Author: John Drymon

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

It being Independence Day, and with my having just taught a citizenship merit badge class at scout camp last week, a couple of interesting facts about our Church’s history, strike me as significant. First, it is interesting that the majority of Anglicans in the eighteenth century were Tories, loyal to the British Crown. My one gripe about the musical Hamilton, which we finally saw after the filmed version came to Disney+ in December, is that it makes fun of poor Samuel Seabury, the first bishop in the American Episcopal Church. Anyway a result of this is that the Episcopal Church became much smaller than it would have been, because so many of our number (and especially priests) fled to Canada during the Revolutionary War. I must admit that we found ourselves on the losing side of that particular issue.

A second, more important fact is that our own Anglican heritage, the history of being started as an established state church, has always made the Episcopal Church a little bit less willing to buy in completely to the American institution of the separation of Church and State. Our own brand of Christianity, had grown used to being not only the dominant religious expression but the official state church, not only in England, but in places like Virginia and South Carolina until well into the nineteenth century, decades after the separation of Church and State was officially established in the First Amendment. This is an historic fact which is much overlooked, and tends to surprise people when they learn of it.

While eventually even the longest holdout, Virginia, completed disestablishment the Episcopal Church removing all legal preferential treatment in (get this!) 1840, our church maintained an unofficial status as the quasi-established church of our own country until well into the 1960s. This is why almost every president of the United States, despite his affiliation prior to taking office, has at least occasionally attended St. John’s, LaFayette Square- the Episcopal parish closest to the White House; this is why there are still a great many state funerals and semi-official national events which take place at the National Cathedral (technically, the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington); and this is why the Episcopal Church has historically sent more military chaplains around the world with our troops than any other religious body, despite our relatively small size.

All of this is by way of introducing a question, which I am not smart enough to answer, but which should give us food for thought. At risk of sounding like one of those eighteenth century Tories who had to run off to Canada, I would humbly pose the following question: Is there not some place where there ought to be interaction between the Church and the State? Is there a way in which citizenship and Christian commitment can be held together, such that we are not “religious creatures” at church and at home and “political creatures” on Election Day and in front of the daily news broadcast? Cannot the fact that we are Christians impinge upon the fact that we are Americans, and even inform how we behave as members of the body politic?

It seems that the Prophet Ezekiel thought so. God told the prophet “I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me.” A nation, a political body which had been chosen by God, required a voice of religious and moral truth to get it back on the straight and narrow. Though our own nation is not “chosen” in the same way as ancient Israel was, we are nonetheless, and for all our problems, blessed by God with a pretty great degree of freedom, prosperity, and peace. Is it so far beyond the realm of possibility that the Church might from time to time fulfill the prophetic role of speaking the truth in love to power, that the powers and principalities of the world might become more faithful to the will of God?

This is dangerous territory, not only because it makes the separation of Church and State murky, but because there are plenty of good, faithful Christians whose political ideologies are significantly different my own. I suspect that if a poll on hot button political issues were to be taken in our own parish there would be a great deal of diversity and disagreement on most issues. So, I want to avoid suggesting that there is a clear Christian imperative which should make the Church’s stance on every policy and piece of legislation obvious. There are those that believe that such clarity is always possible and obvious, and that’s fine, but I’m not one of them. As it happens, I receive much more pushback due to not commenting on every political issue that arises than on preaching from a political stance with which one might disagree. I take it as a point of pride, though others may not see it this way, because I try to recognize that in the great majority of issues du’jour, I truly believe that Christians of good conscience can, in fact, disagree.

What I do want to suggest, though, is that none of us can possibly entirely divorce himself or herself from Christian principles when he or she exercises civic rights and responsibilities. The founding fathers of our own country established a system where an official national church would be impossible, but most of them (with the exception of the most rank Deists like Jefferson) also believed that the Hand of Divine Providence, the Will of God, had some role to play in our common purpose as a nation. In truth, they probably didn’t see as strong a distinction between the life of the soul and political life as we sometimes think they did. The biblical worldview, epitomized by Ezekiel and the other prophets—who spoke the Word of God to the kings of the nations, including their own nation, Israel—saw no such distinction.

For most of us this means that we don’t need to set aside our Christian principles when we enter the ballot box or the public square. We have a valid perspective to contribute to the commonwealth, to the governance of the land we share with so many people of various creeds.

For others this might mean a task somewhat more in the mode of Ezekiel’s, namely the prophetic task of calling a nation back to God or to His Will on a given issue. Often, and most fruitfully, this is accomplished when there is some degree of consensus among Christians on said issue. Even when this is the case, though, it can lead to rejection. God said as much to Ezekiel, and I think that Jesus was getting at the same phenomenon when he told his apostles that a prophet is without honor in his hometown. This danger was more apparent in the days of the Roman Empire and even today under more severe regimes in certain parts of the world. It can happen here at home as well, though, and Martin Luther King was as good an example as any of a prophet who had to undergo rejection and dishonor and even death.

Ultimately, the prophetic task, if it truly be prophetic, will be toward the end of establishing the principles of the Kingdom of God: the sick are healed, the poor are given Good News, life is affirmed rather than death, and brethren live together in unity. These are neither conservative nor liberal principles, they’re Christian principles.

In any event, I think that what we learn from the prophetic gift of Ezekiel and others is that there is not so strong a distinction between being a fellow-countryman and a coreligionist. We need not be sometimes Christian and sometimes American. Rather, the former and primary identity helps shape the latter. It is, in the final analysis, impossible to distance ourselves from the values which Christ and His Church instill in us in order to be secular patriots or something like that. We need not hesitate to pray for our country, and sometimes, like Ezekiel, we need to recognize when it has gone astray.

It’s probably good that we are free from the complications of having a state church, and it might even be good that the Episcopal Church’s de facto status as the quasi-State Church has eroded over the last half century.

Granted, it does make some things harder; when I was at Walsingham a couple years ago, one of the priests with whom I shared a table in the refectory said “I do not envy you American priests, because you have to raise your own money for the church.” As much as I’d love a £9 Billion Endowment for operations and salaries and tax money for building upkeep, not having that might actually give us more moral authority and the ability to speak the truth when it becomes necessary. Even so, let us remember on this Independence Day that as Christians we have not only the right but the responsibility to let our values and our status as Children of God bear upon every aspect of our lives, including the solemn task of citizenship. We must take on this task without the kind of hubris which claims that any of us knows God’s will any better than our sister or brother, but rather with the humility that accompanies the recognition that each is, in his or her own way, trying to live faithfully in service to the Will of God as he or she understands it.

+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 we don’t have cable television, and one of the things I don’t miss about the ability to stay glued to the 24 hour news cycle on cable is seeing the constant, sometimes indelicate coverage whenever a celebrity dies. It’s one thing when somebody elderly dies of natural causes, like Prince Philip earlier this year, but it’s often especially ghoulish when somebody goes before his or her time, whatever that means. I suspect this was the case last year with the deaths of Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman; like I said, we don’t have a traditional television setup, but the online sources I follow bore this out. Anyway, it’s fascinating how much attention the media pays ferreting out all the gory details, and this exercise strikes me as a particularly important window into our hangups as a society. Part of me would affirm that death happens and it’s often of little consequence precisely how. Yet another part of me is just as curious as those in the media and, presumably, their target audience.

Perhaps it’s because death is such a mystery to us these days. We avoid thinking about it for the most part, and then when a death particularly unsettles us for some reason we try to explain it away. If we can make sense of the mechanics of a particular death, we think we can finally put to rest the notion of death entirely. It can become a problem which our modern, scientific minds have solved, and we won’t have to think about it anymore. That’s what we think, anyway, but then the next shocking death presents the whole issue anew. We might have figured out the mechanics, but so many of us lack a theology of death which helps us put it into perspective.

It seems to me that this problem might stem from the fact that we live in such a death-denying culture, as some of you have heard me say before from this pulpit. We can shield ourselves from the reality of death to a certain point, and we can even convince ourselves that we can avoid it. I wonder if all the exercise equipment and quasi-medical products we can see advertised and all of the elective plastic surgery so many of us undergo prey on our inability to accept the fact that we will all grow old and die (at least one hopes).

Even in our Christian discourse we don’t often acknowledge the reality and profundity of death. We Christians sometimes seem to operate on this notion that “there’ll be pie in the sky when we die, by and bye.” And then when the death of a loved-one occurs we might not understand why it rattles us so much. Maybe some of us chalk it up to a lack of faith. Perhaps others lose faith.

Ultimately, I think this internal, emotional roller-coaster, comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of death. Listen again to what the writer of Wisdom said: “God did not make death and he does not delight in the death of the living…through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” Death, he is saying, is an aberration. It was not part of God’s initial plan for humanity, and that means that we shouldn’t berate ourselves when we find it too much to handle. Death is an effect of the fact that we live in a fallen world. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” God’s will is for life, and not only for life but for life abundant, a life fully lived in His ways. Death came later, and fights against God’s plan to a certain extent.

And yet death is inescapable because of our condition, because of the reality of evil and of original sin. Death is not illusory; it’s not a trick to test our faith, to see if we really believe in the resurrection.

I remember one day in seminary when our systematic theology professor said something which became scandalous to my classmates, I think because many of us weren’t really listening to what he was saying. He said, just this directly, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” There was scandal because some of my classmates thought that our professor was denying the resurrection. Quite to the contrary, he was trying to help us understand how profound and wonderful the resurrection of the dead really is. What I’m about to say might sound controversial, but I promise that it is, in fact, the traditional Christian understanding of death and resurrection, so bear with me. There’s not something about us inherently which makes our souls immortal. The Christian view is not that we are essentially disembodied ghosts which after death keep on living just as before. That’s not actually the traditional Christian view, that was Plato’s view and it became popular much, much later in Church history. That view does ultimately deny the reality of death and turns it into an illusion.

Conversely, the traditional Christian view is that death is very real. That the whole of us—body, mind, and spirit—experiences death, and there’s nothing about the way we’ve been created which permits us to avoid that. Far from denying the resurrection, this makes its truth all the more wonderful. When we are dead it is not our own nature but God’s power and grace which brings us to new life. The resurrection is not something we do automatically, it is something which God brings about.

Today’s Gospel reading makes this point. Jairus’ daughter was dead, really dead. Yet Jesus knew that because of the promise of God, death was like sleep. Jairus’ daughter was no less dead, but her death was a period of rest and expectation. It was not the expectation of an automatic transmigration of her soul to some different sphere of being, but that God in Christ would literally bring her to life. And this He did, and this is our own hope for ourselves and our loved ones. While the dead rest in peace, and while we too will enter into that sleep, we have assurance that Christ will bring us back to life fully, not as disembodied ghosts, but as whole, holy, incorruptible people, with minds, spirits, and bodies. When at morning prayer or baptisms or funerals in our own private prayer lives we recite the Apostle’s Creed and proclaim “I believe…in the resurrection of the body” we’re not speaking in metaphors. The Church really does teach that there will be a bodily, physical, literal resurrection, and this is so much more comforting than the idea of “pie in the sky when we die, by and bye.” It’s comforting and esciting. It means that the life of the world to come is not contingent on anything we do, but on the grace and creative power of God, or to use the language of Wisdom “the generative forces of the world [which] are wholesome” because God creates and controls them.

And so, knowing that death is real but not the end we can over time come to terms with it. We needn’t wait for the next shocking celebrity death to broach the topic for us once again, and we certainly don’t need to run from it or deny its reality. Rather, we are called to embrace death in a sense. We are commanded to love our enemies, and death is an enemy we’re called to love, as strange and difficult as that might sound. We are called to love and embrace the reality of death because we do know that it is only through death that we are born to eternal life. For even the evil of this world, death being part of it, can be transformed in such a way that it accords with the ends God intends. All that we need to do is trust God, and keep alive a robust hope in the 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.

One of my more nerdy pastimes is looking through older Episcopal hymnals and comparing the development of our own Church music over the years. Primarily, this takes the form of looking at which hymns were removed or added between, for example, the 1940 Hymnal and its immediate successor, the 1982 Hymnal which is currently in use. Sometimes it is obvious why hymns were removed. Despite its rousing tune, the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” fell into an unfortunate emphasis on human effort and a lack of any theology of grace and divine action. Some hymns, on the other hand, were taken out for reasons neither I nor some experts I’ve asked could determine. Chief in this category for me is Phineas Fletcher’s text “Drop, Drop Slow Tears”, set to Orlando Gibbons beautiful and memorable tune. Some of you may know that one.

And then there are those hymns that one has a hunch why they were removed, but bemoans their absence nonetheless. One of these is a great 12^th Century hymn by the Cluniac Monk Bernard of Morlaix. Now, Bernard of Morlaix was a bitingly satirical writer in his time, and some of his works come across as a touch lugubrious. I commend to you his extended poem De Contemptu Mundi (On Contempt of the World) for a great, depressing read. Anyway, he wrote a hymn, which is really quite lovely, but I suspect it is its opening line which kept it out of our present hymnal. The hymn begins with the unequivocal declaration that “The World is Very Evil”.

Most of us don’t like to think or say much about the reality of evil, not only because it’s a little creepy but also because it presents a theological problem which all of us have probably encountered whether we knew it or not. The so-called “problem of evil”, or to use the technical term “theodicy”, has likely confronted each of us in very profound ways. We’ve all asked the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Underlying this question is a more basic, though often unspoken problem. If God is all good and all powerful how could he allow evil to exist. How could he permit the pain and suffering which so many of us experience in such profound and life-altering ways.

We shall return to this problem, but first it must be noted that whether we find it palatable or not, evil does exist. There are “powers and principalities” to use the biblical language, which attempt to work against the purposes of God. There are circumstances, and I would go so far as to say “spiritual forces” which attempt to separate us from the love of God and which strive to hinder the progress of the Kingdom of God.

Let’s take today’s Gospel reading for an example. On the surface, it appears to be a frightening, though altogether natural situation. Jesus and his disciples are at sea, and a storm threatens to harm or even kill them. A close reading of the Greek and a more fulsome understanding of geography, however, suggests that there is more at play here than a natural inconvenience.

So, first to the Greek text, there is one particular word we find in it which colors the meaning of the story, and which our English translations do not take account of. The word is epitimao and it is what our version translates as “rebuke”. In fact this little verb shows up a number of times in the New Testament and it is always associated with the demonic. Whenever Jesus casts out a demon, he rebukes it. When, in the eighth chapter of Mark, Jesus tells Peter “get me behind me Satan”, the imperative is called a rebuke. So strong is this connection that when Jesus rebukes the storm at sea, we may be sure that Mark means to tell us that Jesus is literally demonizing the storm. Jesus recognized that this particular storm was not just an ordinary effect of weather patterns, but was animated by a spiritual force which meant to consternate the work of God.

If this weren’t enough, it is significant that this particular storm is meant to have happened on the sea of Galilee. Now, some of you may have been to the Holy Land and seen the Sea of Galilee. Nearly twenty years ago now, I had the opportunity to cycle around this body of water; I am no athlete, more was I back when I did it, but I did it all in a day. Calling it a “Sea” is exceedingly generous. It is a smallish lake, about 33 miles in circumference and only eight miles across at its widest. So, Imagine driving to Fostoria and back- you’ve just about driven far enough to circumnavigate the sea of Galilee. Needless to say, we’re not talkng about being in open water, and it’s unlikely that a violent storm could come upon a ship so suddenly. Mark knew this when he wrote the Gospel, and Jesus knew this when he quieted the mysterious storm. It is not meant to be a surprise to the reader, then, that there was something dark and supernatural at work in this particular storm. That it should come upon Jesus and his disciples in the midst of their ministries suggests that there was a force working against the purposes of God which was accountable.

The scriptures affirm that there are truly forces at work against God and his people, that hardship is not always coincidence or bad luck. To put it bluntly, the Gospel affirms the reality of radical evil. In hemming-and-hawing about the matter or by the materialist conceit, the explaining away of everything in terms of natural phenomena, this evil is permitted to do its worst work. As C.S. Lewis put into the mouth of the devil in The Screwtape Letters, “the greatest trick we can play is to convince them that we don’t exist.”

So, we know that evil, radical evil, is a reality and attempts to tear apart the work of God. But this still leaves us with the question with which we began. If God is all loving and all powerful, how do these forces get away with it? Why do bad things happen to good people? If you figure that one out, write the book, get it published, and see countless theologians put out of a job, because you’ve solved the problem about which more ink has been spilled among Christian thinkers than any other.

In fact, the problem will stay with us unanswered until the end of days, because that’s precisely what God tells Job in today’s Old Testament lesson. Most of you know the story of Job. He was that righteous man in ancient times who suffered so much at the hand of the evil one. Ultimately, Job complains in words similar to our modern questions. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” God responds thusly:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements– surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? — when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, `Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

God’s answer, in a nutshell, is “you can’t understand.” None of us created the universe. None of us knows precisely where it’s going except for the glimpses of our future hope we find in Scripture. This isn’t an anti-intellectual shrug of the shoulders, as it were. It is, rather, a recognition that our own capacity for understanding is limited, which is the recognition that none of us is God. Thus, trying to solve this particular problem, the problem of evil, is actually somewhat presumptuous. In my office I have a lovely framed print a friend gave me with a quote from Flannery O’Connor which makes the point more pithily than I can do: “Evil is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”

And it is certainly something to endure. It is something which each of us will endure at some point in our lives. We cannot possibly reckon why “bad things happen to good people”, why evil exists, and that means it’s okay when any one of us cannot possibly understand the travail in which one finds oneself. We don’t need to think it’s our job to figure it out, or worse, come up with some explanation for why “God is punishing us”. That’s not how it works.

While we cannot understand the pain and distress which we face from time to time (or for some, all the time) we nonetheless have a tremendous reason for hope. Maybe Bernard of Morlaix was right and “the world is [indeed] very evil,” but ours is the God who ultimately quiets the stormy sea of our existence. We will continue to undergo much strife in these days, but we know that there is a safe harbour at the end. We know that God will ultimately put all things to rights for His faithful people. We may from time to time face ineffable fear, not knowing how God will fix things, but just like the disciples on the boat that stormy night, we may take comfort that the Lord will come and not be slow to act. For as the psalmist said:

They mounted up to the heavens and fell back to the depths; *
their hearts melted because of their peril.

They reeled and staggered like drunkards *
and were at their wits’ end.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.

He stilled the storm to a whisper *
and quieted the waves of the sea.

Then were they glad because of the calm, *
and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.

May we live confident in that hope, knowing that the harbour for which we are bound is absolute and eternal fellowship with the Lord who saved us from the stormy sea.

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