Author: John Drymon

+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.

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

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city–
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

Those words are taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” and they echo, for me at least, the sorrow and the nascent hope of living in our own time, more than eighty years after they were written. The place to which Eliot invites us are the ruins of an intentional Anglican community, Little Gidding, founded by the scholar and deacon Nicholas Ferrar, and like so many things sadly shut down by the Puritans during the English Civil War, a year after the community had given refuge to Charles I.

There is nothing new under the sun. What Ferrar’s community experienced, what Eliot experienced during the blitz in his adopted homeland, and our current malaise brought on by polarization and technological idolatry and God knows what else all have the same result. Life seems fragmented and community appears an ideal whose ruins we may visit, but whose reestablishment feels beyond our reach.

There is another way. What Ferrar had done in Little Gidding and what St. Benedict established in the Sixth Century, what Anabaptists did in the Twentieth Century with the Bruderhof Communities, are echos of a primordial Christian impulse to live intentionally in community. Those whose common life is described in today’s lesson from Acts are the three thousand baptized on Pentecost in response to Peter’s sermon. The first large group of Christian converts came to Jerusalem (as the very difficult-to-read geography lesson we get on Pentecost reminds us each year) from every corner of the Roman Empire, speaking numerous tongues and no doubt bringing their own cultural assumptions and practices with them. One might expect that the response of this host would be to become the first group of organized missionaries, each going home to Pontus or Phrygia or Pamphylia or wherever, each to establish his or her own local church. Now the missionary impulse is not to be quashed, but perhaps it is not the ideal vocation for the neophyte. They had, after all, only heard one sermon. “Pentecostal fire … in the dark time of the year” to quote the poet again, may need some time to melt the snow round one’s own soul before it spreads.

And so these three thousand Christian men, women, and children set aside their ethnic chauvinisms and what was undoubtedly a difficult language barrier after the miraculously polyglot sermon ended, and set about to live as Christians together, to work and learn and most especially to pray together, and two thousand years and 2 billion disciples later we see the result.

The particular economic system adopted by these three thousand is always what piques the most interest and gets folks exercised for good or ill. In reality we can’t impose a modern term on what they were doing. I love to say that I am neither a socialist nor a capitalist, because that’s both true and gets people wound up and confused. I just say read G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and Jacques Maritain and you’ll start to understand my politics; fortunately, nobody has taken me up on that, so I don’t have to defend myself. But that’s neither here nor there, because saying that the three thousand Jerusalem disciples were distributist Christian democrats would be just as much a category error as any other attempt at pinning them down with modern labels.

The important thing about this early Christian community is just what I said a moment ago, they lived and worked and learned and (most especially) prayed together, and they did those things intentionally. Living in this way is easier the stricter a community is, but there’s an impulse here (I believe a God-given impulse) which can be adapted for various life circumstances. It’s easy in a sense for a cloistered monk or nun, with no family and little or no personal property, to pull this off. The three thousand had their own lives and families and occupations. So did those who lived at Little Gidding. So do Bruderhof brethren. But in all these communities there is mutual support and interdependence, there are common values and goals, and most important of all, there is a commitment to coming together to pray. Communes and kibbutzim rarely work out, not just because they can be too stifling or in the other direction too decadent. I think the primary reason for their failure in the long run is because they are fundamentally secular enterprises.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not about to announce the establishment of “Fr. John’s Christian Commune” this morning. I worry I’d go from gentle Abbot to authoritarian cult leader too quickly. And as much as I can appreciate people like Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth for their critiques of the unsustainable nature of our current ways of living, I don’t think radical agrarianism or neo-monasticism is actually workable for about ninety-five percent of the world’s population.

What I am suggesting is what if we just dip our toes into the shallow water of the pool built by those three thousand disciples? What would that look like? Maybe it would be keeping a half hour each day as a sacred obligation to simply pray with those in our household or friend group. Maybe it’s as simple as sitting down with other human beings to eat a meal and have a conversation when one would normally eat Doordash in front of Netflix. Maybe it’s helping a neighbor clean the gutter in a more active way than giving him the phone number for Acme Gutter Cleaners, L.L.C. or (and this is radical and uncomfortable for most of us Twenty First Century Individualists) asking your neighbor to help you clean your gutters.

To what degree one can manage any of that will vary, but at least the way to start, I think, is to try to enter prayerfully into living more intentionally. We have such great models throughout our history as God’s people. And perhaps we can repair to those places, if not physically then at least in the prayer of imagination, like Little Gidding where the saints have pulled it off in the past. As Eliot wrote, right after the stanzas with which I opened this sermon:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

+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 disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread. What has fascinates me most about this story is the disciples’ lack of recognition up to the point of the meal they shared in Emmaus. We so often call the events we just heard about as “the road to Emmaus”, but we forget that the moment that made all the difference for Cleopas and the other disciple didn’t take place on the road at all, but at the dinner table.

So what about that long walk they all took together? Our risen Lord was engaging in a ministry that defined his earthly life just as much as breaking bread with his disciples; he was teaching the meaning of scripture, how the Law and the Prophets pointed to the coming reign of the Messiah. Later, the disciples would acknowledge that they felt their hearts burning within them during this conversation, yet the moment of recognition didn’t come until that more intimate act at dinner.

Perhaps the disciples’ delayed discovery surprises us, but it shouldn’t. We are exposed to compelling arguments and weighty evidence of some truth or another all the time, but without some kind of personal experience, the truth sometimes doesn’t sink in. We can hear facts and figures about problems in the world, but our hearts are rarely moved if we don’t see it. We live in a society in which a large proportion of people can hear compelling arguments about some scientific or medical proposition but refuse to believe the validity of said arguments until they see it first hand (even if the proposition at hand doesn’t lend itself to that mode of scrutiny). So, I’m not suggesting that our difficulty in accepting truths on the basis of persuasive evidence is a good thing. It “is what it is.” We are now—as post-modern people—more skeptical creatures than we’ve ever been (with regard to science and religion and politics and every other human endeavor), and that’s neither an altogether bad nor an altogether good thing.

That being the reality, we can learn a great deal from the disciples’ delayed recognition. If we are even more prone to withhold judgment than people in Jesus’ day (which I suspect we are, though we’re not right if we assume everyone in the First Century was over-credulous) that affects how we go about evangelism.

If some in the church (particularly the mainline churches) have been sadly derelict in their duty to spread the Good News in recent decades, I think that discomfort is of precisely the same nature which causes others to be uncomfortable with the propagation of very different kinds of truth. Our discomfort may well stem from the very same post-modern rejection with absolute truth and the (to my mind) completely incoherent claim that what might be true for one need not be true for another.

If we truly believe that Christ is risen, we believe something stronger than the claim that “for me Christ is risen, but perhaps not to somebody who rejects my meta-narrative”. We believe Christ is risen. We’re making a claim which is just as true as “gravity exists” or “the earth orbits round the sun”. We’re not just using code language to point to some personal feeling. We’re making a claim about the truth of a fact, a fact which is not co-tenable with every other religious claim everyone else in the world may make. So important is this truth, so potentially life-changing and world-changing is this truth, that we should find it to be a truth whose universal acceptance would be a good thing.

Our discomfort with this suggestion cripples our witness. I may have said this before but it bears repeating. A friend of mine once said that Episcopalian evangelism is like building the most beautiful, well-appointed boat ever constructed, taking it out into the middle of the ocean, and waiting for the fish to jump in. Needless to say, you’ll not catch many fish that way, but sadly I think the analogy rings truer than we’d like to admit.

But, considering the fact that the people we live among are more like those disciples on the road than we might have thought—considering the fact that we now have a couple generations of people who might not have read Heidegger or Derrida or Foucault, but who nonetheless share their rejection of modern logic and argumentation—our approach might need some tweaking, and Jesus is once again the model.

We’ll not convince many people that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” just by setting forth propositional arguments. Some, yes, and questions also arise early in the “conversion process”, so apologetics is still an important activity. But for most it’s probably not the entree.

We may, however, help others see the risen Christ when we break bread with them. The good news of the Resurrection is not limited to what it means for us who have been baptized on the last day. The Resurrection also means that we’ve already been risen with Christ, and we, the Church, constitute his earthly body. So, when we nurture the kinds of relationships with others that are manifested most powerfully in Christ’s breaking of the bread, we open a window of insight into the Christ of whom we are a part. We permit those who do not yet believe to have the opportunity for the same recognition experienced by the disciples.

Our earthly relationships are ideally reflections of the primary relationship God has with each of us. This is why the marriage rite makes clear that the love shared between husband and wife is a sign of the love “betwixt” Christ and his Church. This is why parents and godparents are so intimately involved in the rite of Baptism. Our domestic community (that is, our household) as well as our ecclesial community (that is, our parish church) are primarily contexts in which we humans in very human ways try to reflect the love of God.

What we learn from this morning’s Gospel is that the most compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is not to be found in any scientific enquiry, but rather in the love we show and are shown, and how in that love we point to the Christ who first loved us. May we be brought to daily conversion, to slowly turning ourselves back toward God when we experience the love His people show toward us, and may we break bread with others in the hopes that they, too, will catch a glimpse of the risen Christ.

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