Author: John Drymon

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

I am in the process of both helping a friend with some severe mental difficulties get an apartment and of becoming his “payee” (that is, managing his social security benefits so that he doesn’t run out of money before paying rent and utilities). My friend has an excellent advocate through a nonprofit, and she and I have been on the phone with each other pretty frequently during this whole process. Anyway, we were talking the other day about my friend’s soon-to-be landlord, and she said “his heart is in the right place, but he can be difficult so call me if you have any problems with him.” I responded, “well, I can probably hold my own with him” to which she replied “I know, you’re a godly man.” That is not what I meant, and she gives me too much credit. I meant that I can be a difficult jerk, too, if I have to be.

Something occurred to me after this conversation which had not before. Namely, I realized that a lot of Christians are functionally donatists. Donatism was an ancient heresy which arose following the persecutions of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian in the early-fourth century. Many clergy had buckled under this last concerted effort to stamp out Christianity in the Roman Empire. One of their greatest crimes in the eyes of the church was handing over holy objects, particularly Gospel books which were usually the most valuable thing a church had at the time, to the Roman soldiers. In fact they were given a name which literally means “the ones handing [things] over”–traditores, from which we get the English word traitor. When Christianity was finally legalized under the Edict of Milan in A.D. 313, many of these traitors did their penance and rejoined the college of clergy, but the Donatists claimed that their sin made the sacraments they administered invalid and they’d have to be reordained.

At first, this might strike us as reasonable. Ought not there be consequences for wicked behavior? Well, yes, but it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the priesthood. Ordination is an irrevocable, ontological change, which is to say that it fundamentally alters a person’s nature in the same way as baptism. One cannot simply cease being a priest any more than one can simply cease being a baptized Christian. One may break one’s vows and be under discipline. A public and notorious sinner may for a time be excommunicated, unable to receive the Sacrament until reconciliation is effected, but he doesn’t stop being a Christian. A priest may be inhibited or even defrocked, but that doesn’t mean she ceases to be a priest. She is still perfectly capable of confecting the sacraments, she is simply forbidden from doing so, at least publicly.

In purely practical terms this is very good news for you. It is like your insurance; no matter how wicked I might be, you’re still receiving the grace of the Sacraments. And anyway, where is the line to be drawn? Should any sin render one unable to function as a priest? There is a fair distance between a cross-word to someone who cuts you off in traffic and committing murder. They’re both sins, but gravity matters.

In any event, my friend’s advocate assuming I could handle something because I’m “a godly man” probably (like I said) stems from a bit of functional donatism. Now, she is definitely from a more evangelical background, and I do wonder to what extent that might have influenced that assumption. Not to be too hard on evangelicalism (I really don’t think it’s a good look when mainline clergy do that, because it often comes from a place of assumed superiority), but just to tell it like it is, the understanding of ordination in that context usually assumes a degree of subjective, personal faithfulness (and maybe even charisma) that is different from our understanding–namely, I think, that ordination is not at all about me and my personal qualities, it’s simply a gift for the church effected by nothing more than the bishop praying over me and laying his hands on my head a dozen years ago. But none of this is to say that we are not affected by the same problem. There are a very few priests in our church from whose hands I’d have trouble receiving the Body of Christ (and that being my spiritual state when given the opportunity I probably shouldn’t do), but I have to remind myself that the Body of Christ is still there, regardless.

All of this is a rather lengthy introduction to a single point about today’s lesson from Hebrews, and you may call to mind my disclaimer about substitutionary atonement and supercessionism from three weeks ago, that on these issues I am considered by some a theological troglodyte, though I’m not especially sorry.

The ordained priesthood and the priesthood of all believers, whereby baptism allows us to approach the altar of God, are secondary to the perfect priesthood of Christ himself. I mentioned last week that, like Melchizedek, we continue to offer the unbloody sacrifice of Bread and Wine rather than goats and sheep and oxen and the like, but I didn’t make it explicit why. It is because, as we hear in this week’s Epistle, Christ offered it once for all. He was the sacrificial lamb, and his perfection (not mine nor yours) made this possible.

Thank God, because like those priests of the Old Covenant, I’d have to be constantly making sacrifices to atone for my own manifold sins and wickedness, and you’d never be certain whether the sacrifices I made on your behalf were efficacious. But now we have a guarantee of God’s Grace if we but desire it. The verse immediately before this morning’s Epistle opens makes it explicit: “This makes Jesus the surety of a better covenant.”

We have two more weeks of lessons from the Epistle to the Hebrews–it would be three, but as ever we will avail ourselves of the prayerbook’s permission to observe All Saints’ on the Sunday following the feast–and I pray this series of sermons hasn’t become too pedantic (though, you know, pedantry is my spiritual gift). There is so much comfort here, but even more than that I find reason for tremendous joy, as we are drawn further into contemplation of Christ’s victory over sin and death. Most of all, I am reminded this week of how powerful it is to realize that when we are praying together here at this altar in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ remains standing before the throne of the Father interceding for us, as our priest in this life and our king for ever.

+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.

One of the pieces of advice lectors often receive is to look at the lessons they’ll be reading ahead of time to see if there are any strange names and look up how to pronounce them. Failing that, at least read with enough confidence that nobody will realize that you have mispronounced it. I was reminded of this at my last parish when today’s Epistle was read there once (it must have been six or nine years ago, I can’t remember which, since our lectionary is a three-year-cycle). The fellow reading that morning, who normally came very prepared must have either forgotten to review the readings or got nervous in the moment. Anyway, that day our Epistle ended thusly: “being designated by God a high priest after the order of… Melcheeziak?” and a fairly mumbled “the Word of the Lord.”

Melchizedek is undoubtedly a weird name, but that’s appropriate because he was a weird dude. Or at least his story is very strange. He shows up in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. Shortly after Abraham’s initial call where God told him to leave the land of his birth (Ur of the Chaldeans in what is today Iraq) and a brief sojourn in Egypt, he and his nephew, Lot, part ways, and Lot is taken captive by Chederlaomer, the King of Elam. Abraham mounts an army which defeats the king and rescues Lot. It is then that this strange figure, Melchizedek appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

And here is all we have of that incident, just four verses:

After his return from the defeat of Ched-or-lao′mer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley). And Melchiz′edek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

After this, Melchizedek simply disappears. He is mentioned only once more in the Old Testament, namely in the fourth verse of Psalm 110 to which our lesson from Hebrews refers: “The Lord has sworn and he will not recant: ‘you are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.”

So, what do we learn from such scant evidence? More than you might think. Melchizedek is both a king and a priest. He is the King of Salem, and this is significant for two reasons. First, Sa-lem means “peace” (you might have guessed that, because you are familiar with the modern Hebrew “shalom” and the Arabic “salaam.” Second, it is traditionally understood to refer to the holy city itself, Jesuralem (Jeru-salem).

Melchizeck is also a priest, and specifically a priest of “the Most High God”- El-Elyon. This raises the question as to whether this is meant to refer to the God of Israel, who goes by many names throughout the Old Testament including this one, or if it is, rather, some Canaanite God worshiped in Salem in the Second-Millennium B.C. I don’t usually get my theology from gifs (you know, the little seconds-long videos you sometimes see online with a caption), but I immediately thought of the popular one with the little girl shrugging her shoulders with the caption “porque no los todos?” Why not both? It seems to me entirely possible that the ancient, pre-Hebrew people of Salem could easily have been given some spiritual insight, even unconsciously, which led them to worship the one, true God under some other name to prepare them for the nation of Israel which was to come. That is just speculation of course, and speculation about what might have happened four thousand years ago, so take it with a grain of salt, but if my suspicions which we’ll get to soon are correct, it could make a lot of sense of what’s going on here.

We also see this peculiar offering Melchizedek brings. Bread and wine. Now this may strike us as quite ordinary, since we sacrifice bread and wine on our altar every week. I don’t think it would have been usual in the period in question, though. I am no expert on pre-Israelite ritual culture in the Ancient Near East, but I think I’m right in saying that ancient gods were generally thought to require a bit more than bread and wine. They were carnivores, you might say. Even as the children of Israel became established in their sacrificial system after the Exodus, one might be required to offer grain and wine at the same time, but it was always in addition and secondary to the sacrifice of some animal (see, for example, the fifteenth chapter of Numbers, which I won’t bore you by reading).

Finally, Melchizedek blesses Abraham and Abraham, in return, gives him a tenth of his possessions. This is really tangential to the point I’m winding up to. I only mention it because stewardship season is coming up in November, you’ll be getting your annual pledge cards soon, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention that tithing is a biblical principle. So that’s all I have to say about that.

Anyway, we now have a lot of data points- the king of the city of peace, the priest of the most high God, a bloodless sacrifice of bread and wine, the blessing of one who simply followed in faith where God had called him. Even without the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews making it explicit, I would imagine that reading these four verses about this strange figure in a Christian context would make one suspect what this is about.

I mentioned typology last week, almost in passing. It is understanding something in the Old Testament as being a substantive though sometimes imperfect pre-figuring (more than a simple foreshadowing) of something in the New Testament. So, to use some of the classical examples, Moses holding up the bronze serpent to heal the poisoned Israelites in the desert is the type and the Cross of Christ is the antitype. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish is the type, and Christ’s three days in the tomb is the antitype. Here, it should now be obvious, we have Melchizedek the type and Jesus himself the antitype.

But is there even more here? Perhaps. As I started writing this sermon, the very question I intended to pose in here was beginning to be debated (in, of course, a friendly, collegial manner) by some of my fellow-priests on the social media. Is Melchizedek more than a type. Is he, in fact, an example of what theologians call a “Christophany”, that is an appearance of the second-person of the Trinity, God the Son who became Incarnate in Christ Jesus, before his Incarnation. This is the realm of suspicion and speculation, but I assure you it is not wacky or heretical.

As early as the Second Century, Christian thinkers like Justin Martyr have been asking if the Angel of the Lord who appears so often in the Old Testament–instructing Hagar, speaking to Moses in flame, blocking Balaam and everyone’s favorite talking donkey on their way to Moab (if you’re unfamiliar with that story, it’s in the twenty-second chapter of Numbers, and you need to read it), taking away the sins of the high priest in Zechariah 3, and so many other times–was indeed the Christ come before his Incarnation. So too might not Melchizedek be an appearance of the one who was to come and who now reigns as King of Peace and Eternal High Priest.

So, this is all a bit more abstract and rarefied than my ordinary sermon, and one may well ask, “what’s the point?” Well, it’s interesting, but that may not be a very compelling answer to some. I guess it’s this. I get into a rut of trying to find the practical call to action or word of comfort or whatever to conclude a sermon, and I don’t have that this time. But somebody reminded me that meditating on the mystery of the Trinity is a good in itself, and that at least in our Western Christian tradition intellectual exercise about divine reality is itself a devotional act. And it’s fun, too!

Don’t worry, I’ll probably be back to my ordinary, hortatory crank ways next week. For now, let us give thanks that God has given us minds to ponder the sometimes seemingly ineffable, and that, as one of our hymns puts it “there’s still more light and truth to break forth from his holy word.”

+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.

There is an exercise I undertake with confirmands during our session on the Creeds and Councils of the late-classical and early medieval church. It’s a sort of “straw poll” where I ask them to write down on a piece of paper whether they believe Jesus is more human than divine or vice versa. Usually the results are about fifty-fifty, though every time I’ve done this (about a dozen times now) at least one student is clever enough to realize this is a trick question. The point is really two-fold. Firstly, it is to show that while we believe Christ to be both fully human and fully divine, we seem to have a preternatural tendency to err to one side or the other. This, I hope, makes the Christological debates of the patristic era a little more understandable. Secondly, and more importantly, it is to begin to discuss why it is so incredibly important that regardless of that preternatural tendency, that we believe in Christ’s dual-nature. It has everything to do with how we appreciate the atonement, how Jesus’ death on the cross was, in fact, salutary. To put it as simply as I do to those confirmands, if Christ was not human it was no sacrifice at all (just a sort of gnostic play-acting like I suggested last week), and if he wasn’t God, then that straw-man I mentioned last week (where God could be reckoned capricious and vindictive) might not be a straw-man after all.

I’m not certain, but I suspect most of us are prone to this error for purely understandable reasons. Perhaps it has something to do with how we’re spiritually “wired”, as it were, or what issues we happen to be facing in life. Some may find it comforting to focus on Christ’s humanity to the detriment of his divinity because one is besieged by so many tragedies and temptations that they need to hold on to the image of the one who faced even worse but remained faithful to the last. Others may be prone to the converse emphasis because they need the reminder that Jesus is Lord of all and in his beneficent reign will make all things right because he has the power to do so.

I admit, I tend to fall into this latter category, so I’m grateful that our lesson from Hebrews this week focuses on Christ’s humanity. I need that reminder more than I need to be reminded of his divinity. Last week, you may recall, our lesson reminded us that Christ held “the stamp of divine nature”, that he was luminous with God’s Glory, that he upholds the universe by his word of power. This week we get the flip-side of the Christological coin:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Maybe I’m the outlier, here, but I tend not to think too much about Christ’s having been tempted, and I think this means I might be missing an important aspect of Jesus’ life. Yes, we hear the story of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert every year on the first Sunday in Lent. But beyond that, I at least don’t tend to carry that over to thinking about other times when our Lord must have been tempted as we are. We know of his agony in the garden, when he wished the cup to be taken from him, but its buried in those long passion gospels we hear during Holy Week, and we can easily skip over it.

When else must our Lord have been tempted? Perhaps his rebuke of Peter’s inability to accept Christ’s fated sacrifice was so strong, to the point of calling him Satan, because Peter was tempting him just as strongly as the devil had done in the desert. Perhaps our Lord retreated so often from the crowds who would have made him king, because he knew it would have been tempting to give into their requests. Perhaps his constant warnings to those whom he healed and exorcised about not spreading the word was because he knew he would be tempted as the miracle-workers and false messiahs before him to parlay this fame into some scheme to attain fame and wealth as they had done.

Back in 1988 there was quite a stir over the film The Last Temptation of Christ which eclipsed the controversy over its source material, a 1955 novel of the same name. Now, the movie will not be everyone’s cup of tea, particularly if you can’t get over Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate (yes you heard me right). So, I’m not recommending you go out and watch it. But it seems to me that those who were offended largely missed the point. While on the cross an angel (later revealed to be Satan) tells Jesus that he has done well, but that he is not the Messiah, that he has accomplished that for which he was sent, and takes him down from the cross. We then see scenes of Jesus marrying and having a family and living in peace to an old age. Finally, it is revealed that this is not really what happened, that Jesus was simply undergoing the devil’s last temptation of him. We return to the cross, where Christ has triumphed over this temptation, shouts “it is accomplished”, dies for humanity, and triumphant bells toll as the screen flickers to white (presumably a hint of the Resurrection to come).

Again, the movie is not for everybody, and some of its imagery is disturbing, but it seems to me that the overriding message is a good one. Christ was in every way tempted as we are, yet without sin. In the end he triumphed over every power which militated against the will of God, but he is the one who can sympathize with our weakness.

This may be a great comfort to many of us. For me, it is a source of conviction more than comfort. How often do I find myself saying something like “high standards of self-sacrifice are the ideal, but I am not Jesus”, rightly recognizing Jesus’ perfection but ignoring his humanity to give myself permission not even to try to follow? How often do I read something like today’s Gospel, Christ’s warning about our relationship to money and skip ahead to “all things are possible with God”, skirting past the truth that it really would have been better for the rich man, and for me, to give it all away? How often have I read Christ’s command to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, realized its impossibility, and given myself leave to not even try?

That said, and despite what I believe to be the impossibility of achieving perfection this side of heaven, the process of sanctification, of approaching the fullness of humanity Jesus displayed despite his divinity, is possible thanks to the action of Christ as the Eternal Word. We heard this promise in the first part of today’s Epistle:

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

The Fathers, Chrysostom and Augustine chief among them, understood this to mean a variety of true things all at the same time. (Some of you will remember sermons or lessons I’ve given here outlining the various levels on which scripture can speak simultaneously–the literal, typological, moral, and anagogical–and I won’t rehearse all that now.) Suffice to say there is a sense in which this relates to the separation of Law and Gospel, the division between covenants.

For our purposes, though, the important distinction is between soul and spirit, that is between earthly concerns and heavenly ones. It is an intentionally violent image, the two-edged sword of Christ’s nature severing that which may distract us from our calling, because that process can be a painful one. But the perfect man has shown how iron sharpens iron; how our souls are placed in the crucible of temporal concerns to gain eternal value; how in being cleft and wounded and laid open before the eyes of God with all our imperfections we are, in a holy irony, made whole and worthy of drawing near the throne of grace with confidence.

And here we find our comfort in Jesus the human having gone before us as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Here we find that the Lord was not fibbing when he created us and said it was very good. Yes, we have fallen. Yes, we have inherited the stain of Adam’s sin and a debt which we cannot repay. But our having been redeemed on the Cross and our having been forgiven and sealed as Christ’s own in Baptism we have a chance to follow in faith where he has led the way. We are invited today again to approach the throne of Grace, to receive our Lord’s Body and Blood, his human soul and his divine substance. Let us come, as one of our Eucharistic Prayers puts it, not only for solace but also for strength, not only for pardon but also for renewal.

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