Author: John Drymon

+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.

+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.