Author: John Drymon

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

Our Gospel lesson this morning skips five verses. Some of you have heard me say before that whenever the lectionary does this, we should pay attention, because there is probably a reason. So, between Jesus’ denunciation of petulant hypocrisy from those who wish to find any reason whatsoever to reject both himself and John the Baptist and his comforting, if counter-intuitive words regarding the simplicity and ease of following the Way of the Cross, we should have heard this:
Then he began to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chora’zin! woe to you, Beth-sa’ida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Caper’na-um, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.”
In case the geographical names confused you, Jesus is railing against cities populated by faithful Jews, his own countrymen, declaring that his saving message would have been welcomed in communities by populated by Gentiles and notorious sinners. “Woe to you, Findlay, Ohio, because if these works had been done in Tehran or Las Vegas, they would have repented long ago.”
I believe this statement is more than Jesus engaging in rhetorical hyperbole. I think what he was saying was literally true. Why? Because to accept the salvation Christ offers one needs to recognize his or her need for a savior. And for that to happen, it certainly helps if one can see the beam in his own eye rather than the specks in others. One needs to be convicted of his or her own sin, and this is simply easier for those whose sins are great.
I had a friend once who said that if he were a priest who could conjure his own congregation out of thin air and populate it with whomever he wanted, he’d have a church full of alcoholics and drug addicts. Can you see why? These are folks who can recognize that they need God to pull them out of their misery, because they can’t do it on their own. Now, that’s the case for every single human being. We all need saving, and none of us can save himself. But someone whose life is and always has been pretty “normal” (whatever that means) can have a harder time seeing it. The man or woman who has always been a responsible citizen can be spared (ironically) from the hard and necessary realization that we are all like St. Paul, who recognized that he did not do what he wanted to do, but rather the very thing he hated. The less socially acceptable one’s struggle, the easier the way is to being brought to one’s knees. A secret resentment or chauvinism or covetousness can be brushed aside as minor compared to something more apparently flagrant or criminal, even while we’re all in the same boat with regard to original sin and our fallen nature.
In the case of Jesus saying “woe” to Chorazin and Bethsaida and Capernaum, it is ethno-religious chauvinism specifically that frustrates the mission. This can be a hard teaching during this weekend when we celebrate our own country’s semiquincentennial, and I don’t want to focus on that too much, except to say that I don’t see anything in the world wrong with the sort of patriotism that holds us together as a commonwealth as people grateful for our blessings and striving to extend liberties to all, but when that edges across a fine line into thinking our passports make us better than somebody else, or less liable to God’s judgment, then we’ve fallen into sinful pride. That’s a fine line, and I’ll leave it to you to determine how that plays out personally or collectively.
In all events, that chauvinistic ethno-religious impulse is just one of the many factors that can insulate one from a necessary moral and spiritual self-reckoning. It could be wealth or respectability or just good luck. It could be an inclination toward moral relativism—my sins aren’t all that bad—in an age where we may sometimes have gone a little too far in enshrining self-esteem as a good in itself (perhaps an understandable over-correction from previous eras, but an over-correction nevertheless). Maybe it’s just as simple as distraction. There’s no time for contemplating the health of one’s soul when there’s so much on social media to get us artificially outside ourselves.
Whatever it is, we could all benefit from an examination of conscience on a fairly regular basis, because if we do that in an honest and thoroughgoing manner we will all be convinced that we cannot in fact do it on our own. By “it”, I don’t just mean “save our souls” but also “live a truly happy life.”
And that’s where we finally get to the good news. When we’ve done that hard work, we get to rest in the infinite grace and mercy of a loving God who wants only to forgive us and help us on the way. We get to take on that easy yoke, that light burden, where we finally let God do the heavy lifting for us. We’ll fall into sinful self-will again from time to time, we’ll remove the easy yoke and try to pull a plow with our pinky fingers, and then we can do it again, knowing that each time we’ve made a little progress on the pilgrim path through life toward finally, fully appreciating the perfect rest of God.
+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 must admit, this morning’s Gospel reading always makes me a bit embarrassed when it comes up. The apostles are instructed to lead peripatetic, itinerant lives as heralds of the Gospel. “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff.” No wonder the second half of this morning’s gospel which begins with those words is optional in our lectionary. It’s a discomfiting reminder. Here I am with a stipend and a rectory and a pension and plenty of changes of clothes.
I guess this is just the nature of serving an established institution versus a nascent movement and these are just the concessions we make to the world we live in, but I hope this stark difference between the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed and the lifestyle of the apostles continues to make me a bit uncomfortable, lest I become complacent merely relying on an institution and forgetting about being a laborer in a pilgrim church.
It seems to me that the more important reminder in these words is not necessarily that each of us is individually called to a kind of unsettled lifestyle, but that the Church herself is always being called to this vocation, to be a sort of apostolic, evangelistic pilgrim in a world which may sometimes accept but will often reject its message of radical love and the healing of social ills and the proclamation of salvation coming from outside us- frustrating our designs for control and self-sufficiency.
This is especially hard for us to grasp, though, considering our history, particularly as Anglican Christians. Our heritage is that of a state-sponsored religion before our establishment on this continent, and even after disestablishment in the newly formed United States, we remained a sort of de-facto state church. We’ve got the national cathedral and the famous, for better or worse, claim of being “the church of the presidents.” We’ve got our cathedral in Washington (the epicenter of political power) and our church center in New York (our nation’s financial and media capital) because for a long time people really cared about what the Episcopal Church might have to say about the issues of the day.
Now, here is a hard teaching. That’s probably not what we are anymore. Converting to the episcopal church to get ahead in politics or business hasn’t been a thing for decades, and I say thank God for that.
There is some really good news here, I think. I believe we are at a point where the church is, for the first time in centuries, given the opportunity to go out without gold and silver and extra tunics and sandals, to live into the apostolic vocation. This is not an easy thing; it is a great challenge, in fact. Even so, it is a tremendous gospel opportunity. When all the nonsense is stripped away, when all the worldly, practical reasons for following (or claiming to follow) the Lord Jesus Christ are no longer a matter of convenience, we can get back to the heart of the matter. This isn’t about winning friends and influencing people. This isn’t about getting ahead in life. This isn’t even about having a bully pulpit before the princes of this world. It’s about following Jesus, loving those he gave us to love, and inviting others to share in the same pilgrim journey. Wealth and power and prestige can, of course, be a great blessing for the church or for a person if the institution or the individual is very careful to use those gifts faithfully. However, they can easily become dangers and distractions and even idols if the central message of Christ’s saving work becomes obscured by their trappings.
When I think about this delicate balance, threading that needle with a camel to use Jesus’ own image, and how more straightened circumstances can be a blessing in disguise, I am often reminded of a wonderful hymn by an unlikely modern saint. The hymn is “O God of Earth and Altar” and its author, the great apologist and critic G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was an English convert to Roman Catholicism, active in the early twentieth century- after Catholic emancipation in England but while practicing that form of Christianity was still extremely unpopular and considered unpatriotic. So he knew what it was for one’s faith to lack power and prestige in a way we Anglicans, as I mentioned, now need to come to terms with for the sake of following Christ alone. Sadly, I choose hymns sometimes months in advance, so I didn’t select Chesterton’s as one to sing this morning, but I think his words capture beautifully both the challenge and the opportunity we have as Christians in the 21st Century to reevaluate what’s really important for the future not just of our institutions but, more importantly, of our efforts to bring that saving message to all the world. And so, I will conclude this sermon with that text:
O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord.

Tie in a living tether
The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together,
Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation
Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation,
A single sword to thee.

+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.