Author: John Drymon

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

In his teaching ministry Jesus, like any good teacher, tended to employ images with which his audience would be able to identify. The only problem with this is that the context of his original audience would have been quite different from our own, so sometimes we have to do some work to understand what he meant.

The context of Jesus’ first audiences was that of an agricultural society, and for them the image of sheep and shepherd, the primary image in this morning’s Gospel, would have been an illustration with which the audience would have immediately identified. It is, for us, a bit harder to fully grasp. I, for one, grew up in a city and I have to admit to having never been on a real working farm (unless you count Bellwether, which I think many professional farmers would question) much less have I attempted to wrangle livestock myself. I knew that my primary exposure to the pastoral life in my youth, the Georgics of Vergil the elegies of Matthew Arnold, were probably too romantic to yield a genuine picture of the life and work of a shepherd. I did, however, see something once which made the image of sheep and shepherd a bit more real to me.

I was driving back from a meeting with colleagues through the countryside and noticed quite a bustle on the side of the road. As I got closer, it became obvious that some cows had escaped their enclosure and were running around precariously close to oncoming traffic. The cows’ handlers were trying their best to direct the cows back to their proper place, which task mainly seemed to consist in jumping up and down, gesticulating madly, to scare the cows into going back the right direction. The cows were, I assume, frightened, but not being rational creatures, they did not know how to get themselves back into a safe place.

I understand the herding sheep is much the same as herding cows, though those with more knowledge in this area can correct me. They are at least similar in that both professions are concerned with safeguarding the livestock against both external dangers as well as the animal’s proclivity to put itself into harm’s way. Like those cows wandering into the road, sheep would have been prone to wander off, to go astray, into danger. Far from being the romantic pastoral image some of us might have of the shepherding life, it was really a dirty, dangerous job. The shepherd often had to put himself into harm’s way to save the sheep from their own silliness.

Jesus may have seemed to be speaking in a manner not wholly complimentary when he referred to his disciples as sheep, but to get hung up on our assumption that sheep are just smelly, dumb creatures is to miss the point. We, like sheep—and like those cows I saw running dangerously close to the road—find that we do not have the wisdom and self-control to keep ourselves on the narrow path. We have something to learn from sheep, though. As smelly and dumb as they may seem, they know that their well-being is dependent on the shepherd. They are hard-wired, through their evolutionary history, to follow the leader. They “know” (insofar as an animal can be said to “know” at thing) that their safety is dependent on doing so.

We human beings have more trouble with this. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves. Our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We’ve learned to help ourselves, and seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is reckoned a weakness.

Too often, religion (or at least certain types of religion) is little help. Too often, we get the message that the path to health and salvation, the pathway which leads us by green pastures and still waters where our souls are restored, are our own to navigate. It’s rarely said so explicitly, but religion can become all about being perfect or saying a certain prayer with somebody on television who has given us six steps to salvation. This might all be well and good, but if that’s all there is to faith, then it’s still about me doing my own private thing to chart my own path to salvation, a path which is ultimately more about myself than about God.

It is far more difficult for us to follow. On one level the sheep and the cows might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path; that’s why they run around like they’re crazy and get into trouble. We humans are so smart that we can convince ourselves that we’re going the right way when we aren’t. We tell ourselves that on the path of life there’s no need to pull over to the gas station to ask for directions or to turn on the GPS device in our car, because we’re smarter than that, by gosh.

All of this is to say that the Christian life requires remarkable humility. The Good Shepherd is always ready to lead our unruly hearts, but we must be humble enough to receive his direction. Christ is ready to bring us to the heavenly banquet, his rod correcting us and his staff comforting us along the way, but we can’t be haughty or we’ll strike out on our own, thinking our own directions better. We already find ourselves in the flock, which is Christ’s Church, and the shepherd is leading us as we hear and experience his direction in scripture and prayer and in the breaking of bread. If, then, we are modest enough to listen, to listen carefully to the voice of the Shepherd, we may rest assured that we will be led to the springs of the water of life and will dwell with God in eternity.

+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 during Eastertide our Epistle each week is taken from the First Epistle General of St. John. If you are diligent in praying the office, you’ll know that this same epistle has been before us daily over the last week and we will continue on with it in the coming week. As a whole, it serves a wonderful reflection on justification and divine and human love, but it is good we are getting such consistent exposure to it during this season, because as brief as the letter is, it is complex enough that we are not as well-served by getting just a single excerpt out of context. This is not an epistle well-suited to the age of the sound bite or the tweet.

Take this week’s lesson. Taken on its own, out of context, it seems to suggest something which might strike us as demonstrably false: “No one who abides in [Jesus] sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” I don’t know about you, but I believe I have in some sense seen and known Christ in some sense and have abided in him thanks to the grace of Baptism for 37 years, but, brother, let me tell you, I’ve not managed to avoid some sin for probably even one day of the nearly 14,000 days I’ve been on earth. Maybe there were several hundred days between the time I was baptized and freed from original sin and the time I was old enough to actually engage in particular sins, but I am not winning on points, to use a boxing metaphor I half-understand.

Taking this completely out of context and giving it such a flat reading leads to some pretty serious theological problems. Historically, it has meant people have put off accepting God’s Grace for fear that a sin after Baptism would foul the whole enterprise of salvation up. Famously, Constantine wasn’t baptized until he was on his deathbed, because of a popular misunderstanding that committing a sin after Baptism meant that one was simply out of luck regarding heaven. Or take the young Augustine’s prayer, before he learned better. “Lord make me a Christian, but not yet.”

There is another, more modern version of this, which I came across when I was serving in Arkansas, where fundamentalist evangelicals are “thicker on the ground.” In that form of Christianity, you may know, Baptism (while not unimportant) is generally considered less important than an affective “salvation experience.” I was surprised to learn that many who stumbled after having putatively “been saved” began to question the legitimacy of their salvation. “If I’m sinning,” the argument went, “then what I thought was an experience of Jesus saving me must have not been genuine in the first place, so I’ve got to do it once more, this time with feeling.”

As tempting as it might be, I think it’s really a “bad look” for us, who in pride consider ourselves a more sophisticated breed of Christian to make tacky jokes about getting “saved” and baptized again every time the altar call goes on too long or whatever. It seems to me that there is a really sad truth here about how a misunderstanding about the nature of sin and justification (a bit of 1 John taken out of context) can create scrupulosity and spiritual anxiety, and the proper response is not to make fun, but to try to gently, lovingly correct this dangerous theological error.

So, how are we to understand it? I think there are three primary interpretive solutions here. I’ll be a little provocative here, in order to (I hope) make it easier to remember, by labeling them the Methodist view, the Lutheran view, and the (small ‘c’) catholic view. I’m not saying all adherents of these particular Christian movements believe or teach these things; obviously Christian theological trends (particularly among 21^st Century Protestants) are complicated, and the farther we get from the Reformation and the Great Awakening, the less one can expect a rank-in-file cleric or layperson to hold to his or her church’s historical position. I’m just using the terms here to make it more memorable; and maybe it’s the “Old Adam” in me trying to stir the pot a little, so I must be personally very careful to understand the controversial verse in question for the sake of my own soul.

Anyway, the first approach, which is the standard Wesleyan or Methodist view, is a particular understanding of sanctification, which you’ve heard me mention before in sermons, so you already know I find it inadequate and I won’t belabor the point. The view is generally called Christian perfectionism, and it holds that after justification (so here we’re not just talking about where you end up when you do) one can achieve moral and spiritual perfection in this life. So adherents to this view would hold that John is here talking about a “perfected Christian” for lack of a better term, on in whom the Holy Spirit has completed his work this side of the grave. I think the problem here is not in simply positing the possibility of achieving this degree of holiness in life, but rather the assumption that it is the normative experience. I would suggest that perhaps there are some very few lights of the world that get to that point, and we call them Saints (with a capital ‘S’), but to suggest that it is a reasonable expectation or a likely outcome is to turn Christianity into the province of a very few spiritual athletes, and when used as the lens through which we read 1 John 3:6 it implies not one body of Christ throughout the world, but a division between imperfect sinners like you and me and “True Christians” (registered trade-mark) and this, I think, needs to be rejected as being antithetical to the Gospel.

The second approach, which is the historically Lutheran view, is to understand righteousness in terms of how Christ’s sinlessness has been reckoned to us without our having done anything. This process called “imputation” can go both ways, unsurprisingly termed “double imputation”- our sins are imputed to Christ on the Cross and Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us. This can get very complicated and we can have a long, exciting conversation some other time about the differences between something being imputed, imparted, and infused; I’m sure I’ll get lots of takers for that chat!

Anyway, I think this understanding of justification is both biblically sound, and unlike either Christian perfectionism or fundamentalist evangelical scrupulosity is profoundly pastorally satisfying. You’re not going to be entirely sinless in this life, so thank God Christ has already done what none of us could and made us as though sinless.

I think, though, it doesn’t really apply to the matter John is writing about. Theologians and biblical scholars have tried to make it apply, which is why I’m bringing it up, but that approach seems to me to ignore the context of the epistle in which this verse finds itself. John does not go on to state simply and directly “but Christ has imputed his righteousness to us, so don’t worry over-much about those sins you’re committing.” This is not an antimonian treatise, saying “do as thou wilt” or even “sin boldly that grace may abound.”

Rather, before today’s lesson we hear those famous words “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” After today’s lesson, John writes that those who continue sinning are children of the devil and following the example of Cain, the murderer. It is true that we are justified through no good works of our own, but John is making it clear that moral failures (i.e., particular sins) remain significant in terms of our spiritual status.

For what I take to be the solution (or at least a solution) we can return to our friend, St. Augustine. His ten homilies on 1 John present a careful exploration of the whole epistle, and sadly there is not enough time in a sermon to go line-by-line through the whole of it. Nevertheless, I take his answer to this question we’re looking at to be the heart of his whole sermon series:

This then I have said, that in saying, “Whosoever is born of God sinneth not,” it is probable he meant it of some particular sin: for else it will be contrary to that place: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In this way then the question may be solved. There is a certain sin, which he that is born of God cannot commit; a sin, which not being committed, other sins are loosed, and being committed, other sins are confirmed. What is this sin? To do contrary to the commandment of Christ, contrary to the New Testament. What is the new commandment? “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Whoso doeth contrary to charity and contrary to brotherly love, let him not dare to glory and say that he is born of God: but whoso is in brotherly love, there are certain sins which he cannot commit, and this above all, that he should hate his brother. And how fares it with him concerning his other sins, of which it is said, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us?” Let him hear that which shall set his mind at rest from another place of Scripture; “Charity covereth a multitude of sins.”

My friends, as I have said before, the Gospel is not without its moral requirements, and if faith is simple cognitive assent without some sense of faithfulness, then it is at best a sort of Cartesian bet-hedging and at worst an exercise in moral luck.

On the other hand, if our Credo is about more than signing on to a somewhat incredible proposition, but that having thus signed on, faithfulness to its moral and spiritual implications is, indeed, required then we need to determine what the central implications are, that those things which are peripheral (as important as they may be) do not make our consciences afraid because we realize that the center still holds. In other words, we have to determine where the line is between things like saying a rash word when you’re cut off in traffic or drinking a bit too much on a Friday night or fleetingly coveting your neighbor’s new car or skipping church on a Sunday to play a round of golf and that which has the genuine possibility of creating a dangerous gulf between ourselves and the grace which is available.

Fortunately, St. Augustine identifies that central tenet. Even more fortunately, Christ does so too. He does so before the Pharisees and Sadducees, and he reiterates it in his last conversation with his disciples before the crucifixion. It’s love. That’s it. Love of God and love of neighbor. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets, and in themselves they cover a multitude of sins.

This is not to say that minor infractions like the examples I just gave are unimportant. They are important, because when we continue to indulge in them without penitence and amendment of life, we are in danger of letting them have dominion over us, harm our souls, make us less loving of God and neighbor. But thanks be to God, we have a constant companion, Christ himself who walks beside us and calls us constantly to be more loving, and the Holy Spirit who enables us to follow that path. And if we follow where he leads us, our detours will be minor and the God of love will bring us home by that same path.

+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.

Every year on the Sunday following Easter Day–commonly called Low Sunday–we hear the same Gospel reading, St. John’s account of the Lord appearing to “Doubting Thomas.” So, I’ve preached twelve sermons about this text, and usually it’s about Thomas’ doubt and belief and how we should be a bit more understanding of the poor man, because he’s more like us than we’d like to admit. I want to do something a bit different this year, then, and if you want a good reflection on that issue, I’d commend to you the “dialogue sermon” our bishop had with Canon Sutterisch for the Easter 2 service produced by the diocese.

This morning I want to focus on a matter we see running through all our readings today, namely the oft-overlooked affirmation in scripture of material reality. I say it’s overlooked because sometimes Christians, even relatively well-catechized ones, make this assumption that ours is a primarily disembodied faith.

Some years ago I even had two seminary-trained clergy (I note, not Episcopal clergy, though this confusion is not unheard of among clergy in our own corner of Christendom) who were shocked to learn that I believed Christ’s Resurrection (as well as ours on the last day) was a fundamentally bodily, physical Resurrection, not something merely spiritual or spectral. Christianity is a profoundly body-affirming faith, even in its most ascetic movements, which seek to deny not physicality but fallen fleshliness. More about that in a moment. The opposite, the rejection of material existence and the Creation which, though fallen, God deemed good, is not Christianity but Gnosticism.

Let’s consider this morning’s readings. In his First Epistle General, St. John writes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

The word of life, the second person of the Trinity, was not merely a principle or a spiritual force. It, he, was “made manifest” such that he could be seen and heard and touched.

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, however one may feel about the economic policy which it may imply (and that, I think, is complicated), one thing it does not suggest is that the life of Christians is communal and has material implications. We do not see these early disciples each going his or her own way, becoming hermits, and living on bread and water to simulate a total detachment from physical existence. Whatever else might be said of the economics of early Christian community, it at least recognizes the fundamentally physical nature of existence, the understanding that possessions (however personal ownership and distribution is handled), are gifts from God created to enable human flourishing and require that we view them with a more nuanced moral and spiritual approach than simply saying “I detach myself from life and call these things illusory or somehow “less real” than some primal spiritual force, that they are some gnostic demiurge which must be shunned to enable us to disinterestedly float in the lotus position or something.

And finally, we have that famous story we hear this Sunday every year, but don’t worry right now whether Thomas was really doubting or believing (again, that’s a worthy question for a different sermon). Instead consider what Jesus does. On his first appearance in the upper room, he empowers the Apostles to forgive and retain sins by breathing on them. At his second appearance, when Thomas has joined the other Apostles, Jesus offers to let him touch his wounds. Jesus is making clear that his risen body is a physical body, and he continues to teach this message in the remainder of the Gospel, eating and drinking and building fire by which to warm himself and cook his breakfast.

There is one peculiar element of this story, and I love the answer one of my professors in seminary gave in a course I took on the Gospel of John. The doors are shut and locked, so how could an embodied Jesus get in? Is this not evidence that he is some kind of apparition or specter. Our prof said something like, “of course not; the point is that Jesus is even more solid than the door.” I don’t know whether explanation this holds up. I just know (1) I love it, and (2) John goes to such pains to affirm the physicality of the Risen Christ’s body that there must be some explanation like this.

Anyway, why is this all important? Why does it matter that Christ came back bodily and that we will too at the General Resurrection on the last day? It matters because it reminds us that Creation is not some inconvenient realm in which we can never live with purpose and gratitude. We are not just biding our time in some fleshy layover between states of pure spiritual existence. This life is not some mere test to see if we can become fully detached and join some kind of Nirvana or else get reincarnated as a slug or a chicken or something. God created the heavens and the earth and called them good. Our forebears’ fault caused it and us to fall, but God’s answer was not to dispatch some phantasmal lifeboats to get us out, but rather to redeem all of it. That redemption begins with God himself not only choosing to come to us as a man, but to die as one and to come back just as much of one. It will end when all other things end, not by God or entropy blowing it all up, but by the heavenly city coming to this earth that we might dwell in it, not as ghosties but as men and women, for all eternity. And our moral obligation is not to take this earth or our bodies or the well-being of our fellow human beings as soteriologically insignificant.

Sometimes poetry says it better than my theological ramblings, and so I’d like to close with the great 20^th Century writer and Episcopalian John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” I cannot remember if I’ve ever included this in a sermon before. (To be honest, sometimes I can’t remember if I said something in a sermon or just posted on Facebook at one point or another, which is either a troubling indication about my memory or else just a reality of having been a priest for a while). So, if I’ve shared this before, forgive me, but it’s one of those texts which I think bears repeating, anyway:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

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