Author: John Drymon

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

Many of you know that I find historical shifts and counter-intuitive anomalies in the church calendar particularly interesting. We find ourselves today smack-dab in one of those peculiar periods of the liturgical year in which we may find some topical and tonal confusion. Historically today was called “the Sunday after the Ascension” part of the ten day season of Ascensiontide and the lessons would have more explicitly gestured toward that peculiar period between when Christ left the earth and when the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles on Pentecost.

The contemporary approach, chosen by the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the Revised Common Lectionary, have suppressed this “mini-season” in order to emphasize the unity of the fifty days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost. No longer are we supposed to snuff the paschal candle after the Gospel on Ascension Thursday. No longer is our Gospel reading for today an explicit reminder of the coming of the Holy Spirit after the Lord has slipped the surly bonds of earth. Even the name of the day has been changed, from “The Sunday after the Ascension” to “The Seventh Sunday of Easter.” You’ll note that our hymns this week and even the bulletin cover art have a distinctly Ascension theme, but that because your rector gets to choose those things as opposed to what is set out by authority in the prayerbook.

This is all fine, and not worth getting bent out of shape over, but I think it’s worth highlighting because the sense of transition and liminality of the old season of Ascensiontide tracks so well with what we so often experience in this life and particularly in this moment of our common life as we transition slowly but surely to something more like normality after the strangest (and, for some, most difficult) fourteen months of our lives. The modern suppression of a fulsome Ascensiontide notwithstanding, we find ourselves is one of those periods in the church year where we wait and watch for what comes next, like the season of Advent or Holy Saturday.

I wonder if the Apostless feelings during the ten days between Christ’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost might be a bit like what we are experiencing these days. We remember what life was like before and we know something new is on the horizon which will be fundamentally different, but we can’t quite imagine yet what that will be like. The apostles muddled through; they even managed to replace their fallen member, with some confidence that things were going to get better but without the pudding’s proof having yet been tested. (As an aside, I don’t know about their internal politics, but I hope those dioceses that managed to go through the process of electing a bishop during the pandemic took some lessons and gained some confidence and hope by looking at the story of the calling of Matthias, which we heard this morning).

In any event, there is some remarkably Good News for us, for the church, and for the world in this “in-between time.” The point of Christ’s ascent into heaven is not that we are left down here to carry on without the benefit of his presence and just work it out amongst ourselves as best we can. I’ve seen some remarkably bad “hot takes” on social media this week suggesting that to be the point, and they always lean into this sort of semi-pelagian, “work it out for yourself now” message. Aside from being biblically and theologically false, I think just looking at human history shows that what happens when we put all our trust in man’s goodness and ingenuity is usually pretty disastrous.

The point is not that Christ has abandoned us to work it out for ourselves. The point is that Christ has been glorified and seated at the right hand of the Father. No longer limited to a single place and time, no longer wandering ancient Palestine, he has deposed the rulers of this old world: death and sin and the devil. He now rules over all. He is, as the prayer I say privately after every celebration of the Eucharist, alive and reigning from his throne of glory in heaven, on tens of thousands of altars, and in the hearts of hundreds of millions of faithful Christians throughout the world.

We await the Spirit to come and comfort us, but in the meantime, we have an advocate who is always with us and is Lord of all. Thanks be to God that he has given us the victory and will come again to judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his truth.

+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.

“No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends.” Jesus says this to the apostles on the night before he was given over to suffering and death. He had washed their feet and shared supper with them, and finally, in the midst of his last discourse with them, he surprises them yet again with this wonderful affirmation of their relationship. But what did it mean for the disciples, and what does it mean to us?

In all honesty, this used to make me a bit uncomfortable. I’ve got plenty of friends. I don’t need another friend, I thought. I need a master, a Lord.

The problem here, though, was not that Jesus was turning a profound relationship into something frivolous. It was, rather, that I was minimizing the profundity of friendship. True friendship isn’t trivial. Christian friendship is a very weighty thing. It goes beyond “being buddies”. It is, at its heart, a serious commitment like all Christian relationships. Let’s look at a couple of those relationships as a means of understanding how Christian friendship is similar in intent and effect.

In prebaptismal and premarital counseling I always try to make it a point to say that the relationships which are realized in these sacraments are essentially reflections. They are reflections of God’s perfect love for all humanity and of the perfect love held within the Godhead through the mystery of the Holy Trinity. So, a marriage and its concurrent obligations as made explicit in the nuptial vows is a reflection of God’s love for us and of the love which defines God’s internal relationship. To paraphrase St. Augustine, the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love they share. The Sacrament of marriage is, ideally, a mirror off of which the light if God’s love is broadcast to the world, or perhaps a window, into which we can peer and see God’s love.

Likewise, Baptism is not only about the objective regeneration and adoption of the child, whereby he or she is forgiven and made a child of God. It is also (at least in the case of infant Baptism, which is normative) a means by which parents and godparents commit themselves to a relationship with the child which reflects God’s love. A parent’s chief responsibility is to establish a relationship with the child in which God’s perfect love can be seen. It goes beyond the tangible support a parent gives his or her child – meeting basic needs – to include the intangible: spiritual and emotional support, a moral example, a home full of prayer and Christian education (which is, after all, primarily the responsibility of the family, not of the institutional church, which can only do so much to support them in it).

So, how is this like friendship? Well, it’s not if friendship is merely sharing common interests and indulging in leisure together. These are important aspects of a friendship, but they are not the defining qualities of a Christian friendship. Rather, it is openness and love and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own well-being for another. That’s how Jesus defines friendship in this morning’s Gospel anyway:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you… This I command you, to love one another… Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus embodies Christian friendship- he reveals his Father’s will, he deeply loves those whom he calls friends, and he quite literally lays down his life for them.

Our responsibility, then, is to do the same. We do the same for Christ, our friend, and we do the same for our brothers and sisters whom God has given us to be our friends. We open our hearts and our intentions to God, neither do we hide them from our friends. We love God by serving him, and we love our friends by doing the same. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves – our petty desires, our comfort, even our lives if it comes to that – for God and for those whom he has given us to love.

Are our friendships reflections of God’s love? For that matter are our relationships with spouses and children a reflection of God’s love? Are we open in those relationships? Do we behave lovingly? Are we prepared to sacrifice ourselves for those other people? These are questions we must prayerfully and dutifully ask ourselves all the time. And so, I leave you this week not with answers but with questions, which can be rather disappointing, but at least in this case potentially more profitable. May God give you the will to ask them and the grace, strength, and courage to commit yourselves again to those relationships, knowing that the hardest but most important thing we can do is to be mirrors for the light of God’s love.

+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.

Some months ago, I learned from a colleague from a diocese which shall not be identified that somebody on his diocesan staff had prefaced a suggestion to the clergy for doing some task or instituting some program (I don’t remember) with words like “since you all have more free time these days.” It was shockingly out of touch, obviously, since all the clergy I know have been busier than ever during the pandemic. Clergy or not, I know a lot of folks my age have been stretched to nearly the breaking point trying to juggle work obligations and overseeing their children’s distance learning and all the rest.

It seems that when I ask folks how they’re doing these days, the answer is more often “busy” than it is “bored.” I don’t know how often I respond to this question by saying “It’s a busy time of the year,” without thinking, “When was the last time I wasn’t busy?” We’re coming up on Summer, which is supposed to be relaxing, right? But everyone I know seems nearly overwhelmed. It seems to me that what many of us need is just a chance to do what Jesus said: Abide.

Both today’s Epistle and Gospel use this word “abide”, which is our translation of the Greek “meno”. It was one of John’s favorite verbs, by the way. It appears 40 times in his Gospel and another 29 times in his letters. It’s one of those complex, Greek words that has layers of meaning. On one level it simply means “to remain”, but it also means “to rest”, “to be held continually” and “to await”.

We are told this morning to abide in the vine, to abide in God, and to abide in love. These aren’t very action-oriented commandments. Rest in love. Be held continually by the vine. Await God.

This is a hard teaching for many of us. Our culture values productivity and efficiency above all else. Even in that lovely image of the vine, my own mind turns to labor rather than renewal- tending the vine. It’s an image of hard work. But in this morning’s Gospel it’s God tending the vine. It’s God doing the hard work. We must first abide, rest in the vine, if we are to bear fruit.

And bear fruit we must. Lest we think that we are being taught to be lazy, Jesus concludes his teaching by saying, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.” “Faith without works,” James’ Epistle reminds us, “is dead.” But on the other hand, works without faith are impossible. The trick, then, is to rest in God, to abide in the vine, so that we have sustenance to bear fruit.

And what is that fruit? It is easy enough to say that it means good works, acts of charity. But consider the metaphor Jesus is using. It’s not an orange grove or an olive tree; it’s a grapevine. And what do grapevines produce? Well, grapes obviously. And what do grapes become? Grapes produce wine. And, at least as ancient people understood it, wine produces happiness. Scripture continually uses the image of wine to talk about joy.

Anyway, the fruit we bear brings joy to the world. The knowledge and love of Christ which we spread, which by our Baptims we are commissioned and required to spread, is nothing less than the only source of true happiness there really is in this world. We certainly have work to do.

But if we’re not connected to the vine, we cannot produce good wine (or even Welch’s for that matter). We must stay connected to flourish.

How we do that is something we are reminded of over-and-over again, but which bears repeating as often as possible. First and foremost, it is the Blessed Sacrament, the “food for pilgrim’s given.” It is also daily prayer, daily re-acquaintance with scripture, and – yes – rest. A popular modern metaphor says that we should “recharge the batteries”. I think the vine is an even better metaphor. You remove your phone from the charger, but you don’t remove the vine from the branches. They are always connected. That means that in even the most draining of circumstances, we don’t have to shut down (or “burn out” as some of my clergy friends talk about). We’re still connected. We just need to open ourselves to more of the good stuff that Jesus is pumping through the vine instead of trying to grow grapes without nourishment. So maybe we need to take a lesson from Jesus, and from time-to-time permit ourselves to abide.

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