Author: John Drymon

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

So, apparently this holy season in which we find ourselves has been re-branded. At least you might think this was the case if you saw a particular chyron on the Today Show on Ash Wednesday morning. Henceforth, Lent shall be known as “Mark Wahlberg’s Forty Day Challenge.” I’m glad Marky Mark is doing this, but what of the rest of the Funky Bunch?

In all seriousness, I’m grateful that Mr. Wahlberg is using his fame to encourage faithfulness, and what little I know about him suggests that his Christian faith has truly changed him for the better. From engaging in a couple of racially motivated assaults in the late-eighties and early-nineties, to seeking forgiveness from and reconciliation with his victims and becoming (at least to all outward appearances) a family man who spends his time raising funds for at-risk youth, volunteering in homeless shelters, and engaging in pretty public evangelization efforts. He seems a pretty good, public example of God’s transformative power. (We are fortunate that our program at coffee hour today on the Welcome to a New Life program promises to give us an example of how that same sort of transformation is being encouraged right here in Findlay.)

All that said, we must be very careful here, because as I said on Wednesday, Lent is not a self-improvement program, nor is the Gospel about how we can become better by trying hard enough. It is, rather about the Law having convicted us and Grace having freed us. It is about the imputation of Adam’s sin and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, which has nothing to do with keeping score (as if God has a massive excel spreadsheet for each of us, totting up the sins in one column and the good works in another and seeing if we’ve got a positive or a negative balance when we die). Yes, through fruits of faith can make things better. However if God is most concerned with how we are on our worst day, we’re doomed, and if we think he’s primarily concerned with how we are when at our best, we can start to get the idea that it’s about our own efforts rather than the free gift of grace, setting us up for yet another fall.

That is what it’s all about, and why it’s so appropriate that we have both the story from Genesis about the Fall and the reading from Romans about its reversal appointed on this first Sunday in the season in which our increased attempts to be faithful in prayer and self-denial and works of mercy might get us putting the cart of human striving before the horse of God’s infinite grace. I’ve heard it said that the doctrine of Original Sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian tenet, and I’m inclined to agree. That is to say, while we must rely solely on faith to put our trust in things like the Incarnation and the Resurrection, one need only look around to prove the fact that we’re fallen.

I do have one minor quibble with our appointed readings this morning, though. I wish that reading from Genesis went on just two verses further. Adam and Eve’s disobedience caused them to become ashamed of their nakedness (Nota bene: not because nudity is inherently sinful, but because they had just contracted a concupiscent nature) and they made themselves some rather flimsy clothes. Then what happened?:

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

Where are you? I think this question God asks can be taken two ways, both of them correct. On the one hand it is an accusation. God knows the answer, but wants the man and woman to come clean, like the parent who asks the child “who took the cookie from the cookie jar?”

But it is conversely a question which would presage not something frightening but wonderful, namely–that God would always search for and find us no matter how far we’d fallen.

This project begins immediately. I think we misunderstand God’s passage of judgment on Adam and Eve, as purely punitive when I think it is more gracious than we might expect. (This whole story is richly metaphorical, after all, and for every rock … or fig leaf … we turn over, there is some new insight.) Should the man and the woman take the fruit from the tree of life, they should stand under God’s judgment in his presence for all eternity. An eternity of shame. Their ejection from the garden is both punishment and protection. The toil that would accompany their labors would provide a means not of atonement but at least of partial penance. The entry of death into the world, though tragic, would provide for a rest from those labors. In what is the first sacrifice in scripture, God provides the skins of animals to clothe the man and the woman in a manner more suitable in the harsh reality they were entering.

And then for countless ages, the Lord God would continue to ask “where art thou?” To the children of Israel captive in Egypt and the Jews in exile in Babylon. Again and again through the prophets whenever they went astray. And finally, most wonderfully, (as Paul makes clear) through his supreme condescension in the person of Christ Jesus, the New Adam, by whom many have been made righteous. And to each of us still, God asks “where art thou?” because he desires that each of us should be inheritors of the promise.

Whatever Lenten discipline you’ve adopted (or whatever goal’s you’ve set for yourself in Marky Mark’s Forty Day Challenge) my prayer is that it serves not merely as a means of self-improvement, but rather that it primarily serves as a reminder of our contingency and our need and our reliance on the Grace of God alone, whose sacrifice is sufficient to call us to himself and to strengthen us in this life and to give us hope for unending life with all the saints who have been brought through the ordeal and washed clean in the blood of the lamb.

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

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

There is a medieval aphorism that has become seen as a truism in modern times. Non gustibus non est disputandum. “There is no disputing about tastes,” morphed, sometime in the nineteenth century to “there’s no accounting for tastes.” A philosopher of aesthetics may disagree that this is either obvious or true, and so would I. This places me firmly in the crank camp, but there you have it. Perhaps there are cases in which the quality of one’s preference is purely subjective–whether one prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, say–but I can’t bring myself to say that the relative value of Joyce’s Ulysses to a paperback romance novel with Fabio on the cover, or that Titian’s Assunta altarpiece and a Bored Ape NFT, is entirely a matter of subjective taste.

One of the many things that worries me about contemporary school curricula (an odd thing for me to worry about, since I don’t have children of my own, but it does) is that English classes have increasingly replaced set reading lists with an allowance for students to read and write reports on whatever they want, under the assumption that it is more important for children to read something rather than nothing, whether that be Dostoevsky or a comic book. Now, I’ve got nothing against comic books, but Dostoevsky is more important. I love what Flannery O’Conner (who should be on the required reading list, now I think about it) said about the High School English teacher’s responsibility in her essay “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade”:

And if the student finds this not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I couldn’t agree more. Like I said, I realize this makes me sound like a crank.

I say all that, because I might be about to contradict myself. I’m drawn to a particular aesthetic, both in art and in real physical spaces, which many would understandably find off-putting, and I couldn’t blame anybody for saying “that is not to my taste.” I find what has been called “liminality” extremely compelling, particularly when it comes to spaces which evince that quality. A liminal space is one that is disconcertingly empty when one would expect the opposite, and it can evoke seemingly contradictory feelings of comfort and unease. You can see such spaces in some contemporary visual art and experimental film. One of my favorite filmmakers, David Lynch, does a lot with this. I follow an automated twitter account that posts photographs of liminal spaces at @spaceliminalbot (I selfishly hope Elon doesn’t get rid of all the bots). But I particularly like to inhabit these spaces in real life.

What am I talking about? Some examples. Nearly empty hallways in cheap hotels; streets in declining urban centers early in the morning with shuttered metal security gates over the storefront early in the morning; K-Marts with a third of the stock and none of the customers as one would have seen inside, say, thirty years ago. There is, no doubt, a level on which seeing and being in spaces like this appeal to my nostalgia and my melancholic bent. I think it’s also that they give one the sense of transition and impermanence, which is, I think, the nature of the material world and the human condition as opposed to the divine reality of the one God. The very word, liminal, from the Latin meaning threshold, suggests that the aesthetic is about these sort of transitions from unknown to unknown, and before the word was used to refer to creepy art, it was used by anthropologists to refer to the disorientation brought about in rituals which transitioned a subject from one state or way of life to the next.

So what does all this have to do with the Transfiguration? I think that Christ upon the mountain peak, and for that matter Moses entering into the cloud, can be seen as liminal events. They are, for the disciples in the former case and the children of Israel in the latter, these transitional, in some sense elegaic moments, in which confusion and perhaps dread cloud the present moment (literally and figuratively), making the future seem uncertain but certainly different.

And they have a choice. Push through that uncertainty to the unknown future or stay right there or feebly try to revert to some former, familiar way of being. This, I think, is why Peter wants to build huts on the mountain and stay forever. This, I think, is why the Israelites respond by almost immediately devolving into disobedience. Since the future is uncertain, it is scary.

But the future for Moses and the Israelites and for Jesus and the disciples is in one way quite unlike the mostly empty K-Mart or the blighted urban center, as much as they might have felt similar. They were different, because whatever came about on the other side of those mountaintop transitions was a matter of general providence, of God’s overall plan for salvation for those involved and for the whole world. If you believe, like me, that there is special providence in addition to general providence (to put it simply, if necessarily a bit inaccurately due to the simplification, that God chooses to exercise some level of control on the micro-level as well as the macro-) then there may be hope for the K-Mart and the urban center, too, but that is a larger discussion.

The point, here, is that the simultaneous comfort and unease, the tension between compulsion and revulsion, we feel on the cusp of any transition into an unknown future, is a natural response to our human desire for the familiar and the Spirit’s dragging us into the unfamiliar, and (should we seek it) giving us the courage and consolation to move through and forward, being reminded that we too are in God’s hands.

We come down the mountain this Wednesday and start the journey with our Lord to Calvary. We get all the alleluias and perhaps inordinate love of pancakes out of our systems and start a journey which is in one way familiar if we’ve been in the Christianity thing for a minute, but which can be both fraught with peril and full of new discoveries every year if we’re prayerful and paying attention. Lent thus serves as a microcosm for all those seasons of our lives in which we move through the unknown, hoping and praying and sometimes though not always knowing, that God’s hand is leading us to something greater if we walk that road with patience and humility.

+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 people’s initial analysis of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was a rule-breaker rather than a rule-follower. He ate with tax collectors and sinners; he seemed far less impressed by those who followed the Old Testament rules “to a ‘T’” and far more concerned with what was in one’s heart. But then, at the end of last week’s Gospel, Jesus said something we might find rather shocking:

Truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Was this not, we might ask, the same Jesus who seemed not to care so much about the rules? Was this not the same Jesus who criticized the Pharisees for their obsessive, hypocritical rule-following?

This is indeed the same Jesus, and he is not contradicting himself, though it will take a little theological work to see what this apparent tension in Jesus’ teaching is all about.

In this morning’s Gospel Jesus picked up where he left off by outlining how one’s righteousness can exceed that of the Pharisees and scribes. Whereas the law said “thou shalt not kill”, we are enjoined to not even hold onto anger with our fellows. Whereas the law said “thou shalt not commit adultery” we are prohibited from dwelling on lustful thoughts. Whereas the law required faithfulness to oaths, Jesus said we should be so honest as to not require oaths.

At first glance, Jesus seems to be making a move that was rather common among his coreligionists at the time. The Pharisees were known for a practice called “hedging the Torah”, in which they would create rules around rules, as it were, such that nobody would be in danger of accidentally breaking the law. If the Old Testament said you cannot boil a calf in its mother’s milk, the Pharisees would say that you’d better not mix meat and dairy at all, just to be safe.

While this is what Jesus seems to be doing, I don’t think that’s the real point. For somebody so concerned with conscience above blind obedience, with love above scrupulosity, the practice of “hedging the Torah” would have likely been so out of character for Jesus as to lead to real contradictions. I think what’s really going on here is somewhat more subtle.

To get to the point, we need to look at a possible misunderstanding which might accompany the New Covenant of Grace. We all, I hope, know that the primary distinction between the Old and New Covenants with regard to salvation is the distinction between obedience to the law and faith in Christ. A faithful Jew had many rules to live by. They were not just rules to live by, but rules which, by following, had the effect of justifying the rule-follower. The New Covenant, by contrast, recognizes our inability to follow the rules perfectly, and by means of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross has opened the door to Grace, that our faith alone is sufficient (as far as our part is concerned) to obtain the remission of sins. This much shouldn’t be news to most of you.

Unfortunately, a deadly misunderstanding can attach itself to this life-giving truth. You may have heard some claim, if not in such lofty theological terms, that the freedom effected by God’s Grace has exempted them from righteousness. In less theological language, people might say, “I will be forgiven, so I intend to do whatever I please.” This misunderstanding is often connected to a rather narrow view of salutary faith: the kind that sees one “saving” experience or the sincere recitation of some prayer on the televangelist station a single time, as being a sufficient definition of faith. That faith is more than a one-off experience or prayer is beside the point, though, because even those that recognize that faith is a process of being in relationship with God can fall into the trap I’ve mentioned.

What I believe Jesus is telling us in this morning’s Gospel is that we are not exempted from the responsibility to uphold the highest moral standards for ourselves. I’d even go a bit further, by suggesting that despite the fact that we’ll always fall short, our dogged attempt to follow the moral precepts of the law, which we know from scripture and which we know in our hearts, is itself an expression of the kind of faith which opens us to God’s grace. As the Epistle General of St. James puts it “faith without works is dead.”

But whether or not you can buy into James’ epistle or my somewhat unreformed view of good works, there is one thing about which I think we can all agree. Those sins which Jesus denounces in this morning’s Gospel severely handicap our Christian witness. Anger and lust and adultery and duplicity are rather popular in the church, and to those who need the saving message of God’s Grace the most, the presence of these sins is a scandal.

How many have been turned off of organized religion because of the hypocrisy of some of its adherents? How many have given up the faith because some priest or minister couldn’t keep his appetites for sex or money or power in check? How many have left the church because some fellow Christian harbored resentment for his neighbor or defrauded an associate?

In the final analysis, the rules by which we govern our common life as Christians are not rules for the sake of having rules. Nor are they means by which we can save ourselves by being good enough. They are commandments by which we can live in greater faithfulness to God and in greater love with each other. They are the means by which we can more fully embrace the Grace given us as redeemed people, and they are powerful signs we have to point those who do not yet believe to a way of life defined by faith and love and mutual responsibility. In other words, the moral direction given us by God in Christ are not a set of rules to be broken. Neither are they dogma behind which the lazy may hide. They are a challenge to live a life together in which the Gospel is realized more profoundly and by which others may see God’s Grace and be drawn to it.

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