Author: John Drymon

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

There has been a TikTok trend which has not only taken social media by storm in recent weeks but which has received some coverage in traditional media, with articles in the New York Times and the the Washington Post. Women have been asking men in their lives (husbands, boyfriends, brothers, &c.) how frequently they think about the Roman Empire, and the answer is usually “every day.” Now I think this trend, funny as it may be, unnecessarily plays into gender stereotypes. Perhaps because I am married to a classics major, but I think there are plenty of women who think about the Roman Empire just as frequently as men. What’s more, if you asked me the question, I would give the following answer: I think about the Roman Empire pretty frequently. But I think about the Achaemenid Empire even more frequently.

As it happens, our lessons this morning have made us consider both of these Empires. It is the Caesar, the Roman Emperor (namely Tiberius), who would have been on the coin with which the pharisees are trying to trap Jesus and this event, while proving that Jesus was very clever, might leave us with more questions than answers about the nature of the state, the secular authority, in terms of our obligations and God’s provision of a different sort of Kingdom.

That said, perhaps because of what I said earlier, I find the question raised by this morning’s Old Testament lesson even more fascinating, as it makes us think about the Achaemenid Empire of ancient Persia and its founding emperor, Cyrus the Great. For one thing, and to oversimplify to some extent, biblical history while generally seeing the Romans as “the baddies” (St. Paul’s insistence that all authority is established by God and that the church should pray for the emperor, notwithstanding), the Persians are generally seen as the “good guys” in the biblical story. I think I might have said from this pupit before that the Achaemenid Empire should get more credit in both history classes and pop culture, particularly the latter, in response to the very stupid film about the Battle of Thermopylae–Three Hundred–which got the baddies and the goodies flipped.

Anywayn Isaiah’s prophecy in this morning’s lesson comes at the climax of a fascinating period of history which I think interesting to enough to rehearse briefly, because it makes this morning’s Old Testament lesson all the more surprising. So, on with a bit of a history lesson, and apologies if it seems dry to some. I for one find it to be a really enthralling story.

If you follow the daily office lectionary, you’ve been hearing a great deal of the background of this morning’s Old Testament over the past couple of weeks in morning prayer. To bring you up to speed, the last great king of Judah, Josiah, had done what none of his predecessors had managed- namely, large scale religious and political reform. Though Judah was a client state of Assyria, Josiah managed to tear down the altars of foreign gods and encourage the worship of Israel’s god alone. He used tax revenue not to underwrite the monarchy’s expenses but to undertake a significant renovation of the Temple. Sadly, when Josiah died in the year 609 B.C. a whole series of bad kings followed. Josiah’s son, Jehoahaz, ignored his father’s reforms and was captured only three months into his reign after an ill-advised war with Egypt. Jehoahaz’s brother Jehoiakim was installed in his place by the Egyptian conquerors, but his eleven year reign was defined by his apparently constantly shifting allegiance between Egypt and Babylon who were at war with each other, and, worst of all, after facing criticism by the prophet Jeremiah, he undertook a policy of burning the prophet’s writings. Finally, Jehoiakim’s son, Jeconiah, only managed to rule for three months and ten days before he allowed Jerusalem to fall to the Babylonians and the best and brightest of Judah to be sent into exile throughout the Babylonian Empire on 16 March in the year 597 B.C.

Now, skip forward almost sixty years. Jerusalem had fallen, leaving only a puppet monarchy and the poorest of the poor remaining in Judah. Educated and wealthy Jews had established communities throughout Babylon, leading to an increased nationalistic and religious fervor which the Empire had sought to quash by its program of forced exile. This was a period in which the Jews learned how to maintain their Judaism, their connection to the God of Israel, outside the land given to their forefathers and without the benefit of temple worship. For the common Jew, this meant an increased attention to kashrut, faithfulness in observing the laws of purity and morality found in the Torah. For scholars, it meant not only an increased attention to studying the Law (the beginnings of modern, Rabbinical Judaism) but also an explosion of creativity. It is not in Israel but in Babylon that much of what we call the Old Testament was finally written down.

It should be noted that the Jews were unique in the ancient world in being able to maintain their culture and religion and stave off assimilation after deportation. Ancient empires did this frequently because it always worked, except for this one exception. The northern kingdom of Samaria had experienced the same thing a hundred and fifty years earlier than Judah (in Samaria’s case, at the hands of the Assyrian Empire) and despite what conspiracy theorists and Mormons might tell you, the ten lost tribes of Israel were actually lost, assimilating into the empire of their conquerors. The Babylonian Jews, then, remain the one notable exception, and I’m perfectly comfortable in attributing this to Divine Providence.

More and more, while in Babylon, the Jews realized that they could only follow the God of Israel in the manner they desired by returning to the land and rebuilding the temple. The only problem was, they had no army and a couple generations of life in exile had made repatriation seem little more than wishful thinking.

But then, something unexpected happened. The Word of the Lord came not just to the prophet but to one identified in this morning’s lesson as God’s “anointed”. Indeed, considering that Isaiah himself was holed up in Babylon, we might assume that this prophecy was not even mediated through the prophet to this “anointed one” but went directly from God to him, 500 miles away from Babylon in the Persian city of Susa.

And who was this “anointed one”? Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of Persia. God says to Cyrus that He has “called [him] by name. I surname you,” God says, “though you do not know me… I gird you, though you do not know me.” God chose not one of His own chosen people, but a king following a foreign religion (though, arguably the only monotheistic religion at the time aside from Judaism) to bring deliverance to the Jews.

We Christians often miss this part of the story because we read Isaiah on one level when there are at least two levels on which the prophecies function. Isaiah most certainly points to Jesus Himself as his people’s redeemer, but on another level he also point’s to King Cyrus. It’s not a matter of figuring out when the prophet speaks about one or the other; he can be understood as speaking of both in the same breath, a difficult thing for us literal-thinking modern people to get our minds around.

Anyhow, there is more in this than a history lesson with a twist at the end, because I think the twist-ending itself gives us an important lesson about who God is. We talk so much about coming to know God more fully, but we miss what is arguably more important- namely, that God knows us fully. To Cyrus, the God of Israel, if he had even heard of him, would have been a minor tribal god. He probably wouldn’t have seen this strange religion of displaced Jews as being particularly interesting. But God knew Cyrus, just as he knows each of us: completely. Because God knew Cyrus before Cyrus knew Him, this foreign king was made an instrument of the one true God.

The fact is we can never fully know God. We project all sorts of cultural and personal biases onto Him, and getting an even slightly clearer image of Him is a life’s work. I believe that even those who reject God most vociferously are often rejecting not God Himself but some inaccurate image which they’ve conjured up in their minds or which has been created by poor catechesis—some white-bearded chap who lives in the clouds who has less to do with the God of Israel and of Jesus than it does with our own hang-ups.

That being the case, the Good News is that however skewed our image of God is, God’s image of us is perfect. God knows us fully and can employ the greater angels of our nature, made perfect in Christ Jesus, to do His Will even when we don’t realize He’s doing it. It is a great God who can take some pagan Persian king to be a channel of his peace and deliverance. It is a great God who can take us, confused and sinful as we are, to be instruments of the Gospel in our old world. May our ignorance of God be overshadowed by God’s perfect knowledge of us, and may His perfect love find a home in the hearts who as yet do not know Him at all.

+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.

There are some people who are perpetually underdressed and some who and some people who are perpetually overdressed. I fall into the latter category. I was shocked the first time we went to the Toledo opera and I realized that I was only person in the room wearing a tuxedo. I am rarely seen in shirtsleeves, even during the dog days of summer. My former bishop back in Arkansas once told me that his mother had always said, “be sure to wear a jacket, because you never know when you’ll be appearing before a judge.” Anyway, if one were to err one one side or the other, I think being overdressed seems the safer option, and the parable in this morning’s Gospel seems to agree.

The parable we just heard might be one of the most bizarre of Jesus’ parables. It starts out predictably enough. It seems a rather simple allegory at first. If we were to read it as a simple allegory, there were those invited to the banquet (representing the children of Israel), and the king’s slaves (representing the prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the New) go out to remind them that they had better come, but they refuse. So, the slaves go out and recruit all sorts and conditions of people—both bad and good—to take the place of the missing guests. This motley group of people is us- the saints and sinners who have been given Grace to attend the feast here at our altar and in the Kingdom on the last day, despite being gentile sinnners. It all seems simple enough.

But then Jesus throws us a curve ball. Who in the world is this poorly dressed guest and why does the king deal so harshly with him?

On our honeymoon, Annie and I stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria (not the sort of place we’d normally stay, I note, but it was our honeymoon). Said hotel banned things like jeans and tennis shoes in the lobby, and if you broke the rules you might get a nasty look. But the concierge wouldn’t bind you and cast you out into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (though, I suppose for some who frequent fancy Manhattan establishments, getting one’s lunch at the hotdog stand outside might be one’s idea of hell). We might think that the caliber of guests who finally showed up at the banquet would mean that many were uncouth enough to forgo a wedding robe or simply too poor to own one! At first blush, the king seems rather capricious and uncharitable.

Biblical scholars have engaged in a great deal of work to try to explain this. Some have suggested that the wedding robe would have been a garment which a host would provide for those who came without one, like loaner jackets at upscale restaurants (still a phenomenon when I lived in New York a decade-and-a-half ago, though I suspect this practice might have gone by the wayside). If that were the case, the guest in question must have refused to follow a dress code when compliance would have been easy enough. The truth, though, is that we just don’t know enough about the customs of First Century Palestine to say for certain if this would have been the case.

Fortunately, I don’t think a knowledge of ancient wedding practices really matters so much in this instance. What we have here is not a simple allegory, but a parable in which the symbols don’t necessarily have a perfect relationship to the realities they symbolize. What matters is not how precisely wedding robes were distributed but the fact that the guest doesn’t have one on. Our work, then, is to figure out what the robe symbolizes.

There are two prevailing theories from the most ancient of Christian writers. In the interest of full disclosure, I tend toward the second of these options, which will be no surprise.

The first is found in St. John Chrysostom in his homily on this text says that while the invitation is “grace” the garment is “life and practice”. Others, St. Augustine among them, would agree. The implication of this view is that one’s response to Grace, namely Faith as it is manifest in good works, is necessary if we are to attend the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the heavenly banquet. To comply with the dress code of heaven, we must weave a robe with the threads of righteousness. This meshes nicely with the Epistle General of St. James. “Faith without works is dead.”

Ireneaus and Tertullian hold the opposite view, which I find more compelling. The wedding garment itself is Sanctifying Grace freely given. We may, of course, take off the garment, like the wedding guest, but it’s given to us in Baptism whether we want it or not. It is notable that in the Baptisms of the Early Church, the baptizand—whether infant or adult—would be baptized naked. For adults being baptized, this would mean only Christians of their own gender would be present for the Baptism, and it’s likely the reason for the ordination of female deacons from very early in the church’s history, a practice sadly stamped out relatively early on, only renewed in our Communion in the last Century, and sadly still not embraced in others. Perhaps the Roman Catholics’ forthcoming, so-called “synod on synadolity” will be a hopeful baby step in the right direction, but I ought not get into the internal politics of a church not my own, so I won’t opine or speculate further along those lines in a sermon.

Anyway, after emerging from the water, the new Christian would be clothed in a white robe to symbolize his or her regeneration- that person’s status as a new creation. While we cannot know for certain, the wedding garment in this parable might be not-too-subtly related to the baptismal garment of early church practice.

Whatever that wedding robe is meant to symbolize, though, we can pray that we’ll see plenty of people following the heavenly dress code on that day when we reach the other shore. Thank heavens scripture tells us we will see a multitude dressed in white before the throne, all sorts and conditions being summoned from the highways of this old world to attend the greatest wedding feast of all.

+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.

Many of you know that I generally have little time for debates about how the church should or shouldn’t employ certain language which might rub against contemporary norms, not that they’re unimportant, but mostly because I find there are more important issues in theology and Christian ethics, and frankly, I find those issues more interesting. Further, in an age where it seems to me our chief focus as the Episcopal Church, and as Christian churches more broadly, needs to be in the areas of Evangelization and Discipleship, endless conversations about what pronouns to use for each person of the Trinity seems increasingly like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

One of the issues which gets brought up fairly frequently in scholarly circles which I’ve tended not to worry terribly much about is the charge of anti-Semitism (or, more properly, anti-Judaism) in the Bible. With the exception of the author of Luke and Acts, every person who had a hand in writing the Bible was Jewish. Thus, even when John’s Gospel—the most frequent object of the charges of biblical anti-Semitism—refers to the “bad guys” as “the Jews”, we are seeing an internal division within Judaism between a group of Jewish leaders and a different group of Jews who were thrown out of the synagogue for following Christ. Trusting preachers to highlight this distinction seems a better course than, for example, endless wrangling over revising the Holy Week liturgies.

Despite my initial lack of interest in what I take to be a largely manufactured issue, all of this morning’s lessons can be taken in a way which might prove problematic, to employ an overused phrase. Rather than excise them from the lectionary, though, being exposed to them and realizing they are not what they may first seem is, I think profitable.

So, in the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah, we hear the word of God as given to the prophet which suggests that God has become very angry at His people. Because God looked for justice and righteousness in Israel and found the opposite, he has sworn to tear down the hedge which protects His chosen people from the ungodly who would devour the Promised Land.

The Psalm adds a later perspective, after the judgment proclaimed in Isaiah had taken place. The psalmist cries out to his Lord in words which seem to charge God with abandonment. While the God of Israel had planted a vineyard, He had indeed torn down its walls. The psalmist casts an accusatory “why?” and in what seems to be a defiant reminder to God of His own responsibility to His own people, the psalmist says:

Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven;
behold and tend this vine; *
preserve what your right hand has planted.

The Psalm we just read was not a song of praise but of protest, protest against none other than God Himself!

Shifting to the New Testament, Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, reflects on his Jewish bona fides:

[C]ircumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless.

He immediately responds to this by claiming that he counts this rather impressive CV of Jewish piety as loss; he seems to be rejecting his own heritage and its value system. Indeed, he calls it “refuse” in our translation. The word Paul actually uses here is σκύβαλα,which is, lets just say, a somewhat ruder word than “refuse.” I’ll refrain from providing a list of possible English equivalents from this pulpit.

Finally, Jesus’ parable in Matthew appears to take things a step further. It is no longer an angry God (the landowner) who has despoiled the heritage of Israel, but the Israelites themselves, the evil tenants who killed the landowner’s messengers, the prophets.

The lectionary today has done a very dangerous thing in throwing all four of these reading at us in one day because, to be frank, they’ve made the assumption that the preacher who is given these texts to explain is not an idiot. We might assume that the majority of the clergy are smart enough to avoid the false conclusion these four reading might suggest when taken out of context, but, what I said at the outset of this sermon notwithstanding, centuries of Christian anti-Semitism stand as evidence against the claim that such an assumption is a safe one. Medieval persecution of Jews which were believed to have poisoned water holes and defrauded debtors were more than occasionally “egged on” by stupid clergy. A case can be made that there was more compliance than confrontation from the churches when facing the catastrophe which was the holocaust, and much of this might be attributed to the false and offensive belief that the Jews killed Jesus. Even today, there are sadly many who call themselves Christian but reject God’s own people and Jesus’ own religion and have traded in the Good News of the God of Israel for, anti-Christian “blood and soil” rhetoric. It is almost refreshing when these frightening people trade in their oxymoronic claim to be “Christian nationalists” and just go all the way in worshiping Odin and Thor and so-forth (the religious worldview of pre-Christian heathenry being much more in keeping with that ugly political worldview).

So, how do we marry what I hope is our wholesale rejection of so-called Christian anti-Semitism with an appreciation of this morning’s lessons as being part of the inspired Word of God? I think Jesus’ own words can and should be our starting point. After he shares the parable, he asked his audience what should be done with the evil tenants, and they respond without charity and apparently (considering the fact that Jesus’ audience was Jewish) with a lack of understanding of the referents of his parable:

They said to him, “He [the landowner] will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”

Jesus’ Jewish audience gives the argument which an anti-Semite might, because they didn’t understand the parable either.

Jesus immediately recognizes where this is going and he rejects the position:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

`The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner;
this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

Far from rejecting His people, God has come to give them a new and everlasting foundation, indeed to make them part of the foundation which cannot be shaken. There is a great deal that could be said by manner of explicating this, for which there is not nearly time enough in this sermon. For the initial questions which arise from Jesus’ words here, I would, for now, refer you to St. Paul’s argument in the Epistle to the Romans, particularly the eleventh chapter, which I know I gave a lesson on not too many months ago, in which the Apostle states without reservation that God has not by any means rejected His people, and that with regard to election, the faithful Jew (even if he does not recognize Jesus’ status as Messiah) is guaranteed salvation due to God’s irrevocable promise to his forefathers.

The Good News here for Christian or Jew is that God does not engage in breach of contract. God keeps His promises to Jew and Christian; He’ll never be so short on Grace that he has to cut back benefits or apply a means test, and for this we can be truly and eternally grateful.

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