Author: John Drymon

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

As a consequence of both having poor eyesight and being a rather clumsy person, I’ve never much enjoyed the dark. I dislike that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling around to find my glasses, perhaps tripping over a cat or the shoes I left in the wrong place or whatever. I’m lucky to live in the developed world in the twenty-first century where electric lighting is ubiquitous.

Imagine, then, how surprising the imagery in this morning’s reading from Revelation would have been to people living in a literally much darker world:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day – and there shall be no night there … And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Light and dark imagery is seen throughout scripture, and I suspect it would have been more striking to these ancient people for whom the dark was a very dangerous reality. Bandits and predators struck in the dark. At nightfall you’d lock the gates to the city, and you’d probably stay in your house unless you were looking to get into some mischief.

And as dangerous as the literal darkness would have been, the metaphorical darkness in which the early church operated was a necessary evil. The church was being persecuted, and the best way to avoid death was to act like the bandits- move in secret, don’t get found out, worship God in locked rooms and catacombs.

How heartening, then, was this message of daylight! No longer would Christians need to scurry about in the dark, hiding from their torch-bearing persecutors. Finally, the true light which came to enlighten humanity could shine for all the world to see! The glory of God and of the Lamb would shine into every corner, bringing the righteous into a new and everlasting day and showing the designs of the wicked to be but vanity.

And now for the really interesting question, the question which makes the book of Revelation such a problematic text: Has this taken place? Are we, God’s faithful people, enjoying the light or is it an as-yet dim but growing hope.

I think it’s both. On the one hand, the majority of Christians can now be pretty open about their religion. Since Constantine, the Church has enjoyed a privileged place in Western society, even if she no longer has the authority she once had in the day-to-day lives of adherents and the larger culture. The Church continues to grow in the global south, and societies which once saw the Faith as a threat are starting to loosen up on enforcing laws which discriminate against Christians. Things are by no means perfect, but they’re getting better, at least in some parts of the world.

But we’ve not yet reached that perfect state of light. Sin and death are still with us. The vision of Revelation is not just about Christians escaping outright persecution (though that was the prevailing issue when the book was written). It’s also about all things being made subject to the reign of Christ. We’ve not yet seen “the kings of the earth bringing their glory into [the city of God].” It may have seemed like that for about a millennium, between Constantine and the Reformation, but the story was and remains a great deal more complex than that.

So, as much progress as has been made over the last two-thousand years, there is still darkness. There are still corners into which the salvific light of God has not shone. The nations have not been fully healed. Not all have the name of the lamb inscribed on their foreheads and in their hearts.

So, the image of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is still a hope. It is a hope for which we’ve been given a foretaste in the Church and Her Sacraments, but all is not yet accomplished.

And so we pray “thy Kingdom come”, in the sure and certain hope that it is our birthright in Baptism. We don’t just wait around waiting for “pie in the sky when we die, by and by”, because the vision of the Holy City is a vision of the coming reality of this world, too. Rather, we light a candle here and there, causing the gloom to take flight, and one day, perhaps when we least expect it, Christ will return and the world will be so full of the light of Grace that the darkness will have no bastion remaining, and all things everywhere will be transformed into just what God intends for them.

+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.

Week before last when I was at our annual diocesan clergy conference, I was talking with a colleague who has some similar interests to mine who told me that he had recently read a “thinkpiece” which claimed that the quality of a film or television adaptation of a novel was primarily dependent on that adaptation’s faithfulness to the source material. I told him that this seemed manifestly untrue, since different media necessarily require different approaches, and several examples immediately came to mind for me. Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Stephen King horror novel The Shining is superior in almost every way to the later ABC miniseries based on the same, despite being far less faithful to the book. The film version of Laurence Sterne’s bizarre 18^th Century novel Tristram Shandy was only successful, I think, insofar as it diverged from reliance on the putatively unfilmable book.

But the counter-example which I gave my colleague, because I suspected he’d be familiar with both the novel and the film, was Starship Troopers. I said that Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel was a piece of dangerous, fascist garbage and that the 1997 movie only worked because it was a satire which held its source material in contempt. I was surprised and not a little disappointed when my friend started to look a bit irritated and proceeded to tell me that the novel was one of his favorites, that he had read it six times, and that he did not see how I could find it problematic. Goes to show that sometimes I should know my audience better, or at least I shouldn’t assume my interlocutor always sees things the way I do.

Anyway, his response made me wonder if I had a similar appreciation for a work of art or literature whose actual message would not sync up with what I actually believed or how I really felt. I’m sure there are many examples of this but the one which came to mind immediately was William Blake’s 1804 poem which is most famous for being sung to Hubert Parry’s hymntune “Jerusalem” with Edward Elgar’s rousing orchestration. I’ll avoid the temptation to sing it at you; it goes like this:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

The heartbreaking thing for me is that this is such a wonderful poem with such compelling sentiments, but the last two lines lose me when I think about it.

Blake begins with these rhetorical questions based on a legend that Joseph of Arimethea brought a young Jesus to England, and the obvious answer to them, the poet realizes” is “no, those feet did not in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green nor did his countenance divine shine forth upon the clouded hills.” Blake fully realized that Jerusalem was not built on his lovely homeland then being despoiled by “the dark satanic mills” of encroaching industrialization. The second half of the poem is a rousing call to action, inspiring the reader to take up the arms of spiritual warfare against the forces of evil. So far so good. But then he gets to the point, and it’s this point (the whole point of the poem) that I, sadly cannot affirm: namely, that it is up to us to build Jerusalem, to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.

The message we get from scripture is precisely the opposite. It is God’s divine intervention that brings about the New Jerusaelem on the last day, as we heard in this morning’s lesson from St. John’s Apocalypse. Listen to those words again:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,[not being built by us, but coming down out of heaven from God] … And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” [I, God, make it so, not human effort and ingenuity, but the divine will working out that which we cannot.]

We are no doubt called to make the world a better place, but if we think our own efforts can eliminate sadness or death, we are sadly mistaken. If we think it’s all on us to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land or in Western Ohio’s cornfields, we are setting ourselves in the place of God, and we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

This might at first sound discouraging, but it is, in the final analysis, very good news indeed. It means that eternal life in the presence of God is not some metaphor for peaceful human society built by human ingenuity, but is exactly what it sounds like: eternal life with God. It’s good news because it means that it’s not all on us to make it a reality. God makes all things new. He’s not just in some process of helping humanity perfect itself and build its own Kingdom; he will on the last day raise us from the dead and he will dwell with us in eternity. This takes a lot of the pressure off. It does not, of course, exempt us from living a Christian life and loving our neighbors in word and deed; but it does mean that our own eternal happiness is not ours to effect, but God’s to give as his greatest gift. We need only to be humble enough to recognize that it is God who gives us the victory and not we ourselves, and to offer Him the only thing we can, which is genuine gratitude.

+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.

Many of you know that Annie and I have four cats: Genevieve, Hildegard, Jerome, and Alban. Three of the four have been acquired since we came to Findlay six years ago- Jerome wandered up to the back door of the rectory and just stuck around; we found Hildegard seemingly near death in a ditch while we were taking a drive in Putnam county and I pulled over to grab her and take her to the veterinary hospital, assuming they’d have to euthanize her and delighted that she pulled through; and we Alban famously adopted Alban after our parish’s service day at the Humane Society two years ago. Genevieve is the old lady of the house, whom not only preceded our moving here to Findlay but actually preceded our marriage by four years. That being the case, I was more or less the only human she interacted with consistently for the first third of her life, and she’s developed a strong attachment to me.

This becomes obvious whenever I spend any amount of time away. I was at our annual clergy conference in Geneva-on-the-Lake earlier this week, just two nights out of town, and ever since she’s been pretty much on top of me. It can make it hard to read or do anything on the computer because she’s not satisfied just to sit on my lap; she wants to be right up in my face. Some of you know I’ll be away for the whole month of July this summer, first at the Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention in Baltimore and then as the chaplain for the Merchant Marine academy’s training voyage in the North Atlantic. I can only imagine how clingy this cat is going to be when I finally return.

You’ve all hear the idiom “herding cats”, meaning trying to control an unruly group of people or a chaotic system. This, presumably, is meant to contrast with herding sheep, who are reckoned more docile and obedient. Now, I know it is technically true that sheep tend to be compliant; they are fully domesticated whereas housecats are reckoned only half-domesticated, which is to say that they’re still half wild. My experience, though, is that our cats know our voices and they follow, just like a sheep is meant to do, and just like the sheep of Christ’s fold, whom Jesus mentions in today’s Gospel are meant to do.

I will take this one step further. I wonder if most of us most of the time are worse off than either the sheep or the housecats. We are a lot more clever, if not any wiser, than the innocent creatures of the earth, which means we can convince ourselves we have no need to follow the voice of Jesus, our shepherd. Jesus’ task is harder than herding sheep or herding cats, because we human beings are just a little too smart and a little too wild to be fully- or even seemingly half-domesticated sometimes.

The most important thing about seminary–as great and necessary as all the classes in scripture and theology and church history were–was the expectation that we all attended chapel three times a day every day for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Eucharist. In the center of campus was the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and above the altar, flanked by statues of Old Testament Patriarchs and New Testament Apostles, in the very center was a ststue of Christ the Good Shepherd, holding a lamb which clearly wanted to be as close to Christ as it could get. It was getting right up in his face, just like my cat does when I’ve been gone for too long. And that, I think was what we were meant to be doing in this thrice daily retreat to the chapel–getting as close to Jesus as we could do, because even if we wandered from time to time, we knew his voice and we loved him and in the deepest part of our hearts we simply wanted to be with him, even if we didn’t always acknowledge that.

What if we acknowledged this truth about ourselves, our need to be held in the arms of Jesus simply to be close to him, more often than we do? What if our heart’s desire was simply to rest in his arms more often, to look into his face more often, to find that in following him he simply bids us rest in his presence? That, I think, is why we come to this place week in and week out, whether we know it or not. That, I think, is why in the midst of all the busyness of life, we must take time daily for prayer. We will hear his voice. We will see his face. He will hold us close to his sacred heart. We need only let him lead us. We need only, sometimes, to let him carry us beside still waters to refresh our souls.

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