Author: John Drymon

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

As I said last week, Advent is not just about preparing for Christmas, as important as it is to focus on that. It has also historically been about what we call the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We tend to shy away from at least three of these things – namely death, judgment, and hell – because so many of our more radical coreligionists might seem to place too much emphasis on them. Or, rather, they seem to want to be the one’s meting those things out, rather than leaving it to God. Too many take for themselves the role of judge, daring to speak on matters where Christ, not we mortals, has the final say.

That being said, I think we mainstream Christians are a little too quick to shy away from these last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We are a little too quick to dismiss the apocalyptic themes of scripture, because those who focus on them the most are a little bit “judgy” and creepy.

The problem is that when we simply react against an admittedly odd sort of theology, we can swing too far to the other side, and forget that scripture is full of these apocalyptic themes and if we choose simply to reject them, we’re missing out on a lot of what scripture can say to us. We are throwing out the baby of biblical truth with the bathwater of fundamentalist interpretation.

Take this morning’s Gospel. We hear a rather disconcerting sermon from John the Baptist who cries “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and who gives us an image of the final judgment:

[His] fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

There is more to scripture than gentle reminders to be nice to each other. The prophetic tradition in which John the Baptist finds himself is concerned with the eternal consequences of righteousness and wickedness and it is concerned with finality, the end, and we are unwise to ignore that message.

Now, before this gets too creepy, it’s important to remember that the Kingdom which is to come is a fundamentally positive thing. It is a promised gift to which we may look forward eagerly. This, I think, is where we can draw the most important distinction between the apocalyptic throughline of the Bible and the apocalypticism of some modern people. You see, the latter, at least as I’ve heard it preached, is primarily about fear. God’s coming, they seem to suggest, to blow the wicked away. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, so you’d better jump on a theological life raft. Even secular folk thrive on this sort of fear mongering. How will it end? Nuclear war, a super bug, a climate catastrophe. Well, maybe, but why are we so fascinated by the question “how is it all going to come crashing down?” Such speculation may be well intended—particularly if it leads us to live more responsibly in the days and with the world God has given us—but when Christians focus so much on the world coming to some nasty end the speculation can become profoundly theologically suspect, as I suggested in last week’s sermon, and when we assume such destruction is God’s will, we cede our obligations to make peace and to fight against the greed and corruption which create poverty and pollution and war.

The biblical view of the end is radically different from the modern apocalypticism. Instead of fear the biblical message engenders hope, because it is a story about triumph rather than destruction. There is, of course, an element of judgment in the biblical view—John calls for repentance that we might stand up under that judgment—but the overwhelming theme is that of a new peace and prosperity for God’s people. Hear again those beautiful words from the Prophet Isaiah:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

Every time we come together we pray as our Lord has taught us: thy kingdom come. And when we say “thy kingdom come” we pray not for the wrath of God on our enemies but for the peace that lasts to eternity. We pray not for death and destruction, but for the time when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

Thank God that sooner or later our Lord will return in triumph to judge the world, not because he comes to destroy the wicked, but rather that he comes to redeem us. Because it means that we who have been given grace to repent of our pride, we who are faithful if even in a little, will be brought at last to that heavenly city of peace and unity to dwell with God forever. We watch, then, not in fear but in eager expectation, knowing that our Lord will come and save his people, captive once to sin, but now made free by the power of his mighty Resurrection.

+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 Ghost. Amen.

I’ve never been much of a doomsday “prepper” or a millenerian, but I might have to go onto the streets with a bullhorn and a floppy bible and a sign reading “the end is nigh” after seeing a headline this week. The Church of England suggested parishes consider moving traditional Advent carol services from the evening of the Fourth Sunday of Advent to the night before, so as not to compete with the final game of the World Cup. Lord Jesus, quickly come!

All joking aside, and in light of what I said last week about the Christian’s primary citizenship being in heaven, perhaps the church should be a bit counter-cultural here by keeping services as scheduled and including some prayers about human rights and the Qatari government and our complicity by sending our national teams to such a repressive country instead of boycotting like we did in 1980 when the Olympics were held in Moscow.

Today we enter the season of Advent, in which we are invited to consider Christ’s return and that which precedes and follows it. Several years ago, before I started my current practice of spending a little time on Monday mornings finding some piece of art to put on the front of the bulletin, I discovered that for some years we had been using some images (presumably from some church publishing software) which highlighted what were reckoned by somebody to be the themes of the four Sundays of Advent: hope, peace, love, and joy. Poor Deborah was taken aback when I told her we needed to find something different because these were not the traditional themes of Advent. This schema was popularized by church supply companies who wanted to sell more Advent wreaths and who, probably rightly, figured that focusing on the traditional themes of Advent–death, judgment, heaven, and hell–would not shift as much product.

I’ve wondered what it would be like to go on Shark Tank–the reality television show where people bring their inventions to try to get investors–seeking somebody to underwrite my idea of a theologically correct Advent calendar: open the little door each day to find a miniature calavera (one of those Mexican skulls for the Day of the Dead) or a chunk of brimstone or something like this.

Now, I am not as uptight as I used to be. I confess that I have come to love what we might call “secular Christmas” even when it takes up much of the season when we in church are observing a season of penitential expectation. I kind of love seeing the much too early Christmas lights and displays and finding the radio stations that change format entirely to Christmas music for a full month and digging out my VHS copy of the best Christmas program of all time–which is A Charlie Brown Christmas, there is no debate–and watching it before it’s even December. Don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to find the video released on November 1^st by Queen of Christmas and faithful Episcopalian, Mariah Carey, in which she transforms from a witch into Mrs. Santa Claus and sings “it’s here” backed by the jingle bells and synthesizers of her perennial chart-topper “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I think all that is great.

That said, we are on a different time-frame here in the church, and this morning’s lessons should have made it clear, that while we are called to prepare not only for the coming of Christ in a manger on December 25^th, but also his return at the end of time. I won’t belabor this point, since I know I’ve said it before from the pulpit, but the scriptural view of eschatology, of these last things, as it’s been understood and interpreted by the church over the last two thousand years is not what we see in The Late Great Planet Earth or the Left Behind books and films. The idea of a “rapture” followed by a period of “tribulation” from which the faithful will be spared was a nineteenth creation of poor biblical scholarship, and it’s a bit shocking how much currency the view has received.

The lesson today from Matthew is not about Christians getting whisked into heaven to avoid difficulties. It is rather the opposite: the promise of persecution for the faithful in the face of the powers and principalities which wish, vainly, to silence the word of God, to snuff out the light of the Gospel. Indeed, the Christians of the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire would experience this, as have countless in the millennia since. Even today–though the situation is complicated by tribal histories and the natural antipathy between herdsmen and farmers–the participation of Boko Haram suggests that the thousands of Christians killed every year in Nigeria are victims of a fundamentally religiously motivated persecution.

I may get myself in trouble here for perpetrating what might be seen as committing a contemporary heresy, and I say the following not to denigrate the good work of Dr. King or of the 19^th Century abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, from whom he adapted his most famous quote, but here goes. I do believe the arc of the moral universe is long, but I am not convinced that it bends toward justice.

My own philosophy of history is best summarized by a fictional character, written by that eminent and eminently Christian writer and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien, when the Lady Galadriel of Lothlorien told the hobbit Frodo that she and her husband, Celeborn, the wisest of elves, had “dwelt in the West since the days of dawn… years uncounted… and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”

So, I tend to believe the glorious battle which we are bound to fight against the works of darkness by donning the armor light is one which we will seem to lose as history comes to an end. We mustn’t lose heart, though, we mustn’t cease striving as those without hope, we mustn’t despair, because beyond history is victory. “For in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh.” Lord Jesus, quickly come.

This is a teaser for my final church history class during coffee hour today–the great error of nineteenth century theology was to believe that we were all getting progressively better, the moral arc of the universe was reaching its positive conclusion, and that Christ returning to make things right and inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth was merely a metaphor for how the human race was about to solve all its problems through science and technology and the perfection of human moral reason. Then the twentieth century–the most violent century in human history–happened and reminded us that we were wicked and that in the end only Jesus could fix it all. This is not to say that nobody believes in this myth of human progress anymore. If you do, I bet Elon Musk has a seat on his first colony ship to Mars to sell you.

Even so, we are promised today that at the other side of that long defeat, the victory which Christ has won and will win at the last, is a promise whose glory is hard to imagine now in the time of this mortal life.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it … and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

And so I say once more, “Lord Jesus, quickly come.”

+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.

Even we Americans, who treasure the ideals of democracy, tend to have a fascination with royalty. WThe recent death of Queen Elizabeth II and the degree to which we Americans tuned in to all of the services and ceremonies surrounding it has ignited once again our apparent respect of, or at least interest in, a form of government which is not our own.

Why do we find royalty so charming—even appealing—in a land founded on the apparent contradiction between modernity and monarchy? Perhaps the perceived ineffectiveness of our democratic system, with its nastiness and gridlock which have been all the more striking in recent years, makes us secretly long for something less subject to the passing though passionate sentiments of voters and politicians. Perhaps the appeal of tradition and an admittedly rose-tinted, romantic misperception of “the good old days”, which in truth weren’t all that good, can make us long for that which connects us to that mythic past. Perhaps it’s the aesthetic appeal of lords and ladies in their finery and sovereigns in their courts and all the rest of it.

Or, perhaps it’s because we know we’re not really selfless enough to govern ourselves. Let’s take the conversation away from the commonwealth for a moment and consider the individual. It takes a saint to govern his own appetites and petty desires, to look to the good of another rather than his own. Now magnify that individual flaw and what one sees is a commonwealth of basically sinful, selfish people paying lip-service to the merits of interdependence and mutual responsibility. Unless you’re Ayn Rand or Gordon Gekko, you can see how this is not tenable.

The problem is, absolutism of a certain kind is no better than a democracy fraught with controversy. You can have a good King Edward the Confessor or a bad King John. You can have a righteous King Josiah or a wicked King Ahab. Human frailty, man’s penchant for greed and the pursuit of power, is a constant whatever form a nation’s constitution takes.

The same can be said for the peculiar practice of some sort of “democracy” in the Church. We can elect good bishops and bad ones. I have every confidence that we elected a good one yesterday, as the Diocese of Ohio met in convention and elected the Rev’d Anne Jolly, Rector of St. Gregory’s, Dearfield, Illinois to be our next bishop. The experience of participating in that process and getting to know a little bit about her and her family fills me with confidence, as does the fact that the process seemed to be one of prayerful discernment rather than power politics.

Sometimes we get it wrong, too. Most of you know that I previously served in the Diocese of Arkansas. The Rt. Rev’d William Montgomery Brown served as bishop of Arkansas from 1899 to 1911, and came to be known as “Bad Bishop Brown” because he was. Arkansas cannot be entirely blamed, though, as he resided in Galion, Ohio when he was elected and returned to the Buckeye State when he left Arkansas in disgrace. During his episcopate he wrote books in favor of both segregation and Marxism (suggesting that one can hold both obnoxious far-right and far-left ideas together if one tries hard enough), and the final straw was his claim that Jesus was a mythical figure and the creeds were merely symbolic. He was the first bishop of the Episcopal Church to face a heresy trial and was, rightly, found guilty and deposed.

The problem is that the authority which rulers wield, whether that ruler’s title is King or President or even bishop, is ultimately human authority. In the end our sinful nature forces us to muddle through, governing ourselves knowing that we’ll never do so perfectly.

And in the midst of this reality we celebrate today the Solemnity of Christ the King. You see, the only authority free from the failings of human rulers, be they kings or presidents or bishops, is the authority of God Himself as we have known Him in Christ Jesus.

But this authority takes a remarkably odd form. You don’t see in this morning’s Gospel the pomp and ceremony of the Coronation of Charles III we’ll see next year or of the Consecration of Bishop Jolly next year (and don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wring with those things). You don’t see lords and ladies in their finery and sovereigns in their courts and all the rest of it. You don’t even see the diocesan clergy and visiting bishops processing to the altar, like you will in Cleveland in April. Rather we see our King reigning from the tree, from the Cross which was the implement of his own execution. You don’t see a glorious bejeweled crown on our sovereign’s head, nor a golden mitre, but a battered wooden sign: “This is the king of the Jews.” You don’t see visiting dignitaries in the court approaching the king’s throne, but a criminal being hanged, pleading for mercy.

In this image of apparent utter despondency is the hope of the nations and the hope of the church. We plead to our earthly rulers to bring us peace, but Paul tells us that the King makes peace “by the blood of his cross.” We look to the leaders of the nations to bring us prosperity, but the Prophet Jeremiah tells us there “will [rise] up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”

This is not to say that we ought not expect much from our leaders, secular and ecclesiastical, but it is to say that there is room in the Kingdom of God for only one King, and his sovereign right was claimed neither by royal lineage nor by popular election, but by suffering and death. We can wish for sound government, we should pray for it, but our deepest hope for justice and peace cannot be found in the hands of earthly kings and earthly kingdoms, in nation-states or legislatures or even democratic ideals. Peace and justice in their fullest realizations can only be found in the Kingdom which is not yet come, but which is very near.

We are, as Christians, dual citizens, but our first allegiance is to that Kingdom and its sovereign. Let us pray that that Kingdom will come swiftly, that our King will return to save his people, and that his rule might be acknowledged by all people. This is our hope, and it shall not be in vain.

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