Author: John Drymon

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

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes that “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.” I wonder how often, in the age of GPS, we set out without a clear sense of how to get where we’re going. I know that if I’m going someplace unfamiliar I connect my smartphone to the Bluetooth on my car stereo, and its soothing voice leads me all the way.

I did get a little taste of this recently, though, if only second-hand. Most of you know that I recently returned from being chaplain on a ship with 450 Merchant Marine cadets on its training cruise across the Atlantic. A couple days after we boarded I was on the bow of the ship talking to one of the deck officers when I saw the captain, coming up behind us rather quickly and looking less than pleased. Fortunately neither of us was in trouble. He came to inform the officer I was talking to that he had gotten fed up with the cadets relying too much on the ship’s navigation technology, and he was about to turn off all of the electronics on the bridge and in the chart room.

This was no idle threat. He did just that, and for the next couple of weeks one could see groups of 18-to-22-year-olds on the bridge-wing with their sextants or huddled over physical, paper charts in the aft navigation room. These kids were going to get us from Belfast to New York using celestial navigation, without the benefit of anything more technologically advanced than a hand calculator. It is hard enough, sometimes, to put one’s trust in God’s providence to take one by a way which is unknown, as did Abraham; expecting that providence to be mediated through a bunch of college-aged-kids requires some faith as well!

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Today’s Epistle uses a couple of words which transform our understanding of faith: assurance and conviction. Faith is not just about believing stuff; faith is about receiving an assurance that our greatest hopes will come to pass. Faith is not some tepid assent to facts that we choose to believe because we might as well; faith is about engendering conviction– a certainty about God’s promise which changes how we live our lives.

Abraham was not a captive to wishful thinking. His initial state was fear. God begins his conversations with Abraham in today’s Old Testament lesson, by bidding him “fear not”, yet Abraham remains fearful. He desires what every man of his era desired: a legacy in the form of descendants, and he is justifiably afraid that it will never happen. The normal means by which we come to know things, observation and reason, had taught him that his hope was empty. No man of his age, with a wife apparently incapable of conceiving, could have hope for children.

Yet, God gives Abraham an assurance that the promise will be kept, and Abraham immediately believes. Assurance only means something if the one giving it is in a relationship with the one receiving it. Abraham’s relationship with God was strong, and so the assurance was received. Despite all evidence pointing to the improbability of God keeping the promise, Abraham’s relationship with God was strong enough to elicit trust.

Now Abraham’s response was not just any kind of trust. It was what the author of Hebrews called conviction. Ordinary trust doesn’t require anything of the beneficiary save confidence in the trustee. Conviction, on the other hand, requires action. Immediately after this morning’s reading, Abraham makes sacrifice to God. Throughout the next several chapters he will obey God’s commands even when he doesn’t understand the point, most significantly in the binding of Isaac after Sarah does give birth. Ultimately, it is through this kind of conviction, the principle component of faith, by which God himself is proved faithful.

This is good news for us, but it is also a great challenge. It is good news because it means that we can be assured of things unseen if we maintain our relationship with God. We can come to a place of profound confidence simply by maintaining that bond, as did Abraham and all the great heroes of our faith. It is, however, a challenge, because it means that something is required of us, namely conviction. The Christian life isn’t just about believing certain facts despite the lack of evidence, as important as believing those facts might be. It is about letting those truths change us. It is about bearing the good fruits of virtue: temperance and justice and mercy and love. Just as Abraham’s faith proved God faithful, so will our faith if we live with conviction. Just like Abraham, and just like all the saints, we can not only believe but know, know more sincerely and more powerfully than we can know the truths of reason and science, that God has prepared for us “a better country… a heavenly one.” We may not know the way. We may feel sometimes like our lives are being charted by chance, even less certain than teenagers with sextants. But through prayer and participation in God’s plan for our lives, even when we don’t know that plan–that is to say, when we live by faith and not by sight–we come to the joy of the knowledge that this plan is for our good and that of the world. And When we live in the joy of that knowledge, our lives will be changed, will be transformed into sacrifices even more pleasing to God than was Abraham’s.

+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’s Gospel reading is a tough one. Jesus says some pretty disquieting things in the Gospels, but what we read today might strike us as the most offensive thing in the bible. A man who wishes to become a disciple asks “Lord, let me first go and bury my father [and then I will follow].” And how does Jesus respond? “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” Another wishes only to say goodbye to his family before setting out, and Jesus responds “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” Jesus seems to be contradicting even his own prophetic heritage- you’ll remember from today’s Old Testament lesson that Elijah permitted Elisha to literally “put his hand to the plow and look back”, to take his oxen back home and say goodbye to his own family before following the prophet.

How do we deal with this hard teaching of Jesus? I don’t know entirely, and I’m starting to wish that I’d chosen to preach on the Epistle! Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel are shocking. This is the Jesus whom so many equate with “family values”, whatever people who use that phrase mean by it, and Jesus’ words here seem diametrically opposed to those values.

I think we do violence to Jesus’ teaching if we opt to spiritualize it entirely. That’s a trick we’ve probably seen before in another context. Often a preacher, when given Jesus’ teaching about money (namely, his command to give it all away), will turn the whole thing into a spiritual exercise, saying “well, you don’t have to give all your money away, just don’t place all your trust in the wealth you have. Be ready to lose it if it comes to that.” Certainly, the meaning of Jesus’ teaching in that matter is complex, but there’s something more to it than how we’re supposed to feel about money. We are supposed to do something.

It’s much the same with regard to Jesus’ teaching about family. He’s not just saying, “be ready to lose your loved ones in the normal course of events (as they die or move away or whatever) without losing your faith.” It’s not an entirely spiritual teaching, even if we wish it were because the spiritual meaning is so much more comfortable than a meaning with any practical implications.

But, then again, we can’t come to terms with an entirely literal reading of the teaching either. There is a chance that Jesus meant exactly what he literally said, but that would go against the expectation of the rest of scripture and of the Church’s historical teaching, namely that commitment to one’s family is not only “okay”, but is enjoined on us as a holy obligation.

So, it seems to me, there is something more complex in Jesus’ words than either the simple literal meaning or the entirely spiritualized meaning.

Perhaps, and this is just a hunch (albeit a hunch with some theological training backing it up), Jesus is warning his interlocutors and all of us, his prospective disciples today, against making excuses. Specifically, I think he may be warning us against making our commitments to family an excuse for not doing his work.

Now, before I seem to say something too scandalous, let me explain what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that there aren’t family obligations which affect how we approach our own ministries in the church and in the world. I’m not saying that missing a Sunday from time to time to be with a sick loved one is going to get us in trouble. I’m not saying that becoming a little less active in some role or another because you’ve got young children or teenagers is wrong. I’m not saying that family commitments shouldn’t figure in to how we discern what God is calling us to do and be. Quite to the contrary, family obligations are obligations given to us from God, and fulfilling those obligations is an important way to do God’s work.

What I do think we learn from reflection on the Gospel, though, is that sometimes misunderstanding the nature of those obligations can keep us from doing that to which we are called. In other words, we can convince ourselves that there is a barrier which doesn’t exist between our desire to serve and our ability. For example, I heard a number of anecdotes when I was in seminary from some of my older classmates. This is changing nowadays, but a decade-and-a-half ago very few young people went straight from college to seminary. I was the only one in my class who had done, and it took some effort to convince my bishop that I didn’t have to go have a career in some other field and enter the ordained ministry in middle age, as had been the ordinary pattern for the previous half-century or so. Anyway, many of these classmates of mine had felt a call to the priesthood for years, but believed it to be absolutely unfeasible because of their children’s need for stability. So, many waited until all the kids were out of the house and in college fifteen or twenty years later and then realized that they could have moved earlier, the kids could have been in a good school and had friends and probably would have loved going to seminary with mom or dad, particularly in New York City where we were.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the case in every family’s situation, but what I’m saying is that we’ve got to reflect on rather than dismiss the possibility of some sort of ministry out of hand. We might find that our family obligations preclude volunteering to serve at the mission, or serve on vestry, or whatever. Or, we might find that we can fit it in or, better yet, involve our family. The point is that individual situations with regard to family or work or any other commitment will open up new avenues for ministry and close others. It’s our responsibility to avoid making excuses and consider how precisely we might be able to follow, what that can look like for each of us in the context of his or her own life. Scale back involvement in one area if you need to, ramp it up in others if you’re able. We’ve just got to do the hard work of thinking about it and praying about it first. If we do that, we might be surprised what we can accomplish for the sake of the Gospel.

+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.

I think we forget sometimes just how cruel the ancient world was. Infanticide, often by means of exposure, was a daily reality in antiquity, practiced by parents of unwanted or “imperfect” babies. Bloodsport was a common pastime. Slavery was nearly ubiquitous (it must be noted on this Juneteenth that modern Europeans perfected the institution of slavery as a means of cruel debasement in the Americas, and it was in many respects far more brutal than the form slavery took in the ancient world, but it was more widespread in antiquity, every major Empire in Europe, Asia, and North Africa practicing it, with the singular exception of the Persians, though even they have an asterisk next to that in the record book of history).

Most shockingly of all, the very concept of qualities like mercy and generosity and loving-kindness beings goods in themselves–not simply means for gaining some advantage–was essentially unheard of before Judaism and organized charitable activity (not philanthropy meant to attach one’s name to a public building or service, but honest-to-God aid to the poor and marginalized) did not exist before the Christian Church. Even famously atheist historian Tom Holland, acknowledges in his most recent book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, acknowledges that while he cannot personally affirm the metaphysical claims of Christianity, the moral principles established by Christianity and their influence as our religion grew, undeniably made the world a much less cruel, mean, scary place.

All of this is to put into context something which might have struck you as odd in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus saves the man from the country of the Gerasenes from demonic possession. We know that this is not a Jewish community, but a pagan, Gentile one, both by virtue of being on the opposite side of the sea of Galilee (a largely culturally Greek region) and because somebody is keeping pigs there, which no Jewish commmunity would have tolerated. Now, by contemporary standards or by ancient Jewish standards we might have expected this miracle to have been greeted with joy and awe by all, except perhaps the swineherd who lost his pigs. But how did the people of this city respond? They were afraid and they asked Jesus to leave.

Here is a naked man who lives in a cemetery. Mark’s version of the story tells us that this man would rant and rave and cut himself with stones. One would think seeing this man come to his senses would be a cause for celebration, but not so in the country of the Gerasenes.

It is hard to say precisely why this would be the case. There are various theories. The one I find most convincing is, believe or not, from somebody with whom I generally vehementky disagree, French philospher and critic René Girard. Like a lot of people who get fixated on a particular idea or theme to the point of trying to explain everything by reference to it, Girard developed a view of anthropology which held scapegoating as the primary mechanism by which human culture is established. This leads to some pretty outrageous claims from a Christian standpoint, particularly as it regards the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ crucifixion.

However, in at least this one instance we see the power of the theory to explain otherwise seemingly-inexplicable behavior. Why on earth would anybody want a person to undergo this horrible experience and be disappointed that he’s been healed? Presumably even the most heartless members of a community would at the very least want to be spared having to look at this horrible scene day after day. Because, sinners that we are, we might sometimes want to have a target for our collective guilt and loathing. Just so might we communally impute our problems onto one unlucky person–he must have sinned that this befell him, his sin is greater than mine, and so he bears my sin, too. Look, we don’t even need to stone this one; he’s doing it to himself.

Think this doesn’t happen today? We have seen all too clearly, all too recently with tragic effect what happens when an individual or a group of people convince themselves that their problems cannot possibly be blamed either on themselves or simple bad luck or even thorny systemic issues with no simple solution, but must, rather be blamed on an individual or a class of people. That person or group over there is entirely to be blamed and must be made to suffer, whether they be schoolchildren or the congregation of a church or synagogue or elected officials or an entire sovereign nation in Eastern Europe. Resentment, thus, becomes the primary mode of interacting with the world until that Other is made to suffer, and this has been used by fascist dictators and Marxist revolutionaries alike to create untold suffering. There will never be a shortage of angry young men, and now they’ve all got internet-connected computers in their basements to make the scapegoating more efficient.

Is there good news here? Yes. In fact it is The Good News. Jesus can save us from this cycle of rage and recrimination. When the man formerly possessed of Legion is healed, he is given not only freedom but a job to do–namely telling the people of his own city that there is a better way to live. We don’t know for certain whether or not the Gerasenes eventually accepted this message, but I suspect so, because I suspect Jesus wouldn’t have set the man to this task unless he knew it was going to work.

It can work and it does work and it will work. The catch is that it requires our own conversion, our own turning away (every day, perhaps) from pettiness and the desire to see ourselves as more deserving of God’s love than the person with whom we have the least in common, with whom we are at most enmity. It requires us to recognize that even the one who is most unlovely to us is just as loveable to God. Because in Christ, the one who has the most to need for forgiveness can, when given the gift of grace, is the greatest messenger of the Lord’s universal love. Because the church’s greatest persecutor might well become her greatest Apostle, as of old Saint Paul was made worthy to be. Because in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. For Christ came to save us all, and we must see each and every human heart as a fit place in which the Spirit of God might take up residence, to transform, and to be made and inheritor of the promises of the Gospel and a herald of the same.

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