Author: John Drymon

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

The disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread. What has begun fascinates me about the story is the disciples’ lack of recognition up to the point of the meal they shared in Emmaus. We so often call the events we just heard about as “the road to Emmaus”, but we forget that the moment that made all the difference for Cleopas and the other disciple didn’t take place on the road at all, but at the dinner table.

So what about that long walk they all took together? Our risen Lord was engaging in a ministry that defined his earthly life just as much as breaking bread with his disciples; he was teaching the meaning of scripture, how the Law and the Prophets pointed to the coming reign of the Messiah. Later, the disciples would acknowledge that they felt their hearts burning within them during this conversation, yet the moment of recognition didn’t come until that more intimate act at dinner.

Perhaps the disiples’ delayed discovery surprises us, but it shouldn’t. We are exposed to compelling arguments and weighty evidence of some truth or another all the time, but without some kind of personal experience, the truth sometimes doesn’t sink in. We can hear facts and figures about problems in the world, but our hearts are rarely moved if we don’t see it. We live in a society in which a large proportion of people can hear compelling arguments about some scientific or medical proposition, let the listener understand, but refuse to believe the validity of said arguments until they see it first hand (even if the proposition at hand doesn’t lend itself to that mode of scrutiny). So, I’m not suggesting that our difficulty in accepting truths on the basis of persuasive evidence is a good thing. As the youngsters say “it [just] is what it is”. We are now—as post-modern people—more skeptical creatures than we’ve ever been (with regard to science and religion and politics and every other human endeavor), and that’s neither an altogether bad nor an altogether good thing.

That being the reality, we can learn a great deal from the disciples’ delayed recognition. If we are even more prone to withhold judgment than people in Jesus’ day, which I suspect we are, that affects how we go about evangelism.

If some in the church (particularly the mainline churches) have been sadly derelict in their duty to spread the Good News in recent decades, I think that discomfort is of precisely the same nature which causes others to be uncomfortable with the propagation of very different kinds of truth. Our discomfort may well stem from the very same post-modern rejection with absolute truth and the (to my mind) completely incoherent claim that what might be true for one need not be true for another.

If we truly believe that Christ is risen, we believe something stronger than the claim that “for me Christ is risen, but perhaps not to somebody who rejects my meta-narrative”. We believe Christ is risen. We’re making a claim which is just as true as “gravity exists” or “the earth orbits round the sun”. We’re not just using code language to point to some personal feeling. We’re making a claim about the truth of a fact, a fact which is not cotenable with every other religious claim everyone else in the world may make. So important is this truth, so potentially life-changing and world-changing is this truth, that we should find it to be a truth whose universal acceptance would be a good thing.

Our discomfort with this suggestion cripples our witness. A friend of mine once said that Episcopalian evangelism is like building the most beautiful, well-appointed boat ever constructed, taking it out into the middle of the ocean, and waiting for the fish to jump in. Needless to say, you’ll not catch many fish that way, but sadly I think the analogy rings truer than we’d like to admit.

But, considering the fact that the people we live among are more like those disciples on the road than we might have thought—considering the fact that we now have a couple generations of people who might not have read Heidegger or Derrida or Foucault, but who nonetheless share their rejection of modern logic and argumentation—our approach might need some tweaking, and Jesus is once again the model.

We’ll not convince many people that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” by setting forth propositional arguments. Some, perhaps (and this is why apologetics is still an important activity) but not many.

We may, however, help others see the risen Christ when we break bread with them. The good news of the Resurrection is not limited to what it means for us who have been baptized on the last day. The Resurrection also means that we’ve already been risen with Christ, and we, the Church, constitute his earthly body. So, when we nurture the kinds of intimate relationships with others that are manifested most powerfully in Christ’s breaking of the bread, we open a window of insight into the Christ of whom we are a part. We permit those who do not yet believe to have the opportunity for the same recognition experienced by the disciples.

Our earthly relationships are ideally reflections of the primary relationship God has with us. This is why the marriage rite makes clear that the love shared between husband and wife is a sign of the love “betwixt” Christ and his Church. This is why parents and godpartents are so intimately involved in the rite of Baptism. Our domestic community (that is, our household) as well as our ecclesial community (that is, our parish church) are primarily contexts in which we humans in very human ways try to reflect the love of God.

What we learn from this morning’s Gospel that the most compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is not to be found in any scientific enquiry, but rather in the love we show and are shown, and how in that love we point to the Christ who first loved us. May we be brought to daily conversion, to slowly turning ourselves back toward God when we experience the love His people show toward us, and may we break bread with others in the hopes that they, too, will catch a glimpse of the risen Christ.

+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.

This week we get our annual reminder of poor “Doubting Thomas.” In previous sermons on this text I said that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas.

So I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- viz., a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to to say anything definitive about it. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions, and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about something. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt. I happen to believe the deposit of faith is trustworthy because it developed by the direction of the Holy Spirit over the course of hundreds of years. Even if one doesn’t believe that, it seems to me manifestly obvious that I am not as smart as the Church Fathers, and edgelords on the internet sending tweets and making youtube videos are far less circumspect and careful in their analysis than those who wrestled with the finer points of the theology of, say, the Incarnation and the Resurrection within communities of faithful inquiry and Christian practice.

What if, however, we didn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness (or happiness to use the more literal translation of the Greek Μακάριος) of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by the seed of faith, no matter how small, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel.

So must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honestly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

+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 Ghost. Amen.

I looked back at my sermon from the last time we heard this Gospel reading three years ago, and it turns out that it was the first Sunday we were completely locked down due to Covid. In an attempt at levity in the midst of an otherwise very serious sermon I noted that Martha warned Jesus about opening the tomb, saying “Lord, by this time he stinketh”, and speculating that we might say the same thing after we were let out of our homes again, which at that time I said “in a few weeks.” Little did any of us know that it would be months.

In any event, at that time I said we could identify with our Lord’s reaction to the death of his friend Lazarus, encapsulated in what is famously the shortest verse in the bible: Jesus wept. Though we are no longer home-bound, the state of the world today–war, disaster, economic insecurity–should remind us once again that our God is a God who, in Christ, knows and shares all our sorrows.

Consider again this moving account. Jesus’ friend Lazarus has died, yet Jesus knows how this story ends. Just in last week’s Gospel, in which Our Lord says the blind man’s condition allowed God’s power to be made manifest, so does he say of Lazarus’ condition: “This… is for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” Jesus, who tarries two days in Jerusalem upon hearing of his Lazarus’ sickness, knew by the time he had left for Bethany that his friend had died. Upon his arrival he informs Martha that he intends to raise Lazarus from the dead. And yet, upon approaching the tomb, Jesus weeps. He knows Lazarus will live again, yet his grief is no less real.

My friends, none of us knows how God, in his Providence, has determined to use all the crises which afflict his world to his own divine ends. God knows and will transform whatever the power of evil throws at us to mysteriously and miraculously work his own purposes out. Even so, because we have a God who is not only high and lofty, but who has chosen in Christ Jesus to take on our very nature, we also have a God who despite knowing the ultimate triumph of life nonetheless weeps with us in our grief.

But having a God who suffers with us is not sufficient if that’s all we have to say about God. But thank heavens, we also have a God who is in control, and this reality of having a Lord who is both provident and incarnate is, I believe, the only thing that can satisfy the longing of our hearts for hope in the midst of adversity. To put it plainly, I don’t know how one gets through our life without utter despair without Jesus; thank God we have Jesus, who is our help and our salvation.

We must hold these two truths–that God is in control and that Jesus feels for us–together, lest we believe in a God who is powerless or who is distant. This being the case, I have to amend something I know I’ve said in sermons before (not that I was entirely wrong, but rather that this tension means that sometimes the whole truth is obscured). I know I’ve said in sermons before that the miracles of Jesus are presented differently in John’s Gospel than in the so-called “Synoptic Gospels” of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Specifically, while those three Gospels use the Greek word dynamis (or “deed of power”) to refer to the miracles, John uses the word seimon (or “sign”), suggesting that each of the “signs” including the raising of Lazarus–point to a truth about God in Christ beyond the act itself.

Now this is true. The raising of Lazarus has something larger to say about Jesus being the Lord of Life in a larger sense. The healing of the man born blind that we heard last week has something larger to say about Christ’s mission to enlighten all and bring spiritual sight to those formerly blinded by sin. The feeding of the five thousand has something larger to say about Jesus’ promise to feed us always with the bread of heaven. One could go on.

Okay, that’s all true, but reading the signs exclusively as signs can give us the incorrect impression that Jesus merely used these needy people as object lessons rather than seeing their humanity and need for the provision of real practical blessings. We need not make that mistake though, and the reason why is found in the text as clear as day. Jesus did not get up and give a talk on the meaning of his miracle at the wedding in Cana. He simply did it (and got a little irritable in the process, if you recall). The five thousand were genuinely hungry. The blind man was oppressed and Jesus both gave him the promise of salvation and refused to accept the pharisees’ nonsense. And, then, most profoundly, Jesus, knowing he was about to raise him from the dead nonetheless keenly felt the loss of his friend and the grief of Mary and Martha and wept openly.

Thus, we have a God who is both all-powerful and all-loving. As we approach again the great and Holy Days which present to us our Lord’s pain and his glory, his passion and his triumph, let us hold fast to the one who alone shamed the powerful with weakness, who alone disclosed divinity through perfect humanity, who alone can save us.

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