Author: John Drymon

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

The great English writer G.K. Chesterton once said of today’s Gospel, “Jesus here tells us to love our neighbors. Elsewhere the bible tells us we should love our enemies. This is because, generally speaking, they are the same people.”

I am reminded of this reality increasingly as I walk or ride around town and see houses right next to each other, one with a Trump/Pence sign and the other with a Biden/Harris sign. Indeed, there is one house on South Main which appears to me to be a single-family home, albeit a large one, with a Trump sign on one end and a Biden sign on the other. Now, perhaps that house as been divided into two units, but I like to imagine its occupied by one family figuring out how to live together despite political strife.

Our clergy day program a couple weeks ago was about this sort of thing, but in the context of congregations and communities regardless of what happens November 3^rd. It could have been a good program, that topic being so much before us right now. Sadly, I think it was a missed opportunity. The presenter (a retired bishop of Newark; not the one you may be thinking of, thank God) is on the board of a nonprofit aimed at bringing people who voted differently together and “repairing the breach” that may have opened between them. It’s a good idea, important work, but it was all presented in this sort of lowest-common-denominator civic religion, which seems typically to hold a vague theism and the U.S. Constitution as basically on par with each other. One would think a retired bishop talking to a bunch of priests and deacons could have actually just shared the Gospel in this context, because I think it gives us all the rationale and tools we need, and it starts with today’s Gospel lesson.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

We may respond to this by asking “well, then, who is my neighbor?” Even the neighbor who votes differently from me?! In St. Luke’s version of today’s Gospel, the lawyer who asks the initial question and receives Jesus’ famous response, proceeds to ask this second question—Who is my neighbor?—in order, it should be noted, to trick Jesus, and Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which we heard at Morning Prayer on Thursday.

Even if you didn’t pray the office that day (tut-tut) you still likely remember how that one goes. The priest and the Levite—righteous men by Jewish religious standards—pass by the wounded traveler without offering any kind of assistance. The Samaritan, a member of a race and religion very much at odds with the Jews, rescues the traveler and pays his expenses during his convalescence. Who was the traveler’s neighbor? None other than a man whom circumstance and ideology had made his enemy.

We have a rather narrow definition of love, which I don’t think is unique to our time and place, but which is nonetheless misguided. We hear the word “love” and what do we think? We probably think of warm feelings for somebody because of some kinship or friendship or personal attraction. Warm feelings for somebody are well and good, but Christian charity is a much broader concept, and it seems to me to have little to do with those we are predisposed to like.

Love in the Christian sense includes a commitment to act on behalf of those with whom we have little in common and even those with whom we are at enmity. Look back at that reading from Leviticus. Unfortunately it skipped several verses which are germane to our discussion of love. In the verses we heard, the Israelites are commanded to avoid prejudice and partiality, to avoid slander, to shun hatred, and to divest themselves of resentment and grudges. In the thirteen verses our lectionary skipped, the children of Israel are also commanded not to steal, not to put off paying an employee even one day, not to be cruel to those who cannot defend themselves, and even not to harvest all of one’s land so that the poor might take the produce around the borders of one’s farm. All of these commandments are summed up in that elegant but seemingly impossible commandment: love thy neighbor as thyself.

You’ve heard me say it before from this pulpit and here it is again, perhaps my most often repeated comment on the Christian life: love is not about warm, fuzzy feelings; love is about commitment and sacrifice. If one is committed to loving one’s spouse, he must sacrifice his own selfish concerns for the good of the relationship. If one is committed to loving one’s children, he must sacrifice getting what he wants and doing what he wants to a great extent in order to be present and to support the child. If one is committed to loving the poor, she’s got to do something about it at her own expense. If one is committed to loving Christ’s Church and those who do not yet believe, she must give sacrificially of her time, talent, and treasure to support the Church’s mission of reconciling all people everywhere to God and each other.

And the really hard part is that we cannot show partiality. We cannot choose to love only those whom we like. We must commit to sacrificing ourselves for those whom we don’t particularly like:

Love your enemies [Jesus says] and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

This seems an impossible task, but in truth we already have the greatest example: Jesus Christ who laid down his life not only for the people with whom he had mutual fondness, but for those who hated him, those who spat at him, those who scourged him and nailed him to the Cross. We are commanded to take up our own cross, to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others as Christ had done. Will we do it?

+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.

As tempting a text as this morning’s Gospel is, especially since we’ll soon embark on our annual stewardship drive, there is something about the Old Testament which I find compelling and, thus, want to focus on. Isaiah’s prophecy is the climax of a fascinating period of history which I think interesting to enough to rehearse briefly, because it makes this morning’s Old Testament lesson all the more surprising. So, on with a bit of a history lesson, and apologies if it seems dry to some. I for one find it to be a really enthralling story.

If you follow the daily office lectionary, and include two readings at each office, you’ve been hearing a great deal of the background of this morning’s Old Testament over the past couple of weeks in evn=ening prayer. To bring you up to speed, the last great king of Judah, Josiah, had done what none of his predecessors had managed- namely, large scale religious and political reform. Though Judah was a client state of Assyria, Josiah managed to tear down the altars of foreign gods and encourage the worship of Israel’s god alone- a feat not even managed by Solomon himself. He used tax revenue not to underwrite the monarchy’s expenses but to undertake a significant renovation of the Temple. Sadly, when Josiah died in the year 609 B.C. a whole series of bad kings followed. Josiah’s son, Jehoahaz, ignored his father’s reforms and was captured only three months into his reign after an ill-advised war with Egypt. Jehoahaz’s brother Jehoiakim was installed in his place by the Egyptian conquerors, but his eleven year reign was defined by his apparently constantly shifting allegiance to Egypt and Babylon who were at war with each other, and, worst of all, after facing criticism by the prophet Jeremiah, he undertook a policy of burning the prophet’s writings. Finally, Jehoiakim’s son, Jeconiah, only managed to rule for three months and ten days before he allowed Jerusalem to fall to the Babylonians and the best and brightest of Judah to be sent into exile throughout the Babylonian Empire on 16 March in the year 597 B.C.

Now, skip forward almost sixty years. Jerusalem had fallen, leaving only a puppet monarchy and the poorest of the poor remaining in Judah. Educated and wealthy Jews had established communities throughout Babylon, leading to an increased nationalistic and religious fervor which the Empire had sought to quash by its program of forced exile. This was a period in which the Jews learned how to maintain their Judaism, their connection to the God of Israel, outside the land given to their forefathers and without the benefit of temple worship. For the common Jew, this meant an increased attention to kashrut, faithfulness in observing the laws of purity and morality found in the Torah. For scholars, it meant not only an increased attention to studying the Law (the beginnings of modern, Rabbinical Judaism) but also an explosion of creativity. It is not in Israel but in Babylon that much of what we call the Old Testament was finally written down.

More and more, though, the Jews realized that they could only follow the God of Israel in the manner they desired by returning to the land and rebuilding the temple. The only problem was, they had no army and a couple generations of life in exile had made repatriation seem little more than wishful thinking.

But then, something unexpected happened. The Word of the Lord came not just to the prophet but to one identified in this morning’s lesson as God’s “anointed”. Indeed, considering that Isaiah was holed up in Babylon, we might assume that this prophecy was not even mediated through the prophet to this “anointed one” but went directly from God to him, 500 miles away from Babylon in the city of Susa.

And who was this “anointed one”? Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of Persia. God says to Cyrus that He has “called [him] by name. I surname you,” God says, “though you do not know me… I gird you, though you do not know me.” God chose not one of His own chosen people, but a king following a foreign religion (though, arguably the only monotheistic religion at the time aside from Judaism) to bring deliverance to the Jews.

We Christians often miss this part of the story because we read Isaiah on one level when there are at least two levels on which the prophecies function. Isaiah most certainly points to Jesus Himself as his people’s redeemer, but on another level he also point’s to King Cyrus. It’s not a matter of figuring out when the prophet speaks about one or the other; he can be understood as speaking of both in the same breath, a difficult thing for us linear-thinking modern people to get our minds around.

Anyhow, there is more in this than a history lesson with a twist at the end, because I think the twist-ending itself gives us an important lesson about who God is. We talk so much about coming to know God more fully, but we miss what is arguably more important- namely, that God knows us fully. To Cyrus, the God of Israel, if he had even heard of him, would have been a minor tribal god. He probably wouldn’t have seen this strange religion of displaced Jews as being particularly interesting. But God knew Cyrus, just as he knows each of us: completely. Because God knew Cyrus before Cyrus knew Him, this foreign king was made an instrument of the one true God.

The fact is we can never fully know God. We project all sorts of cultural and personal biases onto Him, and getting an even slightly clearer image of Him is a life’s work. It is my strong belief that even those who reject God most vociferously (the so-called “new atheists”) are rejecting not God Himself but some inaccurate image which we’ve created—some white-bearded chap who lives in the clouds—that has less to do with who God is than it does with our own hang-ups.

That being the case, the Good News is that however skewed our image of God is, God’s image of us is perfect. God knows us fully and can employ the greater angels of our nature, made perfect in Christ Jesus, to do His Will whether we realize He’s doing it or not. It is a great God who can take some pagan Persian king to be a channel of his peace and deliverance. It is a great God who can take us, confused and sinful as we are, and build a Kingdom for which there is no end. May our ignorance of God be overshadowed by God’s perfect knowledge of us, and may His perfect love find a home in the hearts who as yet do not know Him at all.

+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.

Many of you know that I generally have little time for debates about how the church should or shouldn’t employ certain language which might rub against contemporary norms, not that they’re unimportant, but mostly because I find there are more important issues in theology and Christian ethics, and frankly, I find those issues more interesting. One of the issues which gets brought up fairly frequently in scholarly circles which I’ve tended not to worry terribly much about is the charge of anti-Semitism (or, more properly, anti-Judaism) in the Bible. With the exception of the author of Luke and Acts, every person who had a hand in writing the Bible was Jewish. Thus, even when John’s Gospel—the most frequent object of the charges of biblical anti-Semitism—refers to the “bad guys” as “the Jews”, we are seeing an internal division within Judaism between a group of Jewish leaders and a different group of Jews who were thrown out of the synagogue for following Christ.

Despite my initial disinterest in what I’ve taken to be a manufactured issue, all of this morning’s lessons can be taken in a way which might prove problematic, to employ an overused phrase. In the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah, we hear the word of God as given to the prophet which suggests that God has become very angry at His people. Because God looked for justice and righteousness in Israel and found the opposite, he has sworn to tear down the hedge which protects His chosen people from the ungodly who would devour the Promised Land.

The psalm adds an apparently later perspective, after the judgment proclaimed in Isaiah had taken place. The psalmist cries out to his Lord in words which seem to charge God with abandonment. While the God of Israel had planted a vineyard, He had indeed torn down its walls. The psalmist casts an accusatory “why?” and in what seems to be a defiant reminder to God of His own responsibility to His own people, the psalmist says:

Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven;
behold and tend this vine; *
preserve what your right hand has planted.

The psalm we just read was not a song of praise but of protest, protest against none other than God Himself!

Shifting to the New Testament, Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, reflects on his Jewish bona fides:

[C]ircumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless.

He immediately responds to this by claiming that he counts this rather impressive CV of Jewish piety as loss; he seems to be rejecting his own heritage and its value system. Indeed, he calls it “rubbish” in our translation. The word Paul actually uses here is σκύβαλα,which is, lets just say, a somewhat ruder word than “rubbish.” I’ll refrain from providing a list of possible English equivalents from the pulpit.

Finally, Jesus’ parable in Matthew appears to take things a step further. It is no longer an angry God (the landowner) who has despoiled the heritage of Israel, but the Israelites themselves, the evil tenants who killed the landowner’s messengers, the prophets.

The lectionary today has done a very dangerous thing in throwing all four of these reading at us in one day because, to be frank, they’ve made the assumption that the preacher who is given these texts to explain is not an idiot. We might assume that the majority of the clergy are smart enough to avoid the false conclusion these four reading might suggest when taken out of context, but centuries of Christian anti-Semitism stand as evidence against the claim that such an assumption is a safe one. Medieval persecution of Jews which were believed to have poisoned water holes and defrauded debtors were more than occasionally “egged on” by stupid clergy. A case can be made that there was more compliance than confrontation from the churches when facing the catastrophe which was the holocaust, and much of this might be attributed to the false and offensive belief that the Jews killed Jesus. Even today, there are sadly many who call themselves Christian but reject God’s own people and Jesus’ own religion.

So, how do we marry what I hope is our wholesale rejection of so-called Christian anti-Semitism with an appreciation of this morning’s lessons as being part of the inspired Word of God? I think Jesus’ own words can and should be our staring point. After he shares the parable, he asked his audience what should be done with the evil tenants, and they respond without charity and apparently (considering the fact that Jesus’ audience was Jewish) with a lack of understanding of the referents of his parable:

They said to him, “He [the landowner] will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”

Jesus’ Jewish audience gives the argument which an anti-Semite would, because they didn’t understand the parable either.

Jesus immediately recognizes where this is going and he rejects the position:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

`The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner;
this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

Far from rejecting His people, God has come to give them a new and everlasting foundation, indeed to make them part of the foundation which cannot be shaken. There is a great deal that could be said by manner of explicating this, for which there is not nearly time enough in this sermon. For the initial questions which arise from Jesus’ words here, I would, for now, refer you to St. Paul’s argument in the Epistle to the Romans, particularly the eleventh chapter, which I think I preached on earlier this summer, in which the Apostle states without reservation that God has not by any means rejected His people, and that with regard to election, the faithful Jew (even if he does not recognize Jesus’ status as Messiah) is guaranteed salvation due to God’s irrevocable promise to his forefathers.

The Good News here for Christian or Jew is that God does not engage in breach of contract. God keeps His promises to Jew and Christian; He’ll never be so short on Grace that he has to cut back benefits or apply a means test, and for this we can be truly and eternally grateful.

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