Author: John Drymon

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

In Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, one of the characters, Mike Campbell, is asked how he went bankrupt. His answer: two ways- gradually and then all at once. Last week’s Gospel reading introduced us to Nicodemus, whose conversion seemed to have happened in this manner—gradually and then all at once. In last week’s Gospel he doesn’t seem to understand Jesus’ demand that one be “born again.” Later, he is shown advising the Great Sanhedrin to exercise prudence in prosecuting Jesus. He’s not yet won over to Christ, but he’s getting there. Then he reappears at the sepulchre bearing costly ointment, a symbol of his having finally come round fully.

There appears to me to be a similar trajectory with the Samaritan woman in this morning’s Gospel, albeit over a shorter time span. One can see her slowly, systematically entertaining the logical implications of what Jesus says to her and the status she’s willing to assign him creeping up as their conversation proceeds. First, he is simply “a Jew” (an ethnoreligious rival). Then she calls him “sir”, a term of respect though not warmth. Then, maybe he’s greater than Jacob. Then probably a prophet. And finally, she’s convinced he’s the Messiah.

I love this story for three reasons. First, most of you know that I studied philosophy in college, and had I not gone to seminary I almost certainly would have pursued graduate study in that field. (Thank goodness I didn’t, not only because I love being a priest, but because the world of academic philosophy is cutthroat!) The Samaritan woman’s thought process is a lot like a really good philosophical article. You entertain a proposition and work out its implications without getting lost in the weeds of outside issues and logical fallacies. She takes just such a careful, step-by-step approach.

Second, I love the story because Jesus lovingly accepts the woman while not pussyfooting around real issues. It seems to me that a lot of folks (myself included, sometimes) want Jesus to look like one or the other of two extreme pictures, neither of which captures the Jesus of scripture and history. Either we want a judgmental Jesus who condemns all the people we don’t like or we want the warm, fuzzy, hippy Jesus who doesn’t ever talk about sin or make any demands of us. But here, Jesus clearly wants to redeem the Samaritan woman and to be in relationship with her, but he also gets a little spiky about both her theology and her morality. It reminds me that while I have a close, personal relationship with my Lord and Savior, I’m also a work in progress and need to keep asking him to make me a little better day by day.

Finally, I love the story (like that of Nicodemus) because so often I’ve found for both myself and others, that the soul’s conversion can take place in that “gradually and then all at once” way. I’m talking here mostly about the continual conversion which is a lifelong process rather than the discrete “conversion from one religion or from irreligion to Christianity” though that can happen in this way, too.

I recently read The Case for Christ, which somebody gave me, and that’s how it seemed to happen for the writer of that book, Lee Strobel. That was my favorite part of the book. As a work of introductory apologetics it did a good job, I think, and while there was no new information for me, I think it would be a great text for someone just starting out as a Christian or considering Jesus but coming to that with questions. I simply hadn’t read it before because I figured it was too popular to be good, and there may have been some lurking chauvinism in my soul about evangelical apologetics, of which I’m not proud and probably need God to remove from me.

So, I was wrong; it was pretty darn good. What I really liked about it was that it was like the philosophical process of the Samaritan woman: raise an objection, entertain a proposition, follow that proposition to its logical conclusion. In this way the author gradually came to faith and then he came to faith all at once, asking Christ to forgive him and to lead him in newness of life.

But like I said, I find this “gradual/sudden” phenomenon to be even more apparent, certainly in my own life, within the process of continual conversion (what some might call “sanctification”, though for complicated reasons which would take us beyond the scope of this sermon, that term makes me a bit itchy). Growth in God’s Grace can sometimes feel like a slog through the desert and then one surprisingly suddenly finds oneself in an oasis, drinking that water which the Samaritan woman desires. One might stay there for a short time or a long time, but then (unless you die and get to go to a much better resting place) you set out on the desert road for another hike, not knowing where the next oasis is, but given more confidence than ever that you’ll eventually find yourself in it. And between oases, you might come to a little Samaritan village; they’ll ask how on earth you survived the desert journey, and you can tell them. And you might be surprised who will decide to strike out into the wilderness with you toward the next distant but not-too-distant watering hole.

+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 attended a meeting last week with several clergy and lay leaders, both Episcopalian and Lutheran, last week, and one Lutheran pastor present—at whose parish we were meeting—had to excuse himself for a bit to meet with a woman in her nineties whom he said was having “a baptismal crisis.” It turns out that she was uncertain whether or not she had actually been baptized and was worried about what this meant for her eternal destination. Fortunately for her peace of mind, the church secretary found the recording of her baptism from the nineteen thirties. Thank goodness for church records. I always find it amusing when I read again the opening chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, as we did at Morning Prayer on Monday, where the Apostle writes the following:

I thank God that I baptized none of you, but Chrispus and Gaius; lest any should think I had baptized in my own name. And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides I know not whether I baptized any other.

The church in Corinth could have clearly used better record keeping and a good church secretary.

Two quick asides. First, there is always the possibility (at least in our tradition) of something called a “conditional baptism” which is intended for things like this anxious nonagenarian’s situation. When the big moment comes, you just say “if you are not already baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” I have had occasion to do this. Secondly, and more importantly, I don’t personally believe that God deals in “moral luck”, so I personally reject the idea that somebody could be condemned because he or she believed himself or herself to have been baptized but hadn’t been. That said, the pastoral response in such circumstances would not be to argue that point but to try to find the baptismal record and to do a conditional baptism if called for.

Anyway, all of this raises the question of assurance. How can we be sure we are among the elect?

Nineteenth century hymn writer Fanny Crosby seemed to have worked it out. You might have heard her words before if you grew up in a different Christian tradition (it’s sadly never been in our hymnal tradition):

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Perfect submission, perfect delight!
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels descending bring from above
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

Ms. Crosby might have worked it out, but the man who started her own flavor of Christianity, John Wesley, could not. While he taught that humans could have some level of assurance, he—who though not having Crosby’s visions of rapture and of angels descending, had felt his heart strangely warmed in a moment of conversion—could not ultimately confirm that he was certain he had been saved. Perhaps he had backslid back into his high church Anglicanism.

Puritans had similar concerns. While you’re not likely to hear it preached down at First Presbyterian (as our reformed brothers and sisters have lately tended to deëmphasize the theology of Calvin), those of the reformed tradition—Puritans and more moderate Presbyterians alike—believed that one couldn’t have perfect assurance of salvation, but only clues (signs of election) based on things like domestic tranquility and personal wealth–blessings from God which suggested to them that they were favored and thus saved. The result was the development of the Protestant work ethic (you’d work hard to evince these signs of election for your own surety and the recognition of your coreligionists) which works out well if you’re trying to establish a peaceable and productive society, but you also might get a bunch of people worried that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Likewise, a case can be made that the Protestant Reformation itself began less because of Roman Catholic abuses (selling indulgences and the like, as important as that was as a tipping point) and more because good old Martin Luther was so terrified at the church’s ambivalence on the matter of salvation that he needed to find a system which provided more certainty to the believer that he or she was heaven-bound rather than damned.

Folks, I’ve got some good news for you. You don’t have to worry yourself to death; or maybe put better, the fact that you may be worried might ironically be the best evidence that you needn’t worry that you’re going to Hell. You have been been saved by Christ’s one sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction on the Cross. you have been saved in the regenerative waters of Baptism. You are being saved as you continue to receive the Grace of Christ’s Body and Blood and as good fruit is borne through your faith by the work of the Holy Spirit, even if your own participation that is simply sincerely saying “God, work through me though I am too weak to do your will.”

Now this is dangerous information to give out. It’s dangerous information, because people who are afraid of Hell can sometimes behave a lot better than those who aren’t. Geneva, when Calvin was more-or-less in charge was one of the most peaceful, prosperous, democratic places in the world.

And as much as I hate to admit it (and as I implied just a moment ago) the Puritan history of our own country’s early years had much the same effect. While our Anglican forebears on this continent were growing fat and lazy and treating trading slaves in the Southern Colonies, the Puritans up in New England were creating communities of mutual responsibility and laying the foundations for a country that could get on without a king, because they were so darned law-abiding and committed to equality (at least relative to others in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. And, contrary to popular fiction, they even killed fewer purported witches than Anglicans at the time did. Unfortunately, they were so good at obeying law and setting up the foundations of modern civil society because they were afraid that if they didn’t they’d literally go to hell. One takes the bad with the good, I guess.

The theological truth is socially dangerous, because people realize that they’re not going to burn just because they’re bad. We’re all pretty bad by nature thanks to the fall and only good by the grace of God. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually I do, but thank God I’m not God. I’m certainly not as loving and gracious and forgiving as God. In today’s Epistle, we get a pretty broad, generous view of salvation. We are all children of Abraham, and God has reckoned us all worthy of Salvation because of the Blood of Christ. In his conversation with Nicodemus, the only litmus test Jesus gives is that we be “born again” or “born from above” as some modern translations put it. He says we must be born of water and of the Spirit, which is to say (at least as I read it, though there are alternative interpretations) that we must both be born physically and then receive the New Birth of Baptism. Most of us (myself included) received that new birth when we’re too young to understand its nature, and we are merely passive recipients of God’s Grace. But that I think is ideal; infant baptism being normative just means that we’re being honest about the nature of the Sacrament and of Salvation, because even baptism of those of riper years, as older prayerbooks put it, is essentially a passive reception of God’s Grace, which we can only will partially and imperfectly to be recipients of.

So the good news is that we don’t have to worry. We’ve been saved. God’s promise is irrevocable. The difficult news, though, is that we’re not off the hook.

Okay, you’re not going to hell. So what? For about the last half millennium we’ve been obsessed with the question of justification and its mechanics. Who’s saved? Who’s not? How does it happen? What if I’m not saved?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but this is not really the question we who are not systematic theologians need to spend all our time and energy sorting out. God has saved us through the blood of His only Son. We didn’t deserve it. We’ll never earn it. We got it anyway. The precise mechanics of how it works are interesting, and I love being a part of those discussions as an academic exercise. I’m in a group reading through the Decades of Heinrich Bullinger, a seminal Swiss reformer, and just had a long conversation via video conference yesterday about what he had to say about justification by faith. But the God’s honest truth is that you don’t have to read Sixteenth Century theologians or even listen to Fr. John’s occasional expositions on Greek verbs to get saved.

So, as one theologian said (I think it was Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, but I can’t track down the citation), “I was saved, I am being saved, I will be saved.” We have that assurance. The really interesting stuff is what comes after that realization. God loves you. You are baptized into Christ’s Body. You have been born anew, born from above, born again whether you knew it or not. You have a mission. Faith without works is dead, says St. James. That doesn’t mean your or my inadequacy in doing as many good works as we might will send us to Hell. So what?

The reality of being saved and not doing anything about it seems worse to me, somehow. It means you’ve been given something and haven’t done anything with it. And it’s so simple to take that gift and use it. You’ve just got to love your neighbor. As I’ve said before, that means a lot more than having warm feelings for them. You don’t even need John Wesley’s strangely warmed heart. There are people I deal with in life who don’t get the cockles of my heart very warm. But I love them. Or at least I try to do. And that’s what we’ve all got to do. To be loving. To return the gift of Grace which we’ve been given. As absolutely wretched as we may be, as much as we may spurn or resent God or take Him for granted, He still loves us, so we ought to do the same for our sisters and brothers.

+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’ve heard it said that the three most dangerous words in the English language are “I got this.” It is certainly physically dangerous in certain situations. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s reported that Harry Houdini expressed his disbelief in the miracles of the bible right before saying that he could easily take the punches to the abdomen that either killed him or hastened his death.

Those words, “I got this” are even more spiritually perilous. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” warns the Proverbs. While that book is sometimes criticized for its tedious nature and purportedly limited applicability, those few words of universal wisdom strike me as sufficient warrant for the book’s inclusion in the biblical canon. (Not that I or anybody necessarily has a right to question the canon, but it is something that happens.)

“I got this” may be translated as “I will wrest control from the providential hand of God, because I think I can manage things better.” This is the primordial sin we see in Genesis, and it is the climax of of Satan’s failed attempt to cause our Lord, the Second Adam, to fall in the wilderness.

I think the ordering of the temptations is significant. First, an apparently minor trespass (you’re hungry, give in), than the mot-and-bailey approach—Not comfortable making yourself a God by commanding the angels? Surely a little idol worship (I’ll be your idol) isn’t quite as flagrant, and the reward will be tremendous. Perhaps the tempter had succeeded in this gambit so many times he was sure he’d succeed again. The primordial history of the first half of Genesis is full of failed attempts human beings made to be like Gods (to succeed where Adam failed), and then the whole rest of the Old Testament shifts its condemnations to idolatry. Casting a metal God is a lot easier than trying to build a tower to heaven or procreate with fallen angels, after all, and one can convince oneself it’s not really such a big deal, relatively speaking.

The cunning nature of sin is that what appears to be categorically different can in fact be different in degree rather than nature. For what is idolatry, but the natural recourse of the one who has failed at self-deification? My trying to be God didn’t work, so let’s try to make this stone or tree stump a God instead. It seems absurd, but these are the lengths we can go to retain the illusion of control.

I already talked a lot about Lenten disciplines and their spiritual nature on Ash Wednesday, but I want to briefly expand on that theme in light if this reality. I said that the end is to strengthen our reliance on God, not to give us an accomplishment to be proud of; and that disciplines should best be undertaken with this, their proper end in mind. This means that sometimes the most instructive aspect is failing at them, failure typically being more spiritually beneficial than success.

I’ll go a step further. Lent is not about adopting a self-improvement regimen. If we are improved in some respect in the long-term because of a discipline—becoming healthier, becoming more generous, learning more about the bible—this is a good thing. But the primary purpose, I think, of fasting and prayer and almsgiving, is to strengthen our bond with our Lord so that we might rely on him all the more. When the inevitable fall comes—I’ve yet to meet the person who doesn’t have at least an occasional slip in morality or in devotion—we can then be assured that the fall won’t be so great as it might have been, and God is near at hand to pick us back up.

There is a counterpart to the very last verse of this morning’s Old Testament, that I really love. We left Adam and Eve, ashamed and covering their nakedness with fig leaves, a rather shabby and impractical ensemble. After God comes and passes judgment, though, he does not leave it there. Before expelling them from the Garden, he himself fashions for Adam and Eve clothes made from the skins of animals. This shows, I think, that as much as we may disappoint God and experience consequences, the punishment is never as severe as the crime. God’s wrath quickly abates and he provides loving care the moment we need it most.

Christ, of course, does not fall. He has proved by the end of our Gospel lesson, that the Second Adam succeeds in temptation’s hour and foreshadows the fact that he will persevere to the last. But if he had fallen prey to temptation(what a horrible prospect, and whether or not it would have been possible is a difficult Christological question, but consider it for a moment) I suspect the angels would still have come to minister to him in the desert. That’s just how gracious God is.

So, like Luther said “be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” Now, I’m not Lutheran enough to take that literally. Don’t set out with the intention of sinning. But you’re going to do it, I guarantee you. And when you do, Christ’s Grace remains available if only you repent and return, no matter how often. I, for one, am a frequent-flier when it comes to receiving God’s grace in this way. And every time, God has clothed me again and sent his holy angels to minister to me. He will do the same for you.

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