Author: John Drymon

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

“Come and see.” This is the invitation Christ gives to his first disciples in today’s Gospel reading, and I suspect these disciples were surprised by his answer to their apparently banal question. It seems a rather dull, ordinary kind of question they ask: where are you staying? It’s the sort of question we might use to initiate a polite conversation. It’s a dull question to which we might expect an equally dull answer.

“Where are you staying” has a plain meaning, and this might have been the level on which Andrew and the Beloved Disciple were asking it. The question can also be taken to be asking something much more profound, though.

You see, the word translated as “staying” in the diciples’ question is found elsewhere in John’s Gospel, though our modern translations choose different English words at different points. Most relevant to the passage in question are two such verses in John.

First, John 14:10:

“Do you not believe,” Jesus asks his disciples, “that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells (stays) in me does his works.”

Whether Jesus dwells in his own home, or a friend’s place, or the Holiday Inn isn’t the point. The important thing is that Jesus dwells (stays) with his Father and the Father dwells in him.

Then, from earlier in the first chapter of John, a verse which will probably be familiar to you:

“And the Word became flesh and lived [or stayed, or dwelt] among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (1:14)

While Jesus, being the Eternal Word of God, lived on high he has come to stay among us. So, the question, “where are you staying?” in fact gets to the heart of Jesus’ identity. The question leaves an opening for Jesus to disclose the uniqueness of his relationship to God the Father, the union between God and humanity which were mysteriously held together in his very person through the hypostatic union.

Now, Jesus could have answered the disciples’ question with a theological treatise. “I am God from God,” he could have said, “Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. Through me all things were made.” I suppose the first four centuries of church history, in which the Fathers endlessly debated how to define Jesus’ identity, would have been much simpler, if significantly duller, if Jesus had made it this plain.

This, however, was not his answer. Instead, he responded to the disciples’ question with an invitation: come and see. The theological reflection of the Church is very important, but the starting point is a great deal less cerebral. It is simply to keep one’s eyes open for the presence of God with us; to follow where he will lead us, and to behold his glory- “the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”.

We must have eyes to see, as it were, but where is it that we—who do not have the benefit the disciples had of seeing Jesus during his earthly life—where do we look for the Son of the Most High? I go back to one of my favorite prayers for the answer. It’s the traditional prayer for the celebrant after the Eucharist (it’s what I mumble to myself on my way out or with the server at the back of the church), and it goes like this:

“Blessed, praised, worshipped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most precious sacrament of the altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people.”

Christ has indeed ascended into heaven, and he has not yet returned. But he is still spiritually present in our hearts and he is still truly present in the Sacrifice of the Altar. So long as we have the eyes to see, so long as we are open to being in the presence of God, we may still see him in this Church, in ourselves, and in our brothers and sisters in Christ. And it is in moments when our perception of the presence of God with us is most clear, fleeting as these moments may be, that we gain strength and renewal and move toward maturity in the faith.

When in the Gospels people “come and see”, when they get a glimpse of the God who had come among them, they cannot stay in God’s presence by themselves forever. Rather, they are sent out to make the same invitation Christ made to them. Andrew and the other disciple stayed with Jesus that day, the Gospel tells us, but then they left and Andrew found his brother Simon and brought him to Jesus.

Later in the chapter, Jesus calls Philip to follow him and Philip goes straightaway to his friend Nathanael. Nathanael questions Philip’s wisdom in following this Jesus and shows a bit of xenophobia, asking “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip’s response is direct. “Come and see.” Similarly, in the fourth chapter of John, a woman that Jesus meets at a well is convinced that he is the Messiah, and she goes into a village and proclaims to all the people, “come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!”

All of this is to suggest that the proper response to recognizing Jesus as Lord, to seeing him, is to go out and invite others into God’s presence. This doesn’t mean being overbearing or manipulative or obnoxious. It does mean that we have an obligation to represent Christ to the world by our words and our deeds, and to simply and lovingly extend the invitation to “come and see”. This is why one of the postcommunion prayers in the prayerbook asks God “to send us out to do the work [He has] given us to do, to love and serve [Him] as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” And whenever we are tired or perplexed or hungry for spiritual nourishment, we come back again into presence of God who dwells in the sacrament and in the assembly of His people that we may once again “go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

+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.

If you have attended any of our celebrations of the Holy Eucharist that take place on major feasts on weekdays, or if you have tuned into them online, you will have noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of reading an excerpt of a sermon or commentary written by the church fathers instead of a sermon of my own. In case you were interested, these come from a book which provides readings for every day of the year called Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by one of my seminary Church History professors–the late, great Canon J. Robert Wright.

On Friday, the Feast of the Epiphany, if you were there or if you were livestreaming the liturgy, and if you were really paying attention, you might have either been confused or assumed that I had made a mistake. While the Gospel which we invariably read on the Epiphany was what you’d expect–the visit of the three wise men–the homily, written by Gregory Nazianzus, the Fourth Century theologian and Archbishop of Constantinople, had nothing to do with the magi following yonder star and presenting gold frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child and slipping past wicked Herod on their trip back home. Instead, it commented on the theme we encounter today–namely, Christ’s Baptism.

This was not a mistake, though. It was, no doubt, a choice the editor (my old instructor) made to focus on the Eastern rather than the Western Christian focus of Epiphany –unsurprising, since he had done a great deal of work in laying the historical and theological foundations for contemporary ecumenical dialogue between the Anglican and Russian Orthodox Churches. You see, among the Orthodox and other Eastern Rite Churches, the focus of Epiphany (or Theophany as they’d call it) is not on the Magi but on the Baptism.

Epiphany, meaning manifestation, and Theophany, meaning God’s (self-)revelation, are themes which both of these events from Christ’s life highlight. The magi and their gifts point both to the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles and his tripartite status as prophet, priest, and king. Thirty years later in Jesus’ life (though only separated by two days in our liturgical calendar this year) we see an even more profound example of God’s self-revelation–the fact that Christ himself was and is a person of the Triune Godhead. Here we see the Spirit of God made physically present in the form of a dove and the voice of the Father made audibly manifest. Such a clear, literal manifestation of the Holy Trinity would only occur once more in the Gospel accounts, at the Transfiguration which is quite appropriately the Gospel we’ll hear on the last Sunday of the Epiphany season in six weeks’ time.

The point here; the message of the Magi and of the Baptism and of the Transfiguration; the Good News of this season of the Church’s year, is that we have a God who desires to be known. We have a God who has no desire to hide himself or his purpose.

Do not let the fact that sometimes the work of theology and biblical interpretation can be difficult give the impression that the Truth of God’s word is intentionally vague or veiled. Christianity is not a religion which should have any time or tolerance for the proposition that there is secret knowledge meant only for insiders. Religions which make such claims have a name, and that name is cult. This is true of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which claimed one had to attain knowledge of God through a personal mystical communication. It is also true of modern cults, which might either explicitly withhold certain doctrinal claims until one has paid enough money to advance in the group or implicitly, say by instructing the young men who come knocking at your door to carefully elide more bizarre claims, like getting your own planet and harem at the resurrection if you’re a dude (let the listener understand).

Christianity has no secrets, because we believe God’s greatest desire is to be known. Because knowing God, we know love and can make love known to all. Our great privilege is the opportunity to do the same–to open ourselves to the fullness of God and then to turn round and help others come to know him, too. We can do so clearly, gently, without prevarication, with utter transparency and gratitude, because God himself did it first–in Bethlehem and at the Jordan and on the Mount of Transfiguration and to all he met after his glorious Resurrection. And he comes to us still–in our hearts, in his Word, in the Sacrament, and in this great fellowship into which we have ourselves been baptized and made a part of his own Body to be a light to the world he came to save.

+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 morning we celebrate a principal feast of the Church, which is actually the conflation of two themes we find, however briefly, in this morning’s Gospel. We call this day the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but for those of you who remember a prayerbook prior to 1979, you will perhaps remember the old name of the holiday: the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus.

Indeed, both happen in this morning’s Gospel and both are of a piece:

And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

I suspect the rationale for the name change had something to do with our discomfort for something as seemingly indecent as discussion of circumcision in a church. Even so, it is hard for me to understand why we do not acknowledge both themes in our church calendar. So, for this morning, let us rename the day to include both: The Feast of the Circumcision and of the Holy Name of Jesus.

My initial draft of this sermon covered both themes, but it ended up being far too long for those recovering from whatever festivities might have taken place last night, so, let’s focus this morning on the bit that I can say with some confidence will get less attention in pulpits today: namely, the circumcision. From this seemingly passing acknowledgment in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus was indeed circumcised we gain more insight into the person of Jesus than we might expect.

First, and most obviously, we see an affirmation of Jesus’ Judaism. Not only was he circumcised, but it was done on the eighth day, the proper time for a faithful Jewish family to have the rite performed for their child. It is notable that this is found in Luke’s Gospel, often hailed as the most gentile of the Gospels and written by the only New Testament writer who was a gentile himself. This apparently minor fact serves as a powerful rebuke against the purveyors of antisemitism, a backward worldview that has sadly seemed to have increased in recent years–note the recent Kanye West debacle. It should go without saying (though, increasingly, it must be said) that our salvation is founded upon a Covenant which came before us- a Covenant which God gave the children of Israel, just as truly as God gave us the New Covenant.

Secondly, the circumcision reminds us that Jesus is a man. By man I do not mean male (though we also have to assume that bit considering that he was circumcised). I mean that we are reminded that Christ was a human being. If this seems obvious, it is because we live in the twenty-first century rather than in the first. Christ’s humanity was just as hotly contested as His divinity in the early centuries of the Church. Very early in the church’s history (and I would argue even before the Canon of Scripture had been completely composed) there were various heretics (docetists and Gnostics) who denied the orthodox view of Christ’s Incarnation as it would later be defined in the Nicene Creed. The circumcision of Christ reminds us that Jesus wasn’t just some ghosty pretending to be a human, but that He was and is a flesh-and-blood human being. And, as St. Irenaeus reminds us, this is extremely important, because unless Christ were truly human he could not have saved humanity. The Cross would have been nothing more than play-acting if it weren’t for the fact that the body it bore bridged humanity and divinity.

Finally, we see in the circumcision a foreshadowing of Christ’s mission and, in some sense, a commencement of the sacrifice of His life. The Incarnation itself was a sacrifice of the highest caliber, as we are reminded in this morning’s epistle- very God of very God becoming frail and limited by taking on the form of a slave. But in the circumcision we find bloodshed. Forgive my very old-fashioned theology (it is of a sort which would preclude my receiving tenure on many theology faculties, believe it or not), but the atonement which was to be effected on the Cross, the substitution of the perfect man for sinful men through the blood of the everlasting Covenant, begins with the Christ child in St. Joseph’s arms undergoing the rite prescribed. In the arms of the man who would protect Him and His Blessed Mother from the wrath of Herod is the Christ Child given His first taste of the kind of pain which is borne through obedience and which is ultimately salutary.

And so, this day we greet the Christ Child again, but not only as the babe in the manger. We greet Him as an intermediary, an intercessor, a bridge: as the bridge between God’s two great Covenants, as the bridge between Godhood and humanity, and as the bridge between the old life of sin and death and the new life of redemption and Resurrection through his Precious Blood.

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