Author: John Drymon

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

Genres go in and out of fashion across all media. When, after all, was the last really popular Western film, or glam metal album, or didactic novel? My guess is the answer to each of those is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992, The Darkness’ Permission to Land in 2003, and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World in 1991. Give me a moment to sit with my nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which is sadly increasingly the measure by which we “geriatric millennials” judge the world as it is.

Perhaps the genre which has fallen on the hardest of times, though, is what is called the “Gospel harmony.” More-and-less successful attempts at taking the four Gospels and blending them together to present a single, cohesive narrative have been undertaken since very early in the church’s life. The first was probably Tatian’s Diatesseron in the middle of the Second Century A.D., and the genre flourished in the Reformation Era. Modern approaches have been more experimental, and my favorite (which you may have noticed if you’ve paid especially close attention to the bulletin cover art I choose) is James Tissot’s harmony by way not of text but illustration.

In all events, this approach fell very much out of favor with the rise of the historical-critical method. Instead of harmonies we now see synopses, in which the text of each Gospel is placed side-by-side for the the sake of comparing and contrasting them. The question, really, seems to be whether the four Gospels speak with one voice or with four or more. I think that’s a misleading question, though.

Personally (and take this as Fr. John’s perspective, not necessarily as “Gospel truth”), I think the best answer to that question is this—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John speak with one voice from four perspectives. They’re all equally inspired in the proper sense, all equally imbued with ultimate truth from the same spirit who is the Holy Ghost. Yet each retains a perspective on the events given how each writer received the message, whether by being present in the moment, recording eye-witness reports from others, or by given supernatural insight (I believe all three of those modes are active at various points). I am not, and probably will never be, convinced that there are outright contradictions to be found across the Gospel accounts, meaning that I think they could at least theoretically be “harmonized”, but those points at which the narratives depart from each other can teach us something, too, so long as we’re reading faithfully, appreciating the Canon of Scripture as a whole to be authoritative, and ask with some intellectual humility why, for example, Mark and Luke include something which Matthew does not.

And now I’ll finally get to the point for which all of that is meant to serve as a sort of hermeneutical foundation. There is a clause present in the accounts which Mark and Luke give of the Transfiguration which is absent from the version we just heard from Matthew. After Jesus is transformed into a luminous figure before his eyes and joined by those who stand for the Law and the Prophets, but before the voice of the Father comes to affirm Christ’s status as Son of God and Messiah, Peter exclaims “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli’jah.” In Mark and Luke there is then an aside. Luke adds “not knowing what he said.” Mark goes further, imputing a motive; Peter didn’t know what to say because he was afraid.

Some would claim that Luke and then Matthew are here cleaning things up to make Peter seem less like a craven dope. I don’t buy that, largely because they don’t seem interested in retroactively rehabilitating Peter elsewhere, but also because I don’t buy the claim that Mark is the earliest Gospel and Matthew and Luke are using it as a source and editing it; that was the standard assumption among historical biblical critics until fairly recently, but it’s been increasingly questioned in recent decades. (Pro-tip: you can tell when a biblical scholar stopped keeping current by how strongly he or she insists that Mark must have come first.) I tend to think that Mark gives the fullest account, including the embarrassing slip and the motive behind it, because Mark was told the story by Peter himself. This is the ancient, traditional view, and it’s more-and-more acceptable among scholars who are open to questioning nineteenth century assumptions. So perhaps Luke couldn’t be certain of Peter’s having been motivated by fear (who can peer into anyone else’s soul, after all) and Matthew was uncomfortable even saying for certain whether or not Peter said it in ignorance. Maybe Matthew assumed something that we, too, should consider. Maybe Peter said the right thing, it was just the wrong time and the wrong place.

To show that even my own stubbornly held interpretive assumptions can be changed, I know I’ve preached sermons in the past on this text that amounted to the following: it’s nice to abide in the glory of God for times of spiritual refreshment, but you’ve eventually got to go down the mountain and start walking the way of the cross. Now, there’s some truth to this, unless you’re a cloistered monk or nun, whose whole job is to stay in the booth with Jesus and Moses and Elijah; that is a gift and a valid vocation, which is not mine and probably not yours. That said, the polar opposite approach can easily lapse into works-righteousness, into the deadly idea that each of us needs to go get crucified as if the one sacrifice weren’t enough, and into the historically disastrous belief that we can build the Kingdom of God ourselves so long as we’re good enough. Maybe the occasion for building booths and simply abiding with Jesus are more frequent than I’ve suggested in the past. Maybe, instead of descending the Mount of Transfiguration today to enter into “the hard work of Lent” ™, what some or most of us will commence on Wednesday is more like dwelling in booths on the mountaintop with our Lord for forty days. Jesus and the disciples didn’t have that luxury that time, but maybe poor Peter would be right if he said it today.

When I was in college I took a course from a man named Harvey Sindima. He was a pretty severe, almost puritanical minister and theologian from Malawi, where, I gather, Presbyterians had not started feigning ignorance of the man when you brought up John Calvin. He literally failed every student’s first assignment every class every year, probably to motivate us to work harder and to remind us that we were totally depraved. I hated the man at first, and then I came to love him.

Professor Sindima knew that I was considering seminary and ordination and we had a long talk once about this. He asked me all sorts of questions about why I wanted to do this, why I though I should be allowed to, who did I think I was, that sort of thing. And I gave all those answers that callow youths discerning a vocation typically give, which mostly amounted to “I want to be nice and help people.” “No. no. no.” seemed his continual refrain. Finally, he said those words which I believe God gave him, just as he had the Psalmist:

One thing have I desired of the Lord,

which I will require:

even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,

to behold the fair beauty of the Lord,

and to visit his temple.

In that moment I realized the nature of my vocation. And now I am convinced that this is not only the priestly vocation, it is the Christian vocation.

This doesn’t mean that we’re quietists. It doesn’t mean that we’re not called to do external work which God enables by doing the internal work in our souls. We strive for justice. We preach the Gospel to the nations. Sometimes we take up our cross in order to follow. But also dwell on a mountaintop with the Lord. We also behold the beauty of his courts. We also retreat into that quiet place in our souls where Jesus has taken up residence, that we might relate to him as the very joy of our hearts. If you’re still looking for a Lenten discipline, maybe this year you can build a booth, not three maybe, but one, where with Moses and Elijah you can adore the one who is the Law and the Prophets in the flesh, who is our priest and our king.

+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.

The Friday before the snowfall a couple of weeks ago I was on a call with the bishop, and I asked her if she had a parish visitation that weekend she was concerned about being able to make. She said she didn’t have to travel far, but was worried because, apparently, the City of Cleveland was facing a salt shortage. When I mentioned this to somebody a few days later, that person informed me that there is a huge salt mine in Cleveland where they extract rock salt for the express purpose of road deicing. After a little Googling, I confirmed this and saw that the proprietors of this mine simply failed to deliver salt which the city had ordered over a long enough period of time to create this problem. So, salt may be abundant but you can still get in a pickle by not having enough of it.

It puts a new twist on Jesus’ words in this morning’s Gospel “you are the salt of the earth.” There are two billion of us Christians in the world, but are we being sprinkled into the stockpots and spread over the highways of the world, or are we a couple miles under Lake Erie doing little good.

Maybe the superabundance of salt in ourordinary existence is why we’ve taken that old expression from the Gospel “salt of the earth” to mean precisely the opposite of what it actually means, and a salt shortage is a good reminder, even if it unfortunately caused some frustration on the streets for some of our fellow Ohioans. When we say somebody is “salt of the earth” we usually mean that he is an ordinary fellow: simple and honest and unassuming. In reality, what Jesus meant by “salt of the earth” was quite different, and stories of what happens when you don’t have it can make the point more apparent.

In ancient times salt was an even more valuable commodity than it is today. You wouldn’t think about spreading it on roads, and unless you were particularly well off, you’d go broke before you had had enough salt to cause health problems. Certainly salt wasn’t especially rare, but neither was it inexpensive enough to allow an ordinary person to keep a salt shaker on his table, much less buy a frozen dinner containing 300% of his recommended daily sodium intake.

Salt wasn’t as common then as it is today, but it was likely a great deal more important. For one thing, we do need some salt to live, and sodium deficiency was probably a greater problem in the ancient world than was its opposite. What’s more, artificial refrigeration wouldn’t come for about 1800 years, so unless you lived in a cold climate, you’d preserve meat and fish with a hefty amount of salt. So important was salt, that Roman soldiers had at one time been paid with it, later being given a stipend to buy it, called a “salarium”, which comes from the Latin word for salt and which later becomes the English word “salary”. So, in the ancient world the aphorism “time is money” would not have been as accurate as something like “salt is money”.

So, when Jesus says “you are the salt of the earth” he’s not suggesting that his disciples are defined by simplicity and a lack of pretension. Rather, he’s saying that there is something remarkably valuable about them, and not just valuable. Precious metals and rare spices and even glass were extremely valuable in ancient Rome, but they were luxuries. You didn’t really need them, and to have them served mainly to impress one’s peers. Salt was valuable, but it was also necessary. Everyone needed a little, and a little could make life a lot better.

If a Christian is the salt of the earth, then, it means that what we are has the potential to bring a valuable and necessary commodity into the world. We who know Christ can season the situations in which we find ourselves with the salt of the virtues, and a little bit goes a long way. A little temperance here, a dash of charity, a few teaspoons of patience…

But then we get to that puzzling question which follows Jesus’ declaration that we are the salt of the earth: “but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” Now Jesus wasn’t a chemist, nor am I, but I think I remember enough from high school to say with some certainty that salt cannot easily lose its saltness. (I’m sure some of you are more well up on your chemistry, so please correct me if I’m getting something wrong.) Sodium chloride is what we call a stable ionic compound, its atoms held together by electrostatic attractions formed when the sodium loses one of its electrons to the chlorine, creating a positively charged sodium and a negatively charged chlorine. These two atoms are held together by electrical forces which are very strong and thus difficult to break.

Though Jesus wouldn’t have known anything about chemistry, I suspect he knew that salt couldn’t lose its saltness through simple observation. He wouldn’t have ever seen salt go stale, because it couldn’t happen. I’m a bit out of my depth here, but I understand that the “best by” date on table salt is because of the added iodine, which is a modern additive. (And, lest you think I’ve given way to conspiracy theories or recherché tastes, thank goodness for salt iodization and for water fluoridation and for dairy pasteurization and all the rest!) Now, some of the commentaries I’ve read this week did a lot of exegetical handwaving to explain how salt might be capable of losing its saltiness, due to impurities, but I think this misses the point, and I for one am not troubled about having a savior who didn’t know NaCl from MSG. That said, I suspect Jesus had a hunch that salt was logically necessarily salty. Why then this apparent warning? Perhaps the point is precisely that the idea of salt losing its saltness is silly. It’s just as silly as that other image in this morning’s Gospel: hiding a candle under a bushel basket- which I imagine would either snuff the candle or cause a fire hazard, but in all events, nobody would have reason to do it. You’d just blow the candle out and light it later when you needed it.

Perhaps the point is that if we’re salt and light, we cannot be otherwise, we just have to be deployed to where we’re needed. We can convince ourselves that we’re not salt, but we still are. We can refuse to use that which is in us to season our encounters with others, but it’s still there. We who have been baptized cannot be unbaptized. We can ignore our status as children of God; we can try to run away from it, but our adoption as God’s children, our existence as salt and light, is objective and irrevocable.

So you are salt and light. You can’t get away from it, so you might as well commit yourselves to figuring out what bland, perishable thing in this world could use a little seasoning and a little saving rather than staying in the cupboard. You might as well commit yourselves to figuring out what dark corner of this world could use a little light rather than staying in a box in the candle factory. That is what we’re here for, but more importantly, that’s what we are. We might as well embrace what we are: salt and light.

+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.

We celebrate today the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, one of those great stories from the Bible which is so familiar that we’ve made some pretty serious errors in how we’ve received it. This is pretty common. The Christmas story is so familiar that we assume there were three wise men, while the bible never gives us the number—there were three gifts but an indeterminate number of magi. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is so familiar that we just know that the forbidden fruit was an apple, though this assumptions is not borne out in the text.

So it is with the story of St. Paul’s conversion, so I want to point out a couple of assumptions that we habitually get wrong about it. First, the Conversion does not come with an attendant name change. Common knowledge holds that Saul became Paul on the rode to Damascus, and that this name change indicates Paul’s change in character, much like Abram becoming Abraham in Genesis. This is not the case. Paul is still referred to as Saul for several chapters after the conversion story. The difference in how scripture names him has to do with his audience rather than the change on the road to Damascus. When he’s preaching to Jews, the Hebrew name Saul is used. When he’s preaching to Gentiles, the Greek name Paul is used.

Now that’s more a bit of trivia than something of theological significance, but the second mistake, I think, is more important for us to clear up, and it’s related. We have this vision of Paul changing his identity entirely at the moment of conversion- like Clark Kent turning into Superman in a phone booth, though in Paul’s case we imagine the change being from a purely evil character to a purely good character. Perhaps this is why we like the false name-change narrative.

I think this is the wrong way to view Paul’s Conversion. Those who have read much of St. Paul’s writing know that the characteristics which defined him during his life in Judaism—his pugnacious nature in particular—are still with him post-conversion. Paul doesn’t become a perfect person because he experienced Jesus on the road to Damascus. Rather, he becomes a person with a new mission, new goals, a new direction. Surely this new mission makes him a better person over time, but it’s a life’s work God sets him at. The transformative power of the moment of conversion is critical, but it’s a beginning whose implications will be borne out through a life of faithfulness.

So, Paul’s story does not mean that a personal conversion experience, a transformative moment, is the only thing that matters. Nor does it mean, and this is where I part ways with evangelicalism, that such an experience is necessarily normative. It is wonderful when it happens, but the Good News is more than “feel your heart strangely warmed once.”

The assumption that a once-for-all, affective experience of conversion is the “end-all-be-all” of Christian life stems, I believe, from both a misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching and of his experience on the road to Damascus. Paul’s response to seeing and hearing Jesus was not to say “thank God I’m saved, now my response to it for the rest of my life is neither here nor there.” Rather, he begins preaching the power of God to save all humanity, and indeed to redeem all Creation. Paul never says “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and every thing else just automatically falls into place” but he does write “run the race with endurance” and “[fight] the good fight… [keep] the faith.”

So, Paul’s Conversion and what it teaches us about conversion in general might be counter-intuitive for many of us. It seems that conversion isn’t only a one-time deal- God can continue to conform us more and more to the likeness of Christ as we strive with faith and obedience to do his will. Granted, I am perhaps more suspicious of religious enthusiasm than most, but for me I’ve found that the quotidian, rather “boring” approach of saying one’s prayers and trying to be loving offers a more stable foundation than the waves of emotion that may have as much to do with how much coffee I’ve had or how loud the Berlioz is on my boom box than anything pertaining to God’s movement in my life. One has to discern the spirits, and I find this to be a tricky business if I’m not rather calmly circumspect about it.

I don’t know about you, but I find this composed vision of Christian conversion a lot more comforting than being obsessed with whether or not I’m supposed to have a particular, ecstatic experience once-and-for-all, at least when it comes to obtaining spiritual provision for the “long-haul”. It seems not only a lot more comforting but a lot more in keeping with what the majority of Christians throughout the centuries have experienced.

Again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with a dramatic conversion experience; sometimes that’s what it takes and it’s a gift from God when it comes, as it did to St. Paul. But we can all experience what we might call the “second phase” of Paul’s conversion, whether or not the first is needful in any person’s life—we can all experience the gradual growth of stability and wisdom and confidence in God’s saving action.

In other words we can reach the stage of spiritual maturity Paul himself wrote about in his Epistle to the Ephesians, not being as “children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine”, chasing spiritual highs as if they were a drug, but “speaking the truth in love… grow[ing] up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” This life, the life of a Christian, may start with a dramatic, burning bush, or it might not. In either case, the end-point, I think, is full of peace, a down-to-earth sort of joy, and quiet confidence. It may come sooner or it may come later, but that is the promise we have when God grants us continual conversion.

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