Author: John Drymon

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

If you’re anything like me, last Christmas was the most difficult of my life. One of the most disappointing emails I think I’ve ever received (and I’ve got some nastigrams sent my way over the years, as one can imagine) was the bishop’s announcement less than a month before Christmas that we were being required to shut our doors again in light of the rising number of coronavirus infections. I think at the time I referred to it, rather indelicately, as an “interdict”, which some of you may know is what it’s called when the Pope bans the sacraments in entire countries, as he did to England and Wales for six years in the early 13^th Century during the reign of bad king John. I should note that this was because said king had refused to accept the pope’s appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, not because he got the Sheriff of Nottingham to hunt down Robin Hood, though that would have been a fun twist in the legend.

In any event, being forced to return to “virtual church” was a blow. Add to that the fact that, like many of you, we had to make the difficult decision not to gather with family, and it was terribly hard to get into the holiday spirit. As you’ll read in my newsletter article this month, none of these sorts of things can make Christmas any less meaningful objectively speaking, but one still laments that it cannot be celebrated in as fulsome a way as we’re accustomed to. This year, thanks to vaccines and loosening restrictions, many of us will be able to join with family once again, thanks be to God, though I know this is not the case for everybody, and it will certainly be a difficult Christmas for those who lost a loved-one to this dread disease, or for some other reason and were unable to be with them in their final days and hours.

I was reminded of all this while thinking about this morning’s epistle. Paul is in lockdown in Rome, not because there is a plague, but because he’s been put in prison. It wasn’t the first time; Paul should really be the patron saint of recidivists. In fact, the first time Paul was arrested, sometime around A.D. 57, it was in Philippi, the city whose church he is writing to in today’s lesson. But this would have been the last time he had been arrested, sometime around A.D. 66. It was during the first significant persecution of Christians by the empire, after Nero blamed Christians for setting the great fire of July A.D. 64 (quite possibly actually set at Nero’s request, so he could clear space for his new palace, hence his “fiddling while Rome burned”). Paul was writing from a jail cell in Rome which he would only leave to face his own execution.

Like most of Paul’s letters, Philippians was written on the occasion of a difficulty in the community to which he was writing, and the Philippian problem was one which he had written about extensively before to other churches–namely the controversy surrounding circumcision and whether or not one had to become a Jew before becoming a Christian. But it is significant, I think, that he doesn’t bring this up until the third chapter, halfway through the letter, and then pretty quickly returns to the tone of the first two chapters of the epistle. One gets the sense that though the occasion for writing is this old controversy, Paul’s real point is to be found elsewhere.

And the point, I think, is this: He misses them. These are people he loves and longs to see, he knows he will be killed before seeing them again, and he wants them to know how important they are to him. Note the heart-wrenching language in this morning’s lesson: “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you … I have you in my heart … How greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.” He will go on to remind them to be joyful, to be humble as our Lord who came to us as a servant, to avoid those who put their trust in the flesh and the works of the law (here, the putative occasion for the letter). But at the end of the epistle he returns again to how much he loves and misses the Philippians and how grateful he is for them.

So, I wonder, if our experience over the last two years might encourage the same fruit to be borne in us, the fruit of love and longing and gratitude for those whom we could not see and touch and share the physical manifestations of companionship – a shared meal, sitting round the Christmas tree, a hug. A sure and certain hope that those who did not make it will be held in the Father’s Almighty hands until we see and touch them once again on that other shore and in that greater light. This latter hope must have animated St. Paul who, as his own death drew near, encouraged the Philippians to rejoice.

I know we’re not entirely out of the woods. I sometimes suspect that in the era of vaccination, those of us who have seen our way to availing ourselves of that great gift (if I may be slightly controversial, for those who have not fallen prey to the satanic lie of antivaxxer propaganda), are being encouraged by omicron variant click-bait to live once again as those without hope. Even so, there are no guarantees, and I realize that those with suppressed immune systems and other conditions must remain vigilant. For many of us, this year’s Christmas will carry with it a difficult calculus of risk and reward, perhaps more difficult than last year when many of us had to come to terms with gathering being a more uncomplicatedly bad idea, as sad as that reality was.

Whatever one’s celebrations look like this year, though, I hope we’ll all take St. Paul’s words to the Philippians as our example and encouragement. To love and long for our brothers and sisters we cannot see is a good and godly thing. To feel and express gratitude when we do see each other again is the Christian response to the great gift of fellowship our Lord has established in making us all members of the same body. Let us never again take that for granted, and let us be ever swift to rejoice.

+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.

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

These are not particularly cheerful words during a season in which the culture-at-large tells us that it’s time to start celebrating Christmas. I’d guess that most of you here have been more-or-less successfully catechized to know that there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, a distinction which the church continues to maintain despite the fact that it seems that Christmas in the secular culture seems to keep expanding to envelope about the last quarter of every year in a phenomenon called “Christmas creep.” As jaundiced as one can be about this sort of thing, I continue to be surprised every year when I see Christmas displays in big-box stores well before Hallowe’en.

All this is well-trod ground for us, but I think that sometimes we say there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, but we don’t quite acknowledge what precisely the distinction is, or, more to the point, what Advent is really all about. We sometimes say that it is to prepare us spiritually for Christmas, a sort of fast before the feast in the same way that Lent prepares us for Easter. This is true, but there is a whole other theme in Advent which we sometimes shy away from: namely the second coming of Christ.

It should be no surprise that we tend to forget this part of the story, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. We in the Christian mainstream have basically ceded this topic to fundamentalists, and that’s too bad, because there is a great deal of hope to be found in scripture’s account of the second advent of Christ. It’s not just weird, scary stuff.

Remember that scary passage from the Gospel reading with which I opened the sermon: the nations are in perplexity, people are fainting with fear, the seas roar, and the heavens shake? Here’s what comes next.

And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

We get caught up in the nasty bits and we forget that the Gospel is Good News. We forget that it’s not about God inflicting havoc on the world, but about God coming to us in the midst of turmoil and, through Jesus Christ, setting all things right.

What our Lord is on about in this morning’s Gospel is that when things seem to be absolutely as horrible as they can possibly be, God is there ready to step in and establish justice and peace, to bring about the Kingdom of God.

We do pray for this every week for heaven’s sake: thy kingdom come. We pray for it because it’s a good thing. I’ve said before that, despite the obsessions of some streams of American, fundamentalist Protestantism, there are some things not worth worrying about. Don’t worry about some people getting raptured up and others left behind. Some very poor biblical scholars basically invented that idea in the nineteenth century. Don’t worry about the wrath of God coming down to give you your just deserts for saying a cross word to your kid or accidentally swallowing your toothpaste before church. This religion we’re a part of is about grace, not judgment. Don’t worry too much about the whole world going to hell in a handbasket (unless you’re specifically worrying about premature Christmas decorations, I guess). God won’t permit it to go that far. Just as nations and peoples start freaking out in today’s Gospel readings, God comes and sets things right before it gets too bad.

So, that’s really the upshot, here. Don’t freak out. “Keep calm and carry on” as that old English poster from the Second World War put it (there’s one in my study and it inspires me frequently). God is on our side. God will keep us safe. God will establish a kingdom without end. Watch for it and pray for it.

+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.

On this Solemnity of Christ the King we are invited to meditate on a rather foreign concept to us contemporary Americans. We have no king in this nation; though sometimes looking at the nastiness that seems to define Washington at present we may wish we had one. Even those European countries which have maintained a monarchy have kept the institution while gradually stripping it of its political power over the course of centuries. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around what that image of Jesus on his “throne of glory” is all about. The best image most of us have of kingship is from things like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

But the reality is, none of our images in popular culture really get to the heart of the biblical view of kingship (though, as a side-note, I would claim that the Lord of the Rings novels—not the films—can be seen as an extended meditation on virtue, and their presentation of kingship gets close to the mark). We must, then, remind ourselves of the political milieu of the first century.

The Jews were, as happened so many times during their history, a people ruled by heathen outsiders. While much can be said of the benefits Roman rule brought to the Ancient Near East as well as Europe, the reality is that those subjected to such rule without consent were not inclined to appreciate an Emperor governing from a thousand miles away. While governance by consent is a hopelessly anachronistic concept, we can nonetheless appreciate the fact that the Jews would have been none-too-happy about the arrangement. To make things worse, Roman rule was not a benign institution in this part of the ancient world. Granted, most Roman governors made shrewd concessions to those practicing the Jewish religion in order to keep the peace (concessions which former empires had failed to make, like I mentioned last week). Even so, the uneasy peace which would ultimately break apart roughly thirty years after the death of Christ was constantly tested by regressive taxation and occasional violent persecution.

Suffice it to say, Roman rule in Israel was predicated on one overarching goal- namely, the accumulation and protection of power in the hands of a few individuals. There is no sense of a social contract in this period, no commonwealth. Contemporary anarchists have no idea how good we have it today, in a nation which (for all of its flaws) recognizes that, to some extent at least, we’re all in it together. I mean, these days we at least get tax breaks for doing what we ought to be doing anyway, like contributing to the church and to charities.

This being the context, Jesus’ action in as our sovereign is all the more radical. I think the most clear example of this is our Lord’s action during his crucifixion. As the King reigning from his throne, the cross, Jesus welcomes a stranger, a criminal, into his kingdom. He doesn’t require proper documentation or a citizenship exam or the promise to pay taxes. He doesn’t ask the criminal hanging beside him if he’s really a terrorist out to infiltrate the Kingdom of God. In response to nothing more than sincere desire, our meek king said “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

The King of Glory is a King whose law is love, and (as I’ve said from this pulpit before) Christian love is not about warm, sentimental feelings; it’s about treating those people we call brothers and sisters as if they really were our brothers and sisters. It’s about comforting the weak and feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and putting the stranger’s needs before our own.

And when I say “stranger”, I mean it. If Christ is truly King, it means that His Law is universal. It really means that we are obliged to see our God and King in people outside our own community. It means we treat the stranger just as well as the person already inside our walls, because in a very real sense the stranger is our King. It means we have to welcome the criminal, just like Jesus did. It’s easy to prop up those whom we see as “our kind of people.” It’s far more difficult to see Jesus in the outsider and thus to treat that outsider as if he were more important than ourselves. As William Tyndale, father of the English Bible, famously put it, “The Church is the one institution that exists for those outside it.” I fear, sometimes, that we’ve forgotten that.

In all events, the Kingship of Christ is not only different from the kingship of the emperor; it is diametrically opposed to the spirit of our age- the spirit which revels in individualism and so-called enlightened self interest. I sometimes wonder if we are more influenced by Max Steiner and Ayn Rand than we are by the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no place in the Kingdom for ethical egoism. I am not sure which is worse: an Emperor in Rome or a king in every man’s self-estimation. Whichever is worse, the latter is the contemporary sin, and it is more dangerous than the former at least as it regards our souls.

So our response to the Kingship of Christ is pretty simple. It is in loving sacrifice that we involve ourselves in Christ’s Kingship. It is in that remarkable paradox in which we see Christ reigning not only from His Throne of Glory, but from the Cross of Shame with a Crown bejeweled by thorns. Our own Glory, our own Kingship is bought on that more shameful throne with that most heavy crown, and our acceptance of the reign which Christ wishes to give us is a condition of our willingness to take up that Cross, put on that crown and follow.

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