Author: John Drymon

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

I just read a fantastic novel by the young writer Sarah Perry titled The Essex Serpent which takes place in a small fishing village in the East of England in 1893. The credulous villagers–along with a young, worldly widow from London, are convinced that they are being terrorized by an ancient sea monster lurking in the Blackwater Estuary. Naturally, the one man fighting against the superstition of the locals is the village rector. Also naturally, there is a great deal of sexual tension between the rector and the young, worldly London widow. I should note, this book was a Christmas gift, not a purchase I made for myself. I’ll not spoil how any of it turns out, of course, and I only bring it up to highlight the fact that even in contemporary literature we’ve maintained this view of “fisherfolk” as simple-minded, uneducated, credulous bumpkins.

In addition to being a literary trope, there is, no doubt, some truth to this. Now, I’m sure there have always been and continue to be well-educated people who choose commercial fishing as their trade, but it has not historically been a profession populated by the intellectual elite. It certainly wasn’t in the ancient world. Now, this claim can be taken too far; it is quite likely that of those four Jesus called in this morning’s Gospel, at least Simon Peter and John were literate. Literacy rates among ancient Jews, even those of low-estate, were remarkably high compared to other contemporary groups. Even so, these two were not intellectual titans. You would not have seen them debating scriptural interpretation in the local synagogue or philosophy in the local forum.

Consider Peter and John together before the Council in the fourth chapter of Acts. The priests and scribes are astonished at what they hear, because these men, they believed, were credulous rustic fishermen from the provinces. “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered.” Consider also that we know Peter had to rely on an amanuensis for his epistles, whom he identifies as Silvanus, and if you hold (as I do) to the traditional position about Gospel authorship, Mark served the same role in recording Peter’s witness in the Gospel from which we just read. John, while not identifying such an assistant has traditionally been assumed to have one–namely, Prochorus, one of the first seven deacons, whose ordinations are recorded in Acts 6. Even if that’s not the case, for all its theological richness (perhaps greatest among the Gospels) the Greek of John’s Gospel is unquestionably the simplest. (In seminary Greek class, we always hoped it would be a Johannine passage on the final exam!) So, alongside texts penned by physician and a tax-collector–two clearly educated people–we have the accounts of simple fisher-folk to complete the foursquare foundation on which our faith is so firmly founded.

The Church Fathers recognized the significance and apparent incongruousness of the Lord choosing these men. Hear what Eusebius wrote in his Proof of the Gospel:

Reflect on the nature and grandeur of the one Almighty God who could associate himself with the poor of the lowly fisherman’s class. To use them to carry out God’s mission baffles all rationality. For having conceived the intention, which no one ever before had done, of spreading his own commands and teachings to all nations, and of revealing himself as the teacher of the religion of the one Almighty God to all humanity, he thought good to use the most unsophisticated and common people as ministers of his own design. Maybe God just wanted to work in the most unlikely way. For how could inarticulate folk be made able to teach, even if they were appointed teachers to only one person, much less to a multitude? How should those who were themselves without education instruct the nations?

For all that this may have seemed a “tactical error” this is precisely what God did, the means by which the Gospel indeed spread through all the world.

Now this is a hard thing for somebody who considers himself well-educated and relatively intellectually sophisticated to acknowledge, but it is nonetheless a truth which we must all come to appreciate. I like to believe that I can give a reasoned case for the faith as the church has received it, and there is a place for that. But how much more powerful is the witness of one whose experience of the living Christ has less need to be couched in the language of advanced metaphysics and historical and linguistic inquiry? How much more convincing is the one who can say, “I know the Lord God lives, because that is how I have experienced his presence in my life”?

I think this is the message we can take from the vocations of Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John. No doubt there are specialized callings within the body of Christ. No doubt some are especially suited to the work of apologetics or philosophical theology or biblical interpretation, but we are all called to and capable of the work of evangelization no matter our background, simply because we have come to believe. As that old African-American spiritual put it: If you cannot preach like Peter,
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.
This, friends, is not only something we all can do; it is something each of us is called to do. It needn’t be overbearing or saccharine. It mustn’t be self-serving or insincere. It can be as simple as the fisherman’s story: “I was casting my net, I was mending my net, and the Lord called me to be a fisher of men, and I could not deny him.”
+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.

Friends in Christ, after the horror of last Wednesday what words I had prepared about the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, seem less apposite. With your leave, then, I want to make just one point, relatively briefly, about this morning’s readings, and then to share with you our presiding Bishop’s “Word to the Church” released on Friday.

This one point I want to make has to do with the nature of water. It is necessary for life. It is the means by which we are given new life through the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. It is a blessing.

And yet water, in itself, is chaotic. Our historic prayerbooks, with their many prayers for those at sea and those facing storms, capture this reality in a way missing from our contemporary book. Take for example the following from our 1928 Book of Common Prayer For a Person, or Persons, going to Sea”:

O Eternal God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; We commend to thy almighty protection, thy servants, for whose preservation on the great deep our prayers are desired. Guard them, we beseech thee, from the dangers of the sea, from sickness, from the violence of enemies, and from every evil to which they may be exposed. Conduct them in safety to the haven where they would be, with a grateful sense of thy mercies; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This and prayers like it from our liturgical storehouse were clearly written by people for whom the great waters were more than the place for a leisure cruise.

And so, in itself, the primal element of water is a thing of chaos and danger. But what does scripture tell us about what God has done? In the very opening lines of the bible, from which we heard a few moments ago, the Holy Spirit descends upon the waters, ordering the chaos. In the 29^th Psalm, which we just recited, we are assured that God sits above these chaotic waters in majesty and judgment, that he reigns even above the flood.

My brothers and sisters, we experienced this week chaos in our nation’s capitol like the rushing of dangerous waters. We saw the dams burst with rage and violence by those whose hearts and souls and minds were given over to a spirit of destruction. But God reigns. He is the only one whose word can transform this powerful primal element into a blessing, as the Prophet Amos foretold: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” Pray that God will accomplish it, and that right soon.

+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.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for many of us to do is to “take flight” when the situation calls for it. It’s not always been so. Though we are wonderfully created in the image of God—though we are indeed moral creatures unlike anything else under the sun—human beings are still in a sense “animals”, and anyone who’s studied animal behavior will have heard of the “fight or flight” mechanism. Certainly, earlier in the history of the human race, we were, like any other animal, largely controlled by reflexes which would determine if a fight (perhaps with a mastodon or a person from another tribe) was winnable and, if not, our reflexes would set us into flight.

Over the millennia, with the development of civilization, this natural response came to be suppressed and to be cast as cowardice. “Run Away” is not a very inspiring battle cry, unless, of course, you’re Monty Python’s version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Retreat is seen as a negative thing, an embarrassment when necessary and to be avoided at all costs for the sake of honor- or something like that.

Thus, we might find the response of the Holy Family in this morning’s Gospel to be initially less than inspiring. The machismo of our modern sensibilities might not align with Joseph’s response to the threat of Herod. Joseph didn’t organize a militia of sympathetic Bethlehemites; he didn’t sit on the porch swing, shotgun in hand, daring Herod’s soldiers to step onto his property. He ran away.

It’s too bad that our natural response is what it is. It’s too bad that we have a hard time seeing how brave St. Joseph and Our Lady were to pick up the Christ Child and retreat to an unfamiliar place, and to sojourn there, without knowing who would help them or how they’d survive, but only knowing that it was God’s will that they go.

In truth, sometimes the bravest action, the action God desires for us, is flight. Despite the Monty Python joke, sometimes “run away” is the most valiant battle cry. Too often we hear on the news or even from personal acquaintances, stories of battered women and men, who are frightened to run away, the tyranny of whose Herod-like spouses has instilled a degree of fear which immobilizes. In those sorts of situations, the choice to flee is both courageous and unimaginably difficult.

A dear friend of mine since kindergarten, wouldn’t be alive, unless his father had made a courageous decision to run away. He was among the hundreds of thousands of Indo-Chinese who, persecuted by their government, got his family on a rickety boat that they might escape imprisonment, torture, and potential death.

Examples of courageous decisions to flee could be multiplied. However, most of us, though I suspect not all, have been fortunate enough to be spared extraordinary situations like abusive families and oppressive governments. Even so, most of us find ourselves in situations where a brief retreat of our own, a brief sojourn in Egypt as it were, is necessary.

Perhaps the most common case I’ve seen among my friends and acquaintances, is the need for spiritual retreat. So many of us these days are stressed to the brink all the time. In some ways “workaholism” is the disease of the American middle class today. I’m not suggesting that one ought not do one’s job and do it well, that one ought simply to run away when things get tough, but sometimes we permit our physical, emotional and spiritual health to suffer because we cannot but be busy all the time. In these situations, perhaps the best thing is to retreat to a place of calm and of prayer. There’s certainly a balance to be maintained in this regard, and we cannot engage in avoidance or laziness, but the overworked, overstressed person today must permit himself or herself periods of quiet and calm and reflection in the midst of a busy life in order to maintain a good and gracious disposition at work and in the home and in all of the other places in which we live and move and have our being.

I used to love taking retreats at monasteries; now in the age of Covid a spiritually edifying book and a cup of tea in my living room is a pretty good substitute, albeit less than ideal. Some people go out into the woods or down to the beach. The important thing is that we give ourselves a little time to flee from the terrible nonstop rush of things in order to spend quality time with God on God’s terms.

And just like the Holy Family on their retreat, our retreat may present itself as the context for a certain kind of peril. Perhaps it will not be the peril of not knowing how we are to survive, but rather the danger that when we do quiet down and listen to God for a while, He might demand something new and different from us. He might make it clear that His will for us is a radically different course in life. Too often we subconsciously avoid listening to God because of this very real possibility. But like the Holy Family, and like all those who flee awful situations for the good, we must approach our own flight, our own retreat, with courage and with faith that God’s will is always to the good.

And we can take heart in the fact that however treacherous the path may seem, God makes it safe for His people. God said to the prophet Jeremiah “I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.” God will do the same for us if we only let Him, if we only trust Him to make the path smooth, if we only determine to flee to Him when He calls us.

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