Beware the scribes,” indeed!

But let’s change the focus from these, turn around the camera which captures their shows, because nothing is easier than pointing out hypocrisy in others. Such radical forms of hypocrisy can serve as an easy distraction, because we can always say, “well, I’m not as much a hypocrite as him.” The difficult task, the hard work which we all need to do, is to search our own hearts for what apparently minor hypocrisies any of us is prone to commit.

I’m in an especially dangerous position, because, though a sinful person like anyone, my profession means that I walk around in long robes, and I do have the best seat in the synagogue (except when the bishop comes and displaces me from it). It is a short step from doing my job and exercising my authority appropriately to clericalism, and it’s an even shorter step from clericalism to outright hypocrisy.

But I am not alone in these dangerous waters, you see, for every single Christian can fall into it because of pride or simpe negligence. A good model for all of us, however, is found in the second half of this morning’s Gospel.

“Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

Now, the point is neither that rich people and their contributions are bad nor that penury is a good. If all you have in the world is “two small copper coins”, I’m not advising that you put it in the offering plate this morning, because I don’t want to be accused of devouring widows’ houses. The point is quite different from this.

In both Mark and Luke, the story of the widow’s mite, as it’s come to be called, immediately follows the denunciation of the scribes, and biblical scholars will tell you that this is intentional. Both episodes are meant to be understood as meditations on the same theme, the dichotomy between authenticity and hypocrisy. This is why, though neither Mark nor Luke says it explicitly, it is believed that those putting great sums into the treasury were actually doing it with great pomp and ceremony, ostentatiously drawing attention to their generosity. In other words, they were play-acting, just like the scribes. They wanted to be seen as surpassing “holy”. Giving generously wasn’t the problem, it was giving simply to be seen giving that was. The widow did not make a great deal of her offering. She just gave it.

Money is an obvious example, because it’s so tangible. It can be both a great source of good and potentially harmful to the soul, and we can often see the effects either way, comparing those who give selflessly and those who either become miserly or who give for self-aggrandizement. But money is just the most tangible example of this dichotomy of hypocrisy and authenticity. In reality, all that we do and say has implications in this regard. When we follow the widow to the treasury, the treasury of merit as the medievals called it, we deposit all our good works. Whether what we do is authentic or hypocritical, God can no doubt use it to His own ends, but it is only a true offering and a sacrifice if it’s done for the love of God, and his people, and his Church rather than for the love of attention.

In some ways, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir, because, as I’ve said from this pulpit before, there is a great deal of selfless work done around this place and in our community by many of you. Even so, we all, myself especially, need an occasional reminder along these lines. Thank God that we have such good examples. If you look hard enough, you’ll see the little acts of loving-kindness you catch your friends furtively doing, not blowing a trumpet but toiling in the dark. You can find examples in the stories of saints long gone on to their reward who took their master’s call to heart by giving of their energy or of their wealth or of their very lives. If nothing else, you can find a very good example in the poor, nameless widow from Jerusalem who all those generations ago gave her two mites, and was, no doubt, richly rewarded by her Father in heaven.

+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 was a bit down in the dumps this last week for reasons many of you will know, so yesterday we went to see an inspirational movie, a genre which many of you will also know is not my “go-to”. I was a bit uncertain about the film adaptation of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, particularly having read the book on which its based some years ago at Annie’s insistence, but we did attend the “sneak preview” yesterday afternoon anyway. On the one hand, “faith based” movies are often poorly made, sometimes by those who couldn’t hack it in mainstream, secular media, and there message sometimes theologically dubious. On the other hand, too often mainstream films adapting explicitly Christian themes inappropriately soft-pedal those themes to appeal to a secular audience (see, for example, the Wrinkle in Time and Chronicles of Narnia movies from several years ago). So, it’s a tough needle to thread as far as I’m concerned. In my opinion, though, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever succeeded, and when it comes to wide release next week, I’d heartily commend it to you.

In case you haven’t read the book, it helps to know that the alternate title for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in Commonwealth countries was The Worst Kids in the World. A woman appropriately named Grace is saddled with directing the seventy-fifth annual iteration of her church’s children’s Christmas pageant, and like a lot of things in churches, it had been presented in exactly the same way each year for three-quarters of a century. She had not intended to change things up, but through a series of events the most ill-behaved children in town, the Heardmans, who had never gone to church before showed, up for the audition and essentially bully the other children into letting them take all the major roles. The worst of them all, Imogene Heardman–who smokes cigars and drinks jug wine and constantly takes the Lord’s name in vain–ends up cast as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Despite constant pressure from the other Sunday School parents to kick the bad kids out, Grace comes to believe that letting the Heardmans participate, and particularly letting Imogene play Mary, is what she’s been called to do. If Jesus didn’t come to save the Heardman children, “the worst kids in the world”, after all, then who did he come for? I won’t give the whole story away, but it will suffice to say that it ends up being both the best and the strangest iteration of the church’s annual pageant, and both the Heardman children and the whole community learns precisely whom the Christ Child came for to begin with.

In my younger years I used to lament the conflation of All Saints and All Souls, the celebration of the famous men and women of church history and all the faithful departed. I’m still stuffy enough to feel the need to maintain that distinction to a certain extent, to say that, for example, we may pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary but we only pray for the late aunt Mary, and that our adoption of an ecumenical lectionary has muddied this important distinction further. Our readings this morning are really more about all the faithful departed rather than the “capital S” Saints whom we more properly celebrate on this feast. That said, I think it’s good to be reminded that the most basic reality is that all Christians are, to slightly modify a famous saying by Luther “simul sanctus et peccator”–at the same time saints and sinners. This applies to the famous, named saints on our church calendar as much as to each and every one of us, as much as to those whom we love and see no longer. Jesus loves the worst kids in town just as much as he does those who live lives of heroic faith and service.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be a bit better, or rather that we shouldn’t try to let God work in us more what we cannot do ourselves. It does mean, though, that the righteousness of our Lord and Savior has been imputed to each of us to the same degree as to those who were famously faithful. When the Father sees us he no longer sees that which our concupiscence has made us do, but the righteousness of his Son which has been given us as a free gift. In this sense, while we can and should look to the “capital S” saints for their good examples, and while we may still request their intercessions on our behalf, we are all of us saints in a more fundamental and universal sense. Living into that, permitting the progress of sanctification in our lives and hearts, is a life’s work, the hardest part has already been done for us. And this is a work which God continues for those on that other shore and in that greater light whom we will one day join in a kingdom which has no end. Thanks be to God for that.

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