Author: John Drymon

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

It will be no surprise to you that I’ve never been of the opinion that all religions were just paths up the same mountain, because I believe with all my heart that Jesus Christ is not only the fullest expression we’ve ever seen of godliness, but that he was and is none other than God (full stop). But Paul’s sermon to the Athenians strikes me as providing an important caveat to this view.

“Men of Athens,” he says, “I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” Of course, he could be speaking ironically, and no doubt “religious” meant something very different in Greek–and in English before the nineteenth century, for that matter–than it does today. Specifically, the definition of “religion” had to do with one’s practice of piety rather than any particular set of doctrines and practices which constitute distinct faiths; this is an important distinction.

But then Paul uses several Greek words which should give us pause. They’re all translated imprecisely in our English versions, a testament to the fact that the act of translation is always an act of interpretation. “[I] observed the objects of your worship” the RSV says, but in Greek it’s “I beheld your σεβεσματα” that is “devotions”. The RSV says “what therefore you worship as unknown”, in Greek is “what ignorantly you ευσεβειτε” or “are being devout to”. While the RSV gives a weak translation “served by human hands”, the Greek uses a word with stronger religious significance: “θεραπευται” meaning something like “attending to”.

Devotion and attendance. These are the actions of sincere worship. This is the language that would have been used for priests of God’s temple in Jerusalem, and they are still used (if, sadly, less often) to describe what we do in church. They are words implying a response of love and commitment and genuine conviction. I try, sometimes, to model a language of worship. It is not preciousness but precision; not meaningless grandiloquence (I hope) but appropriate care for that which is, I believe, sacred. So, we don’t just put on a church service, but we devote ourselves to prayer. We don’t just “serve Communion,” but we attend to the holy sacrifice.

Now the problem with the Athenians was not that their love and commitment and conviction (their devotion and attendance) was insincere; rather, it was simply misplaced. They were devoted to objects unworthy of devotion; they attended to pagan idols rather than to the ministrations offered to the God of Israel. They are not being let off the hook. Nonetheless, Paul’s language acknowledges what might be fairly called heartfelt religion. We can see in the Athenians this nascent desire to reach out to what is greater and truer than their ordinary lives. In other words, they have an inherent disposition to religion, and it’s more a matter of directing that devotion and attendance to its rightful recipient. Paul even goes so far as to suggest that some have felt inklings of this truth before having heard the Christian Gospel: “Even some of your poets have said, ‘For we indeed are his offspring.’”

Critics of religious studies as a discipline with whom I became enamored as an undergraduate suggested that “religion” was not a category into which we could place the various paganisms outside Christendom, and this was the position I held for some time in my more callow youth. What Paul suggests, though, is that things are not so clear-cut. The seeds of faith, of true religion, may well be innate. We are disposed to worship the one true God who created us and to worship Him rightly; we just need to be told about the Way.

This is good news for we who are called to labor in the fields of the Lord. The fields are more ready for harvest than we might have imagined, because God has given all His children a keen disposition to seek Him out even before they know his name. When we, like Saint Paul, share the hope that is in us, when we point to the statue of the unnamed god and say “I know his name, it is the blessed name of Jesus, which has been exalted over every name”, then we may well be surprised to find an audience open to that very possibility. We may well find an audience that has been eagerly waiting for that Good News without even having realized it.

+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 about a half dozen home-bound people to whom I take Holy Communion each month and with whom I have a time of conversation. One of these people (and don’t ask me to give any identifying information or try to speculate who I’m talking about, because you’ll guess wrong) knowing that she’s not going to be in this world for too much longer has become increasingly concerned about how she’s not done enough to merit entrance into heaven. She says things like “I’m relying on you to put in a good word for me, Father John.” She has a relative who sends her bible readings or devotionals or something on a daily basis, and her take-away is something like “it’s telling me all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m not doing them.” I want to say that either this can’t be the point of these things you’re getting or else it’s based on tremendously bad theology and should be ignored as much as possible, particularly at this point in her life.

It all reminds me that as much as one can say that the Gospel is about God’s free gift to us, our reconciliation to him by nothing more nor less than Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, enslavement to the Law and reliance on works-righteousness is a pernicious evil which even my most strident defenses of the sufficiency of Grace are hard-pressed to begin to dispel from the anxious soul of one being continually reminded that he or she must just “be good.” Whatever form our moralism takes, and whether it’s directed against others or creates anxiety and scrupulosity in our own souls, the message of Grace is offensive in the most wonderful, liberating way. Thus can St. Stephen pray with confidence that even the sin of those who martyred him would not be held against them.

This is the Good News we hear in today’s Gospel, taken from the fourteenth chapter of John. Jesus spoke these words at the Last Supper, the very night before he was himself to be killed and to pray with confidence to the Father that his own murderers would be forgiven. This is one of the options for the Gospel at funerals in this church, and perhaps the most popular for obvious reasons. Christ’s comforting command “let not your hearts be troubled” and his promise that he himself goes to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house are not, however, immediately understood.

Both Thomas and Philip seem to me to be caught up in the same anxiety as my friend I mentioned at the outset of the sermon. Show us the way. Show us the Father. We do not know the way. I think that these demands are a way of saying, “Lord, tell us what to do to be good enough to join you in heaven.” Give us a road map, give us step-by-step instructions on what good works we must do to merit a place in your Kingdom. How do we earn this?

Jesus rejects the premise of the question. Instead of a set of rules or a to-do list he gives them himself. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” Yes, he promises that in coming to him, in believing in him, in being in relationship with him, the apostles and we would be empowered to do great works. But the way to the Father’s house would already be secured, and the works would not serve for self-justification but to display glory of God.

I want to ask you to think of a place that feels like home to you. It could be the town you grew up in. It could be a grandparent’s house. It could be your college campus. It could be a place you went on vacation and have fond memories of. It could be this church, and I hope it is for some of you. It could be anywhere. Does that place feel like home to you because the weather was pleasant or because it had nice amenities or because it was selected as top micropolitan area by Site Selection Magazine a thousand years in a row or whatever it is? I suspect not. I suspect it’s because of relationships with other people you had or have in that place. The city I grew up in was determined by a Gallup poll a few years ago to be “one of the eleven most miserable cities in the United States.” But it still feels “homey” to me because of the relationships I had with people there.

Why is heaven our home? We know precious little from scripture about what the life of the world to come will be like. One thing we do know, is that we will be there with each other and, most importantly, with Jesus for ever. He’s gone to prepare a place, not because we’ve earned the right to attend a graduation party or a retirement party or something. Why? “So that where I am you may be also.” Because he wants to be with us for eternity. Because he loves us, and because with what little love we have, we love him too. I’ve not earned that love. Frankly, I’ve not earned anyone’s love. That’s not how love works. That’s not why we’ve been given each of us to each other in this life. We have, rather, been created and redeemed simply to share unearned love with each other in reflection of the only one who ever earned it, in preparation for the fulsome experience of that love in eternity.

+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.

Two images have struck me this week as we are given our yearly reminder that Jesus being the Good Shepherd means that all we are like sheep (prone, as the Prophet Isaiah put it, to going astray). First, last summer Annie and I went to the county fair and saw one of her friend’s children showing a sheep. I’ve joked before about how I’m a “city boy”. I admit that I’d never seen anything like this before. I once saw a demonstration of a dog herding sheep, but I’d never seen a person dealing with livestock, and it became clear pretty quickly that some of the beasts were more inclined to being handled and directed by their young shepherds than others, to say the least.

The second image was from yesterday, at Bishop Jolly’s consecration. It was a beautiful liturgy with many moving moments. One of the loveliest elements was when all of the current and former bishops of Ohio presented Bishop Jolly with her crozier, the staff which symbolizes her role as shepherd of the flock which is this diocese. Most of you have seen a bishop with a crozier before, but one has to use one’s imagination to connect the symbol with the practical application of an actual shepherd’s crook. Well, not this one. You’ll get to see it when Bishop Jolly visits us in June, but I’ll tell you now, this is the first time I’ve seen a bishop’s crozier that looks like it could actually go round the neck of an actual full grown sheep, or the neck of a wayward diocesan priest for that matter. It recalled the moment a bit earlier in the liturgy, right before the consecration proper, when the co-consecrating bishop’s examine the bishop-elect. In response to one of the questions, pertaining to the bishop’s role as chief priest and pastor of her diocese, to which the ordinand answers “I will, in the name of Christ, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.”

If you’re anything like me, as I’ve said before on this Sunday, you probably don’t like to be compared to a sheep. But look again at what Jesus is saying. “The sheep follow [the shepherd] because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Perhaps we’ve underestimated the sheep. As smelly and dumb as they may seem, as prone to straying as they are, they know that their well-being is dependent on the shepherd. They are hard-wired, through the history of their domestication, to follow the leader. They know that their safety is dependent on doing so, and they’re smart enough at least to be able to discern between one who will lead them to safety and one who will steal them away.

I wonder if most of us are this discerning. Even those of us who are intuitive enough to discern someone who’s genuine from a con-man most of the time, can nonetheless throw our lot in with a sheep-thief. I don’t just mean that we can fall in with a rough crowd, though for some that is an issue. I mean we can totally misplace our confidence, failing to follow the Good Shepherd in favor of some other leader.

And it should be no surprise that for us modern people the most common thief one might trust instead of the Good Shepherd is none other than oneself. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves, and our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We say “God helps those who help themselves” (which I hope you know, comes neither from the bible nor from a Christian thinker), we say we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and we believe seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is a weakness.

It is far more difficult for us to follow. On this level the sheep might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path. They can recognize the shepherd’s voice, and they know they’re in trouble when they don’t hear it. We humans are so smart that we can convince ourselves that we’re going the right way when we aren’t. We tell ourselves that on the path of life there’s no need to pull over to the gas station to ask for directions or to turn on the GPS device in our car, because we’re smarter than that, by gosh.

So, maybe, we shouldn’t get offended when we’re called sheep. Maybe there’s something we can learn from those silly beasts after all. Maybe we can learn that we should cultivate enough humility that we can be led by another. The Good Shepherd is always ready to lead our unruly hearts, but we must be humble enough to receive his direction. Christ is ready to bring us to the heavenly banquet, his rod correcting us and his staff comforting us along the way, but we can’t be haughty or we’ll strike out on our own, thinking our own directions better. We already find ourselves in the flock, which is Christ’s Church, and the shepherd is leading us as we hear his direction in scripture and prayer and in the breaking of bread. If, then, we are modest enough to listen, to listen carefully to the voice of the Shepherd, we may rest assured that we will be led to the springs of the water of life and will dwell with God in eternity.

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