Author: John Drymon

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

Back when I was in college I heard that NBC was to air a new dramatic series titled The Book of Daniel. I was terribly excited, knowing that the Old Testament book spun a great story and I was intrigued, wondering how the makers of this program would capture both the more well-known incidents from the biblical book—the fiery furnace and the lion’s den and so forth—as well as the really weird bits, like Daniel’s dream of the four beasts and that interesting character, the Archangel Michael, whose first appearance is in Daniel in this morning’s Old Testament lesson.

Much to my chagrin, when the ultimately short-lived program aired, I discovered it was not about the book of Daniel at all, but about a pill-popping Episcopal priest named Daniel, his boozy wife, and their dysfunctional family, including Daniel’s father, a bishop who was having an affair with his female suffragan. Even if an unbalanced clergyman and his dysfunctional family might be interesting and troubling in real life, it makes for incredibly dull television, which is probably why it was canceled after five episodes.

If I had been head of programming at NBC, I think I would have gone to the biblical book of Daniel instead. It’s story is far more compelling, and ends with a note of hope, the sort of hope that seemed lacking from the priest’s family in the series.

Like many of the most hopeful tales, Daniel was paradoxically written in the context of desolation. At morning prayer the last few days we’ve begun reading through Maccabees, about how after the death of Alexander the Great the known world got divided up to his forebears, and by the 2^nd Century B.C. the King Antiochus Epiphanes came to rule over Israel. Antiochus instituted a program of hellenization, conforming the customs of conquered peoples to the Greek standard. This included mandatory worship of Zeus rather than the God of Israel, and imprisonment or even death for those who failed to comply. Needless to say the Jews were not tickled with this state of affairs, and although a number gave into Antiochus’ pressure, a faithful remnant remained true to God despite certain persecution. A goodly number, despite the personal cost, stayed true to the words of the psalmist:

Their libations of blood I will not offer,*
nor take the names of their gods upon my lips.

It was in the context of this upset that the book of Daniel was written. It’s a funny little book, and in some ways out of place in the Old Testament. Sections of the book were written in Aramaic rather than biblical Hebrew, the only Old Testament book to use the more modern dialect. It was, you see, written for the people alive then to read. Daniel is neither straight prophecy nor standard history, like so many of the other books, but allegory, much like the New Testament book of Revelation.

The author of Daniel was most assuredly writing about the struggles of his people in the present, during the Greek occupation, but he placed the story in an older context, the days of the Babylonian captivity. Instead of Antiochus Epiphanes he wrote about Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar. The original audience’s present reality which was implied underneath the text would have been apparent to the faithful Jews suffering under the yoke of foreign rule, but it was not explicit enough to get the author or his readers into more trouble (just like, as you may know, John used coded language in Revelation in order to speak about the Romans without being explicit enough to get his readers crucified themselves).

And the similarities between Daniel and Revelation do not end with the fact that both are obscure and symbolic. Both books are written in the context of horrendous persecution, but both are among the most hopeful books in the bible. Revelation presents us with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth in which God has put all things rights. In the same way, Daniel presents a remarkably hopeful vision in the midst of a situation which would lead most to despair:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, [it says] some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.

This is the first explicit mention in the bible of the Resurrection of the dead, the great hope which Jesus himself would define and enable. It was only in the midst of an apparently hopeless situation that the most hopeful message in the history of humanity was revealed.

So it is for so many of us. Christian mystics throughout the centuries have recognized that great hope and joy comes out of apparently hopeless situations. St. Teresa of Avila wrote about aridity, dry periods which seem always to precede spiritual breakthroughs; St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote about the twin experiences of desolation and consolation, the former being the precursor to the latter; and St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul”, a period of pain and fear which preceded his own spiritual awakening.

This is not to say that God causes pain. God did not will that the Jews should suffer under the yoke of the Babylonians and the Greeks, that early Christians should be put to death by Rome, that all the nasty experiences that we might suffer in our lifetime should have visited us. These are the effects of original sin and free will, not of a vindictive God. However, God can and does use those experiences as a means for revealing his glory and love. Just as Jesus said to his disciples in today’s Gospel: “do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come… This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” May we, then, recognize that in the midst of our own troubles, God is still at work, bringing about a new and better creation; let us pray for patience in the midst of these trials, knowing that at the end of every death comes the light of resurrection.

+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 year, as ever, I noticed many of my colleagues posting on social media some variation of the following warning: This is your annual reminder that All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are two different days. Those of you who’ve been around here a while have heard me make this distinction, so I won’t belabor the point, except to say that this is true–the former celebrates those “capital ‘S’” canonized heroes of the faith, and the latter recalls and bids us pray for all the faithful departed. I’ve done a pretty bad job at modeling the distinction this year. We had a celebration of the Eucharist Monday morning for All Saints’ Day. I generally celebrate a requiem mass on All Souls’ Day, but this year, for my sins, I was a poll worker and, figured nobody would be willing to attend a liturgy which fit into my schedule (which would have had to either end before 5 a.m. or begin after 9 p.m. Tuesday). And, as ever–as a lesser of two evils, perhaps– we sort of mash the two together on the following Sunday, so we have a somewhat tonally jerky liturgy today in which we both celebrate the Saints and pray for the dead. We have the litany of the departed and read the necrology during the Eucharistic prayer, and our lessons (because the revised lectionary we’ve had to use for the last fifteen years is itself rather confused) seem a bit more “All Soulsy” than they are “All Saintsy.”

All that said, I want to diverge a bit from the lessons and the themes of the faithful departed, to speak a bit more personally about a couple of Saints that mean a great deal to me, and I hope in this brief reflection you can find something which might encourage you to study the lives of those Saints who for what ever reason appeal to you as potential prayer-partners, which is their primary way of interacting with us. More about that in a moment.

One of my favorite English idioms is the phrase “busman’s holiday.” The idea is that somebody who drives a bus for a living is likely to take a bus someplace for vacation; so it suggests a vacation where you do something related to your working life. I took a “busman’s holiday” in the summer of 2019, and many of you will remember me talking about it quite a bit, so I won’t bore you with an extensive travelogue. The best bit, as some of you will remember, was celebrating the Eucharist at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in England. There were many other highlights, but two have really stuck with me. One was a stay at the Carmel, the convent in Lisieux (in France) which was home to St. Therese. The second was a stay at the Abbey in Eibingen outside Rudesheim-am-Rhine (in Germany) which was founded by St. Hildegard von Bingen.

I want to do something a little different, here, and simply read the official hagiographies (that is a fancy word for the biography of a saint) published in our churches book of Saints, Lesser Feasts and Fasts (the most recent edition being approved in 2018), and then I’ll just say one word about something which I think those hagiographies omit.

Therese of Lisieux

Called “the greatest saint in modern times” by Pope Pius X, canonized by Pope Pius XI just twenty-eight years after her death, and named a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II, Thérèse of Lisieux has become one of the most beloved saints of the Church.

From an early age, Thérèse felt called to the religious life; even as a little girl she played at being a nun. On Christmas Eve 1886, at age fourteen, she experienced a vision of the infant Christ and what she called a “complete conversion.” Thereafter she understood her vocation to be prayer for priests, and she began seeking admittance to the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. When she entered the order at age 17 as a Discalced Carmelite, she assumed the name Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.

Dedicated to what she called her “little way,” she led a simple, quiet life of prayer—in particular for priests—and small acts of charity. She struggled with illness throughout her life and suffered greatly from tuberculosis before her death in 1897 at age twenty-four. At age twenty-two, just two years before her death, her prioress instructed her to write her memoirs. The Story of a Soul, as it came to be called, commended a life of “great love” rather than “great deeds,” echoing the insight of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, a book that had helped her to discover her vocation and develop her spiritual life. She corresponded with Roman Catholic missionaries to China and Indonesia as well as with young priests, pursing what she saw as the mission of the Carmelites, “to form evangelical workers who will save thousands of souls whose mothers we shall be.”

Toward the end of her short life, Thérèse experienced a profound sense of abandonment by God, but even this did not shake her love for God. On the verge of death, Thérèse confessed that she had “lost her faith” and all her certainty, and was now “only capable of loving.” She experienced her sense of separation from God as something to be borne in solidarity with unbelievers. She “no longer saw” God in the light of faith, but nevertheless responded to him with a passionate love. In this experience, her youthful decision that her vocation was “to be love in the heart of the church” lost all hint of sentimentality. Her last words epitomize her “little way”: “My God, I love you.”

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098 in the Rhineland Valley, was a mystic, poet, composer, dramatist, doctor, and scientist. Her parents’ tenth child, she was tithed to the church and raised by the anchoress Jutta in a cottage near the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg.

Drawn by their life of silence and prayer, other women joined them, finding the freedom, rare outside of women’s religious communities, to develop their intellectual gifts. They organized as a convent under the authority of the abbot of Disibodenberg, with Jutta as abbess. When Jutta died, Hildegard, then 38, became abbess. Later she founded independent convents at Bingen (1150) and Eibingen (1165), with the Archbishop of Mainz as her only superior.

From childhood, Hildegard experienced dazzling spiritual visions. When she was 43, a voice commanded her to tell what she saw. Thus began an outpouring of extraordinarily original writings, illustrated by unusual and wondrous illuminations. These works abound with feminine imagery for God and God’s creative activity.

In 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux recommended her first book of visions, Scivias, to Pope Eugenius III, leading to papal authentication at the Synod of Trier. Hildegard quickly became famous, and was eagerly sought for counsel, becoming a correspondent of kings and queens, abbots and abbesses, archbishops and popes.

She carried out four preaching missions in northern Europe, which was an unprecedented activity for a woman. She also practiced medicine, focusing on women’s needs; published treatises on natural science and philosophy; and wrote a liturgical drama, The Play of the Virtues, in which the personified virtues sing their parts and the devil, condemned to live without music, can only speak. For Hildegard, music was essential to worship. Her liturgical compositions, unusual in structure and tonality, were described by her contemporaries as “chant of surpassing sweet melody” and “strange and unheard-of music.”

Hildegard lived in a world accustomed to male governance. Yet within her convents, and to a surprising extent outside of them, she exercised a commanding spiritual authority based on confidence in her visions and considerable political astuteness. When she died in 1179 at the age of 81, she left a rich legacy which speaks eloquently across the ages.

So, we are given here very brief sketches of two very important women in the church’s life. So important that they are two of only four women (alongside St. Teresa of Avilla and St. Catherine of Siena) whom the Roman Catholic church lists as Doctors of the Church.

The hagiographies I just read do a good job of presenting Therese and Hildegard as women of tremendous spiritual depth, but they do leave out what I think is an important aspect of each. Namely that they were strong enough in their faith to speak boldly to powerful people despite the place of women in 12^th Century Germany and 19^th Century France not making that an easy proposition.

On a diocesan pilgrimage to Rome, after having been told by the diocesan authorities that she was too young to enter the Carmel, a fifteen year old Therese knelt before Pope Leo XIII during an audience and demanded he force her bishop to allow it. She had to be dragged off by the Swiss Guard.

In the year 1153, having discerned that the King of Germany, who was soon to become Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, was not managing the kingdom’s affairs wisely, Hildegard wrote the following letter to the King:

O king, it is imperative for you to have foresight in all your affairs. For in a mystic vision I see you like a little boy or some madman living before Living Eyes. Yet you still have time for ruling over worldly matters. Beware, therefore, that the almighty King does not lay you low because of the blindness of your eyes, which fail to see correctly how to hold the rod of proper governance in your hand. See to it that you do not act in such a way that you lose the grace of God.

As you can imagine this could have gone very badly for Hildegard. She could have been jailed or banished. Instead, Frederick invited her to come to his court at Aachen to serve as an advisor.

With these two heroes of the faith, their trust in God gave them strength and courage which few of us could imagine embodying. This, I think, is what defines a Saint, and it is a quality which we, too, can develop. Perhaps we’ll none of us get there in this life, but we are all works in progress thanks to the Spirit working in us.

All of this brings us, at last, to the point, which is what the Saints do for us. They are Saints, not to put it too crassly, by virtue of the fact that we have a high degree of confidence that they have already received the beatific vision, their souls are already before the throne of God in sure and certain hope that their bodies with ours will follow at the final judgment. Thus they are already engaged in the worship of God in heaven and their prayers for us can be powerful.

Saints, as I said at the outset, are our prayer partners. Just as we might ask our friends whom we know to be powerful pray-ers (some use the term “prayer warriors” which is alright, though some might be turned off by the martial imagery), so too might we ask the Saints to intercede for us. As an aside, if somebody from a more reformed background asks, either genuinely or as a means to try to trap you, “do you Episcopalians pray to the Saints?” you can simply answer, nobody (Episcopalian or Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or whatever) prays to the saints; we pray to God with the saints.

We do not in this Communion have as developed a canonization process as, say, the Roman Catholic Church with its devil’s advocate and documentation of miracles and the like. Sometimes we add folks to our calendar who might be important people–the first bishop of the diocese of Northeastern Fostoria or whatever–because our process of adding commemorations to the calendar is painfully democratic for good and ill. My response is often something like, “well that fellow’s important, but I’d hardly call him a saint.” But there is a rule of thumb, here, which I find helpful, as subjective as it is. Do I feel comfortable saying “Saint [insert name here] pray for me”? If so, go for it. If not, humbly move along and hold out the possibility that somebody else might come to a different conclusion.

This is a practice I commend to you, and if you’d like to get a good start, look at the calendar (it starts on page 19 of the prayerbook) each morning and ask “who is today’s saint?” Take a minute to do a little study. Google them. Or, even better, ownload a copy of Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018, which I mentioned earlier. The pdf is free. Read the hagiography, say the prayer appointed for the day, maybe read one of the appointed lessons. And be persuaded as you will that this hero of the faith, too, is praying before the throne of God, and we are joining our prayers with theirs, and this is a very comforting thought.

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

Over the last week our Old Testament lessons at morning prayer have covered the opening chapters of Ezra and Nehemiah, which, if you pray the Office (which I commend to you) you might have found a bit dry, but which I find extremely interesting. The Jews have returned to the land and get to work, with the help of their liberators the Achaemenid–or First Persian–Empire. Two things that struck me as interesting, the first really a curious point but worth noting and the second particularly relevant.

So, first, if any of you saw Zack Snyder’s exceedingly silly movie about the Battle of Thermopylae 300, which came out fifteen years ago, you’d have gotten precisely the wrong idea about the Persians. In short, they should have been the good guys and the Spartans should have been the baddies. Starting with Cyrus the Great, the one who founded the Empire and liberated the Jews, the Persians established an order which respected and fostered religious and cultural diversity, established good government with an essentially federal system 2,000 years before America, and (perhaps most significantly) largely eschewed slavery, the life-blood of societies like that of the Spartans. In our readings from Ezra this week, we learn how much assistance Darius I assisted in helping the Jews restore the temple in Jerusalem and reestablish the sacrificial system there. Then of course you have the movie’s big-baddie, Xerxes I, who in the film is portrayed as a sort of tyrant and target of the audience’s supposed homophobia because of his flamboyance. In the biblical Book of Esther, on the other hand, Xerxes (called by his Hebrew name, Ahasuerus) is shown saving the Jews in the Imperial city of Susa from the wicked designs of his viceroy, Haman, and eventually making Esther his queen. This, by the way, is the origin of the festival of Purim, which is observed today as a sort of Jewish Hallowe’en (complete with costumes and baskets of candy) so how appropriate we are reminded of that today.

More importantly for our purposes today, one is reminded in these lessons from Ezra and Nehemiah the great complexity of the temple’s ritual system and the enormity of the construction required to house it. The nature of the sacrificial vessels are outlined in some detail as well as the particular sacrifices to be made on appointed days. In chapters omitted from our course of reading, after Nehemiah inspects the temple walls, we are treated to details of how that work proceeded and given a sense of just how great the scope of restoring the buildings of the temple complex must have been. And that the Jews would seek help from their new imperial overlords (relatively benevolent though they may have been) suggests just how important the project was considered by those newly returned to their land.

Interesting, then, that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws not upon the image of the second temple, nor even of Solomon’s temple before it, when drawing his parallel to Christ’s sacrifice:

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

“The greater and more perfect tent.” The Greek here is σκηνης. It does not say temple or building, but “tent.” The verses prior to our Epistle’s opening makes it plain, here, that he is speaking not of either of the grand building complexes of the Jerusalem temples with their thousands of gold and silver vessels, but the relatively simple tabernacle toted around the desert by Moses and the Israelites recently freed from Egypt. There is, here, an earthiness in the image Hebrews chooses, a simplicity, but arguably even more importantly, a mobility–a sort of geographic and temporal limitlessness not permitted by a system bound to a single place and time to which one must travel thousands of miles to approach or hope that the geopolitical reality of any given era allows that place to stand and be entered.

I cannot remember whom I heard put it this way, but I think he was right, as non-pluralistic as it might strike the ears of a contemporary person. One genius of our faith is that it is not bound to a particular place. One needn’t go to Jerusalem to make the appointed sacrifices in precisely the point God told the Israelites to do. One needn’t make the hajj to Mecca because Muhammed said so. Christ, though born in Bethlehem, is truly born in the hearts of all believers. The heavenly tent, the Holy of Holies into which Christ entered once for all, is not a place we must go, because it comes down to earth upon hundreds of thousands of altars in the sight of hundreds of millions of Christians throughout time and space. This is not to say we’ve always appreciated this fact; the Crusades stand as perhaps the greatest historical example of our getting this all wrong. Nevertheless, here Christ is [on our altar] and here he is, too [in our hearts].

I, for one, am grateful that we have a lovely and well-maintained church. It is, first and foremost, a temple in which the Body of Christ is given a home, just as the temple in Jerusalem was, first and foremost, a temple in which the Spirit of God, resting upon the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant, is given a home. It should, therefore, be respected and maintained and made beautiful. That said, our Lord is just as capable of being present anywhere anytime, in a beautiful cathedral or on a card table set in the midst of a homeless encampment or on a little stand in the hospital room of a believer about to meet our him face to face. How appropriate that the Apostle Paul–whom I’m comfortable claiming wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, though I’m in the minority camp–literally made tents for a living. So whether one goes forth into the world carrying the Blessed Sacrament (as I often do on my calls) or just with the Christ who is present in each of our hearts, we can be certain that he is there with us, and wishes to make himself known to all whom we meet. For he has entered the Holy of Holies, he has become our Advocate, and he promises to give us the victory over sin and death wherever he may call us to spread his presence.

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