Author: John Drymon

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

I am too old and probably too self-serious to have appreciated it, but I have a goddaughter who was just the right age to become obsessed with the Disney movie Frozen, and in particular the song “Let It Go.” One critic referred to the song as “musical crack” which “sends kids into altered states” which I can confirm anecdotally. I’m not sure if the message of the song is meant to be “be yourself” in the way that young people should hear or if it’s more like “you have no obligation whatsoever to respect social norms and the reasonable expectations of your fellows” which I think is not a great message at this time in our common life. Either interpretation could stand up, but probably best for all of us if I don’t spend any time subjecting you to my analysis of a cultural product that is beyond my ken.

I did read a book last week, though, which gets at a similar question of letting go—Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun. I particularly love literature that deals with philosophical questions of identity and perspective and metaphysical issues like “what is the soul?” and this book had all that, which is why I read it, but it also focused, in my reading anyway, on this moral and spiritual issue of “letting go” (particularly in parent-child relationships, but in other ways, too). I won’t spoil the book; it’s a good read, and I commend it to you. Ishiguro is a lot less whithholding than in some of his other novels, and he gives a lot of “grist for the mill” in dealing with some pretty heartbreaking stuff.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about this difficult issue of “letting go”, which presents itself in at least three ways in the lessons assigned for this Sunday after the Ascension. I’ll take them in ascending order of difficulty, at least as I see it, though your ranking may be quite different from mine.

First, the very first verse of our lesson from Acts. The disciples have spent forty days seeing the risen Lord come in and out among them, they were all witnesses to what is not just the greatest miracle of all time, but what we might think of as a happening beyond even the term “miracle.” (For what it’s worth, I’d class the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection as sui generis occurrences, so glorious that even the category “miracle” is insufficient.) So they are witnesses to something indescribably great, and yet what is the question they ask on the last occasion they’ll have to speak with Jesus before he goes to the Father? “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” It’s not “how shall we get by without you?” (He had warned them he was leaving.) It’s not “how shall we pattern our lives as we await your return?” It’s not “any last pro-tips for evangelism, since that’s the mission you have set for us?” No. “We have this political problem. We don’t like the Romans and we were really hoping you’d be our king? I know you said your kingdom is not of this world, but can’t you be a little flexible on that one?”

What I’m about to say is not to diminish the fact that Christians are called to work for the common good. We should be good citizens, not quietists. Christian ethics can and should be applied insofar as our lives intersect with the political realm. All that said, I believe that if one’s Christian identity can be reduced to a political party or platform, then something has gone very wrong. Namely, we have set up a false soteriology, a misguided view of salvation, which holds that the promises of the Gospel are to be achieved by human effort in establishing a particular civic order. This has been attempted over and over again throughout the church’s history, along both what we might anachronistically term “conservative” and “liberal” lines, and the Kingdom of God, it turns out, never managed to get perfectly established on earth.

I’m aware that I’m not preaching before the United Nations or a joint session of Congress this morning, but this can affect each of us. I know people whose spiritual well-being seems entirely dependent on whatever is happening politically (in the world, in our nation, in one’s community) at any given moment. I know people(not in this parish, by the way, but who knows) whom I’d rather not ask “what is your prayer life like?” because I worry the answer would be something like “well going to this march or holding this listening session is a sort of prayer.” It might be, but it seems to me that you’ve got to get on your knees and talk honestly with the Creator of the Universe sometimes, too. So, the first thing I’d suggest trying to let go is the belief (implicit or explicit) that all our hope is to be founded in human efforts at establishing a more just society. We should hope and pray and work for that, but it’s ultimately not the Kingdom of God we’re building here.

Second, and more difficult in my experience, we should try to let go of anxiety. “Cast all your anxieties on [God],” wrote St. Peter in today’s epistle, “for he cares about you.” I am fully aware that just saying “don’t worry” is mostly unhelpful, even if that is followed up with good evidence for why the worst case scenario is unlikely. Some of you know that I have a relationship with a schizophrenic man, Bruce, and that while my legal obligation is simply to handle his finances, the actual responsibility I have goes much deeper and touches every aspect of his life. So, I have learned the hard way that saying “calm down” to someone in a psychotic state does not work. Actually, it rarely works for someone fully in his or her right mind.

The only advice I can give as far as this goes, is “stay prayed up” and know that you are being prayed for. For all their blundering and the myopia which led them to use their last chance to ask Jesus for a political solution, the disciples finally seemed to get it, as they returned from Olivet and went directly to the upper room to devote themselves to prayer with each other and with our Lord’s Blessed mother. The more frequently and consistently I pray, the less nervous I find I am about the changes and chances of life. It just works. And you are being prayed for. Among the handful of things I pray for in the wee hours every morning, before I’ve had sufficient coffee to actually pray morning prayer formally, is for this parish, and that includes each of you and all your troubles and concerns. I bet there are others praying for you on a regular basis. I know that our Lord Jesus Christ is; he is ever making intercession to the Father on your behalf, and he says as much in his high priestly prayer, part of which we heard as this morning’s Gospel. Fully integrating the knowledge of this blessed, comforting truth may, in time, be enough to let it go.

Finally, most difficult of all perhaps, even more difficult than letting go anxiety as it relates to our own lives, is trusting other people enough to live as adult Christians, free moral agents, people who are going to make mistakes and sometimes surprise us by demonstrating that they know more about themselves and the world than we do. Maybe that’s just a “me problem”; I try not to be paternalistic, but I realize that this can be my natural modus operandi, and I don’t even have children (perhaps for the best, then).

Because I don’t have children, and my only frame of reference is found in literature like Klara and the Sun, and particularly since I have lots of opinions that nobody signed up to be subjected to, I’ll not get into the most fraught manifestation of this need to “let go”—namely, how to calibrate that against a host of other concerns during a person’s journey through adolescence and into adulthood. (Plus, even though I’m of the right age to have adolescent children I’m very much behind the times; if I wanted to go to the mall, my parents would say “take the bus”, but now there are no malls, there are no buses here, and if there were you might get CPS called on you for letting junior go on one by himself!) I will simply say that this difficulty applies to all sorts of relationships, the whole web of complicated obligations that every human being has with his or her fellows. Just from a personal standpoint, as some sort of spiritual leader, I find the line between proferring wise and reasonable advice when it’s sought and trying to impose my will on somebody when I think I know better can be dangerously fine.

Here, I think, as ever, the model can be found in our Lord. We may think of the Ascension as the moment when the disciples had to let Jesus go (or rather, let go of relating with him as they previously had done). But it seems to me that it is just as much (if not more) about Jesus letting the Apostles go. He would always be with them in an important, spiritual sense, and we’ll celebrate next week the fact that he had a further provision for them, the Holy Spirit, to keep them on the right track. But no longer was it just as simple as telling Peter or Philip or Thomas or the others to straighten up and fly right the moment they said or did something silly or counterproductive. Jesus had to let them go, to make their mistakes, to learn from them, to pray for his help, and to get on with it as mature disciples, shepherds of his beloved flock, sent out to spread the Good News. We are in this together, we are the body of Christ, but none of us is the head, so we don’t get to control the whole body, even if we think we’d do it better.

And just like problems one and two, just like the danger of placing our hope for salvation where it doesn’t belong and just like getting over our anxious cares and worries, the best approach here, I think, is simply to pray, by yourself and with others. Staying grounded in the glory of God, which now that he is ascended illuminates every inch of the earth and every corner of the human heart, is not a matter of being good or becoming a spiritual athlete. The capital “S” saints got partway there during their mortal pilgrimage, and were the happier for it, but all of us need simply to say our prayers and read our bibles and try to be regular and honest and vulnerable in our approach to the one who loves us and will give us all we need. As for the rest, if you can, let it go.

+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.

Most of you are accustomed to hearing me hold forth on theological propositions on which I have strong feelings one way or the other, but this morning I want to confess to a matter—or rather a constellation of issues—of some importance about which I am absolutely ambivalent, namely, prevenient grace and the extent to which it operates. In layman’s terms, the question is whether and in what manner may the activity of the Holy Spirit in one who has not yet accepted the fullness of Truth as we have received it in Christ Jesus be made manifest, and does this activity (if it is possible to begin with) enable some expression of divine wisdom without necessarily leading inexorably to something like Christian conversion.

There are a couple of reasons this thorny issue has presented itself to me this week. First it’s because of what I’ve been reading. I mentioned last week that I was rereading The Confessions, and if Augustine isn’t directly quoting scripture, he’s constantly alluding, both explicitly and implicitly, to ideas from Plato as filtered through Plotinus. I’m also, some of you know, in a reading group taking a year-long slog through Heinrich Bullinger’s magnum opus, the Dekaden, and the portion I read this week, quoted liberally from Ovid and Horace and Vergil. Bullinger was no crypto-pagan. He was a very serious, sometimes severe Swiss protestant reformer, and while he’d insist that scripture alone was the source of saving wisdom, he didn’t balk at finding wisdom elsewhere, too, even among the unregenerate. And of course the theologian most influential to yours truly, Saint Thomas Aquinas, is most famous for his use of the thought of Aristotle for informing his summation of all philosophy and theology.

The other reason for my thinking through this issue is this week’s lesson from The Acts of the Apostles. Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus reinterprets an obscure idol as a portent of the God of Israel and of Christ. To what degree is his statement “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” sarcastic and to what degree is it sincere? I suspect it may be a little of both. (Perhaps Paul is ambivalent about this issue, just as I confessed that I am.) Paul certainly condemns the superstition of the Athenian pagans, here, and he states in no uncertain terms that having now heard of Christ, they can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.

That said, this scene strikes me as something more than Paul simply “baptizing” some pagan symbol, Christianizing it because it is close to hand and a useful evangelistic prop (though, no doubt that’s part of it). Those who read my newsletter article this month will know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, so I don’t think you need to suffer scruples over Christmas trees or Easter eggs or anything. But it seems to me that Paul may be going a step further, laying open the possibility that some little shard at least of Christian knowledge may by providence be revealed in some pre-Christian ideas and practices. Perhaps a few pieces of the puzzle, if only a God-given impulse to seek after truth, is present before the full explication of the Gospel.

Perhaps my ambivalence here is not so much with that proposition, but more with how it can be misconstrued or misapplied. I do not believe it useful (and I do believe it sometimes to be positively dangerous) to see ourselves as customers at some sort of “divine delicatessen” picking what one likes from a seemingly unlimited number of options. You may like grape jelly, liverwurst, stilton, and capers but you wouldn’t put them all on the same sandwich, presumably. Religions make non-cotenable truth claims and moral demands on us, and Christianity is, in a sense, a closed and coherent system. Being a closed system doesn’t mean that we should be closed-minded. One can exercise judgment without being judgmental, but exercise judgment we must.

So, I don’t believe wisdom in non-Christian ideologies which contradicts Christian truth to be possible. Carefully comparing and contrasting can be an interesting enterprise, and it can sometimes illuminate what it is we hold to be good and true, but I often worry that while “comparative religion” might be reckoned a sort of “graduate seminar” for those who are sufficiently grounded in his or her own tradition, we sometimes take it up the first semester of the freshman year of life. I’m committed to the proposition that in order to get our theology straight we should really stick to scripture and the church’s tradition and to praying for asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate our study of the same.

My cranky disclaimer out of the way, though, can we recognize the stirring of the impulse toward true religion in those who do not yet believe, in those who have lost their faith, and perhaps even in ourselves when we’ve spiritually wandered and dabbled. I think so, and perhaps this is part of what it means when we say we’ve been made in the image of God. Sometimes this is a long road with a lot of turns. I mentioned St. Augustine who had to try out Manichaeism and a more pagan-inflected neopaganism before finding the Faith. A few months ago I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth, who’s latest book I read earlier this year, who from irreligion became wiccan for a while before converting to Orthodox Christianity.

I wonder sometimes if the biggest hurdle in our postmodern age is not scientific skepticism but something like its opposite, namely the assumption in our society (bred by the fact that more than a thousand years of “Christendom” is now, for better or worse, coming to an end in the West), that Christianity is tame or vanilla or “basic” in the slang sense of that word. Perhaps it’s just too familiar, or we’ve made too many assumptions, because I’m here to tell you that Christianity is pretty strange when viewed objectively, and that’s one of our greatest strengths. We make metaphysical claims about eternity and truth and totality and situate them in a particular space and time, in a corner of first century Judea which could not be more foreign to us. And those of us Christians who worship in a way which is different from how the average American consumes culture and information (through popular music and screens of varying sizes as balkanized individuals) makes us even stranger.

Now, I’m the opposite of a hipster (you may have noticed) but maybe we need to highjack the approach they’ve taken in places like Portland and Austin and start making “Keep Christianity Weird” stickers and signs. I think this is a powerful counterpoint to the fragmented, consumptive, bland society in which we find ourselves in the modern Western world.

You see, I guess I do believe that whether or not Plotinus or Aristotle or the crowd of the Areopagus were crypto-proto-Christians, so many (perhaps most) of our fellows have this impulse which has led them to worship at the altar of an unnamed God. They are looking for connection, for rootedness, for something of substance and these are God-given urges. Too often the Athenian superstition takes hold, and we mistake something else (social media, success, a substance) as the offering by which we appease this idol, but are left even more bereft than when we arrived.

Here, the sense of St. Paul’s words can be our reply. I perceive that in every way you are very religious. You are in search of a great prize, a blessing. And yet you are flailing and failing. You have identified the goal, even if you’ve not made it explicit, because it is the same thing men and women have been searching for since the beginning. But you have not discerned the means. God has given you the desire, and he does not give us the desire for anything that is truly good without making a way to capture the prize. You desire stability in an ever-shifting world. You desire meaning among a people who have embraced nihilism in the guise of self-actualization. You desire wisdom while we are all amusing ourselves to death. Above all, you desire love—genuine unconditional love no matter how unlovely you falsely believe yourself to be. Here these things are to be found. God has led you to the door. You need only knock and it will open.

+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.

At the end of this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus says something which, if we were to really think about it, is rather hard to swallow:

Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.

We’ve heard this a hundred times, and if we approach it uncritically (as we are so often wont to do) it’s a very comforting thought.

If, however, we were to pause a moment and consider this promise for what it seems to suggest, I think we’d quickly become troubled, because the fact is, it doesn’t seem to ring true with our experience. To put it more bluntly, it might seem to us that either Jesus is lying or he is powerless to keep his promise.

Most of us are taught from a young age how to pray. We are instructed to address God the Father and to pray “in Jesus’ name”. If it’s all about mechanics—about using the correct words—then, indeed, Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel must be false. But the words “in Jesus’ name” do not constitute a magic formula, the unthinking repetition of which ensures that we get whatever we want. We may pray “in Jesus’ name” to win the lottery but, (perhaps it’s just my own lack of faith) it rarely seems to happen. That’s a bad example, because I’ve never purchased a lottery ticket, so let’s take a different example. We may make less overtly selfish prayers, tack “in Jesus’ name. Amen.” to the end of it, and still not see the prayer answered. We can pray for world peace or an end to hunger or for a loved one’s recovery from illness or for an enemy to have a change of heart (prayers I know I’ve made and which do not require the purchase of a lottery ticket to prove my trust in praying for it), and too often be left disappointed.

We’ve all heard the rather easy explanation that “God answers prayers, but sometimes it’s with a ‘no’” but look back at what Jesus promises: if you ask anything in my name, I will do it. He doesn’t say he’ll provide an answer one way or the other, but that he will answer our prayers by giving us what we ask.

So, how do we approach this genuine theological problem? We must, I contend, stand firm on the assertion that Jesus is not a liar, nor is God powerless to keep His promises. The answer, I think, comes from a more fulsome understanding of what it means to pray “in Jesus’ name” in the first place.

We know that these words are not a magic formula. There is, of course, nothing wrong with structuring our prayers the way we do, but perhaps praying “in Jesus’ name” is, to use philosphical language, partly positive and partly normative. That is to say, first of all, that we do express a reality when we pray “in Jesus’ name”. We are, as baptized Christians, the body of Christ, and when we pray “in Jesus’ name” we affirm that reality. But at the same time, we can never as individuals honestly affirm that our will is perfectly conformed to our Lord’s, that we are fully capable of standing in the place of him who died for us and rose again, and so when we pray “in Jesus’ name” we are also referring to an ideal to which we strive but will never reach in this life.

That being the case, we may not be praying “in Jesus’ name” in a very important sense just because we tack a few extra words onto the end of our prayers. We may not fully know the will of God, and the intentions with which we pray may not perfectly conform to God’s intentions.

All of this can be discouraging, but it is not meant to suggest that our prayers are in vain. What it does mean is that there is an extra task each of us has when we are praying. We don’t just ask for stuff we want or favors we want God to bestow on others, but for our wills to be conformed to Christ’s, that we may know how to pray aright, to, as one collect in the prayer book puts it “ask only what accords with your will”.

When we pray without considering this necessary element of prayer, we run the risk of taking the name of Jesus in vain. Far worse than letting some swear word slip is the pride which makes us think that we can use the blessed name of Jesus for selfish gain, not considering how great a privilege and a responsibility it is that we are permitted to pray in Jesus’ name to begin with.

Sometimes Christ’s will is that our prayers slowly make us more and more like him until they bear fruit in what we had asked for in the beginning. The best example of this I can think ofis that of Saint Monica, Augustine’s mother, whom I am reminded of because I recently reread the confessions. Monica’s prayers for her son’s conversion took years to come to fruition but, in the meantime, they made Monica herself a more loving and patient mother, a more christ-like mother.

In the final analysis, it does all go back to trust: trust that God’s will is to save his people, to bring them to the Father’s house in which there are many rooms. When we trust that God’s will is for the good, it becomes more natural for us to conform our will to his and to accept what we experience as setbacks or unanswered prayers as mysterious means for God’s plan to unfold. When we have faith that God will set all things to rights for his people, we can begin to pray more fervently and to see how he graciously answers us. There will always be disappointments, there will always be prayers which seem unanswered, but, as in every relationship, a foundation of trust will help us to maintain our hope that even in our own darkness God’s light can shine and will ultimately illuminate all our experiences, showing us how God was working his purposes out all along.

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