Author: John Drymon

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

And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

These are not particularly cheerful words during a season in which the culture-at-large tells us that it’s time to start celebrating Christmas. I’d guess that most of you here have been more-or-less successfully catechized to know that there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, a distinction which the church continues to maintain despite the fact that it seems that Christmas in the secular culture seems to keep expanding to envelope about the last quarter of every year.

I must admit that I used to be rather rigid about keeping this distinction in my own personal practice, but I’ve loosened up significantly I have already watched three Christmas movies this year, before Advent even began–The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (which I mentioned in a sermon several weeks ago), the so bad it’s good Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Jingle All the Way, and the surprisingly actually pretty good Will Ferrell movie Elf. Not only have I grown more lax, but I’ve grown more sentimental, obviously. There’s nothing wrong with this, I’ve come to learn, but it does make observing Advent as a distinct season a bit trickier for me. It’s still worth acknowledging, though, that we’ve not made it to Christmas yet, and there’s some spiritual work to do over the next several weeks, even if it’s okay to cheat a bit.

All this is well-trod ground for us, but I think that sometimes we say there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, but we don’t quite acknowledge what precisely the distinction is, or, more to the point, what Advent is really all about. We sometimes say that it is to prepare us spiritually for Christmas, a sort of fast before the feast in the same way that Lent prepares us for Easter. This is true to a certain extent. Advent is a season of penitential expectation, which we reflect in the way in which our liturgy changes and becomes more penitential and traditional. But there is a whole other theme in Advent which we sometimes shy away from: namely the second coming of Christ.

It should be no surprise that we tend to forget this part of the story, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. As I’ve said before, we in the Christian mainstream have basically ceded this topic to fundamentalists, and that’s too bad, because there is a great deal of hope to be found in scripture’s account of the second advent of Christ. It’s not just weird, scary stuff.

Remember that seemingly scary passage from the Gospel reading with which I opened the sermon: the nations are in perplexity, people are fainting with fear, the seas roar, and the heavens shake? Here’s what comes next.

And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

We get caught up in the nasty bits and we forget that the Gospel is Good News. We forget that it’s not about God inflicting turmoil on the world, but about God coming to us in the midst of turmoil and, through Jesus Christ, setting all things right.

What our Lord is on about in this morning’s Gospel is that when things seem to be absolutely as horrible as they can possibly be, God is there ready to step in and establish justice and peace, to bring about the Kingdom of God. Our Old Testament lesson from Jeremiah is about the same thing. Prior to the lesson we heard, Jeremiah speaks of the desolation of Israel and Judah, but it ends up in what we heard this morning- the fulfillment of the promise and justice and righteousness abounding in the land.

We do pray for this every week for heaven’s sake: thy kingdom come. We pray for it because it’s a good thing. Please permit me to take a liberty and just suggest that there are some things not worth worrying about (if I explained why in detail it would take longer than anybody here wants to listen to a sermon, and I have covered it in detail in other sermons): Don’t worry about some people getting raptured up and others left behind. Some very poor biblical scholars basically invented that idea. Don’t worry about the wrath of God coming down to give you your just deserts for minor infractions. This religion we’re a part of is about grace, not judgment. Don’t worry too much about the whole world going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t mean to say “don’t worry at all” or “don’t work to make it better.” That is certainly our call. Even so, scripture promises that just when things seem most bleak, God is near at hand. God will, at the end of days, come and make all things new.

So, that’s really the upshot, here. Don’t freak out. God is on our side. God will keep us safe. God will establish a kingdom without end. Watch for it and pray for it.

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 Spirit. Amen.

Yesterday Victoria and Joanie reaffirmed their Baptismal commitments and became card carrying Episcopalians, for which we congratulate them and will fete them at coffee hour today. Because the notice of yesterday’s deanery-wide confirmation service came rather late, I subjected them to a marathon class last week instead of several sessions. Anyway, one of the things that I always need to emphasize when we’re going through the church history portion, particularly since it’s such an uncomfortable part of our own Anglican identity, is the long history of conflict between religious and secular authorities in Western Europe.

Lest we think Henry VIII’s venality and concupiscence was an isolated incident, it’s important to realize that this was and remained a long-standing issue. This was particularly a problem with regard to the appointment of bishops and other prelates. The ancient practice of diocesan clergy or cathedral chapters electing bishops had been slowly but surely replaced by one of two alternatives–either the bishop of Rome (i.e., the pope) made the appointment, or the emperor or king or prince over the see in question did. Thus, there was constant wrangling between the Vatican and whoever happened to be on his bad side at the time–the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of France or the Grand Duke of Lithuania or whoever.

Naturally, the English were frequently on the naughty list, which reached a head during the reign of bad King John (of Robin Hood fame) whose spat with the Pope over the latter’s appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury in A.D. 1208, led not just to the former’s excommunication but a general papal interdict–meaning that for six years all churches in England and Wales were closed, administration of the sacraments was forbidden except to those nearing death, and even those fortunate souls could not be buried in the churchyard. Just imagine how awful it would be to be deprived of the solace of the church’s ministrations for so long. Thus when the barons confronted King John at Runnymede and made him sign Magna Carta (the document itself having been drafted by Archbishop Langton) the provision that the Church of England should remain free, meant it should be free from the King’s meddling, not the Pope’s. So, it’s not comfortable for me as an Anglican to admit, but three hundred years later Henry VIII established a scheme which was clearly unconstitutional, the exact opposite of what a “strict constructionist” might define as the Church of England’s freedom. All that said, as an American Episcopalian, I am relieved that the bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction here and equally relieved that the only authority King Charles III has that touches on our common life is that he technically still appoints the Archbishop of Canterbury, though in practice the monarch just chooses whoever a church commission tells the prime minister to tell the king to appoint.

The relatively new feast day which we celebrate today, Christ the King–which only came about in the Roman Catholic Church in 1925 and in our own in 1979–comes from a similarly messy history. While secularism and even atheistic regimes like the then-recently founded Soviet Union were genuine threats to the church’s flourishing (and religiosity more broadly) perhaps the most pressing concern which led to the establishment of Christ the King Sunday was the so-called “Roman Question.” The unification of Italy into a single kingdom in the Nineteenth Century had meant the church’s loss of secular authority and control of large swathes of territory and eventually the fall of Rome itself. Thus the pope was said to be a prisoner within his own, now extremely circumscribed domain, which would come to be known as Vatican City. Rapprochement only occurred with the Lateran treaties in which the church was given a rather raw deal by King Victor Emmanuel III and his Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini. In any event, the reiteration of Christ’s kingship with the establishment of its own festival day was meant as a not-so-subtle reminder to the faithful that whatever secular authorities might claim, Christ’s authority was supreme.

That being the case, we must note that even those insisting on the church’s freedom from secular control sometimes missed the point themselves, particularly considering the Roman Church’s claim to more than spiritual authority against the Kingdom of Italy. You see, the sort of Kingdom which is God’s and the sort of kingship which is Christ’s is not a mere argument for church authority in temporal affairs. It is, rather an entirely different sort of reign. Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel make this much clear. Pilate would not have understood what sort of kingdom Christ was claiming, his view of power being entirely concerned with control over men and nations. Christ’s Kingdom is different. It is not of this world or its values.

The King of Glory is a King whose law is love, and (as I’ve said from this pulpit before) Christian love is not about warm, sentimental feelings; it’s about treating those people we call brothers and sisters as if they really were our brothers and sisters. It’s about comforting the weak and feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and putting the stranger’s needs before our own.

the Kingship of Christ is not only different from the kingship of the emperor; it is diametrically opposed to the spirit of our age- the spirit which revels in individualism and so-called enlightened self interest. There is no place in the Kingdom for ethical egoism. I am not sure which is worse: an Emperor in Rome or a king in every man’s self-estimation. Whichever is worse, the latter is the contemporary sin, and it is more dangerous than the former at least as it regards our souls.

So our response to the Kingship of Christ is pretty simple. It is in loving sacrifice that we involve ourselves in Christ’s Kingship. It is in that remarkable paradox in which we see Christ reigning not only from His Throne of Glory, but from the Cross of Shame with a Crown bejeweled by thorns. Our own Glory, our own Kingship is bought on that more shameful throne with that most heavy crown, and our acceptance of the reign which Christ wishes to give us is a condition of our willingness to take up that Cross, put on that crown and follow.

+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.

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.