Author: John Drymon

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

One of the many things I miss during this season of pandemic protocol is how infrequent have become my unexpected conversations with non-parishioners who pop into the office for one reason or another–often, though not always, seeking some financial help. Having to keep the doors locked and folks enter by appointment has really cut down on a lot of these serendipitous meetings. I know some of my colleagues don’t like this part of the job, and have set their secretaries as kinds of gatekeepers to keep this from happening. I think that’s a real shame. I’ve said to some of you before that even if I can’t give somebody money for whatever reason, I can still have a conversation and a prayer with all sorts and conditions of people, and I’ve always been grateful that my office is the first one one comes to when entering, the building so it doesn’t feel like there is “gatekeeping” going on.

Anyway, I did have an encounter last week with somebody who caught me in the few steps between the office and the rectory. He didn’t ask for money, and he didn’t come to me with a particular prayer request, though he was grateful when I told him that I wanted to pray for him. Rather he had a theological question. It became clear early in the conversation that the fellow was not “neurotypical” to use the psychiatric term, and the conversation veered into things he had gathered from watching television shows like Ghosthunters and Ancient Aliens, so it wasn’t going to be a matter of my providing a real cerebral theological disquisition. Even so, the fellow’s primary question, perhaps providentially, made me think about something which we encountered both in this week’s Old Testament lesson and the Old Testament Lesson from evening prayer last Wednesday. His question was “why couldn’t Moses look at God without dying?” His confusion had to do with Moses’ presumed age and maturity; if anybody could look God in the eyes, my interlocutor figured, couldn’t have Moses? It was, for the strangeness of much of the conversation, a pretty good question!

An unmediated experience of the divine by one who has not been perfected this side of heaven (which, you’ve heard me say before, is to my mind an impossibility) would, no doubt, destroy a person. Moses, the greatest of all who had been born between Adam and John Baptist, got the closest, but even he–you may remember–needed to have his eyes shielded lest he be consumed by the divine majesty.

What’s more, even a mediated experience of the Lord can be dangerous, it seems, for those unprepared. As Moses reports in this morning’s lesson, the children of Israel feared for their lives even being in proximity to the mountain on which the Lord gave them the Law: “Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, or see this great fire anymore, lest I die.” God’s response to this cry is not to get all warm and fuzzy and say, “ah, don’t be worried, I won’t hurt you.” Rather, he says, “They have rightly said all that they have spoken.”

At evensong on Wednesday, the Old Testament lesson, from the sixteenth chapter of Genesis, provided a similar reaction. Hagar has fled from Sarah, her harsh mistress whose plot to acquire an heir had led to understandable enmity and jealousy. In her desert sojourn with the infant Ishmael, an angel appears to Hagar to provide both solace and instruction. After this encounter, we read “So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘Thou art a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’” Of course, it was not God himself whom she saw, but God’s messenger, but even that is enough to prove an uncomfortable brush with divine glory.

You see, holiness is not something to be taken lightly. There is, even in Holy Things, an element of danger. Consider St. Paul’s warning about consuming the Holy Eucharist without discerning Christ’s Body and Blood is an eating to one’s own damnation in 1 Corinthians 11. I think many of my colleagues find my opposition to communion of the unbaptized quaint at best and inhospitable at worst, but it’s because I take Blessed Paul’s warning seriously (and for that matter, because I take church law seriously). Holy Things are not trifles, but are set apart for care, reverence, and appropriate use.

As Christians, though, we do have a transformed relationship with God’s terrible holiness. That new relationship is defined in the prologue of John’s Gospel:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father…No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

That which once had to be hidden has been revealed, but we mustn’t take this lightly. We mustn’t approach the throne of glory as if it is our due, as if God ought to wait upon us and not the other way round.

While we may behold God the only Son, full of Grace and Truth, it is still a dangerous prospect, not least because in the light of that glory our imperfections are laid bare and our need for repentance and amendment of life may lead to not a little discomfort. Yet this is the only way to salvation, and so we must balance both our godly trepidation and the boldness given us by Grace that we may by approaching the altar of God be made a new creation.

I may be alone in longing for the old pre-lenten season, in which we were given three Sundays to prepare for the hard work of performing this balancing act. In the old calendar today would have been the first of those Sundays, Septuagesima, and while it is no longer our current practice, I for one will begin that process of preparing to once again approach the throne of grace for the assurance of pardon and the hard work which follows it on Ash Wednesday and the forty days which follow. I’d encourage you to consider the same. What is it in my life, in my heart, in my mind, in my intentions which stands in the way of approaching the throne of God and beholding the Redeemer as he is? What dark corner of my conscience do I need the Holy Spirit’s help in searching that the truth may be known to myself as it already is to God? How might I best embark, two-and-half weeks from now, on a holy Lent which will permit God to do his work in my soul and through my life for the sake of his glory? Let us embark on this work with honesty and courage, knowing that the Lord will turn its discomfort into new life for us and for the world.

+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.

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.