Author: John Drymon

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

“Never read the comments.” This has become the refrain when it comes to articles and videos online, and I need to start following this sage advice. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that for some reason I can’t hide the comments when I’m watching the governor’s daily briefings online on my laptop. So, I’ve seen that derogatory slur used by people who think we’re dealing with a media-driven hoax against those who trust epidemiologists and other experts who say we’re in the midst of a real pandemic with Covid-19. “Wake up, sheep,” the incendiary comments often say, “and liberate Ohio!”

None of us likes to be likened to sheep, because the implication is that we are mindless followers. But look again at what Jesus is saying. “The sheep follow [the shepherd] because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Perhaps we’ve underestimated the sheep. As smelly and dumb as they might 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 that their safety is dependent on doing so, and they’re smart enough at least to be able to discern between one who will lead them to safety and one who will steal them away.

I wonder if most of us are really as discerning as the humble sheep. Even those of us who are intuitive enough to discern someone who’s genuine from a con-man most of the time, can nonetheless occasionally throw our lot in with a sheep-thief. I don’t just mean that we can fall in with a rough crowd, though for some that is an issue. I mean we can totally misplace our confidence, failing to follow the Good Shepherd in favor of some other leader.

And it should be no surprise that for us modern people the most common thief one might trust instead of the Good Shepherd is none other than oneself. Most of you have heard me say things along these lines before, but it bears repeating. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves, and our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We say “God helps those who help themselves” (which I hope you know, comes neither from the bible nor from a Christian thinker), we say we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and we believe seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is a weakness. So the online invective against trusting experts and instead following one’s “gut” is just another example, I think, of our culture’s sin; our false soteriology which holds that salvation (however you define the term) is to be found within oneself and that reliance on any outside authority is a sign of weakness or foolishness.

It is difficult for us to follow. On this level the sheep might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path. They can recognize the shepherd’s voice, and they know they’re in trouble when they don’t hear it. 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. We don’t need experts, whether it comes to public health or spiritual health, because by God I know better. This is precisely the kind of pride which can precede a tremendous fall.

So, maybe, we shouldn’t get offended when we’re called sheep. Maybe there’s something we can learn from those silly beasts after all. Maybe we can learn that we should cultivate enough humility that we can be led by another. 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. We can’t become haughty or petulant or we’ll strike out on our own, thinking our own directions better and we’ll end up falling into a pit. Thank God, we already find ourselves in the flock, which is Christ’s Church, and the shepherd is leading us as we hear his direction in scripture and in prayer, in the wisdom of holy tradition, 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.

The disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread. What fascinates me most about this story is the disciples’ lack of recognition up to the point of the meal they shared in Emmaus. We so often call the events we just heard about as “the road to Emmaus”, but we forget that the moment that made all the difference for Cleopas and the other disciple didn’t take place on the road at all, but at the dinner table. For one thing, I think it suggests that old cliché about the journey being more important than the destination isn’t as wise as we think it is (as is so often the case with clichés). Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination, and sometimes it isn’t, and sometimes the reality is just a whole lot more complicated than something pithy you can put on an inspirational poster or refrigerator magnet.

But what about that long walk they all took together? It wasn’t pointless, or else it wouldn’t have made it into Luke’s account. On the way, our risen Lord was engaging in a ministry that defined his earthly life just as much as breaking bread with the disciples was; he was teaching the meaning of scripture, how the Law and the Prophets pointed to the coming reign of the Messiah. Later, the disciples would acknowledge that they felt their hearts “burning within” them during this conversation, yet the moment of recognition didn’t come until that more intimate act at dinner.

Perhaps the disiples’ delayed discovery surprises us, but it shouldn’t. We are exposed to compelling arguments and weighty evidence of some truth or another all the time, but without some kind of personal experience, the truth sometimes doesn’t sink in. We can hear facts and figures about something, but our hearts may not be moved if we don’t see it. We live in a society in which a large proportion of people can hear compelling arguments about some scientific or medical proposition, but refuse to believe the validity of said arguments until they see it first hand (even if the proposition at hand doesn’t lend itself to that kind of scrutiny). Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who think our current predicament with COVID-19 is a hoax, either because they are naturally incredulous or because they’re too credulous and they just get exposed to bad faith arguments from questionable sources. There are plenty of people who honest-to-goodness believe that the earth is flat and the moon landing was a hoax and the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 were “inside jobs”, too. So, I’m certainly not suggesting that our difficulty in accepting truths on the basis of persuasive evidence is a good thing; it just is. It’s a reality of our condition as we try to make sense of a world that doesn’t always immediately make sense to us.

We are now—as modern and post-modern people—more skeptical creatures than we’ve ever been (with regard to science and religion and politics and every other human endeavor), and that’s neither an altogether bad nor an altogether good thing. This is your problem not mine, of course, because my own worldview, as you know, is that of the so-called Medieval Synthesis of the 13^th Century. (Unfortunately, preaching over the system of tubes we call the internets means I cannot be certain you all realized that was a joke, but here we are.)

Anyway, this high degree of modern and post-modern incredulity being the reality, we can learn a great deal from the disciples’ delayed recognition. If, as I would contend, we are even more prone to withhold judgment than people in Jesus’ day, that effects how we go about evangelism.

Now, there is a word we Episcopalians can be uncomfortable with—evangelism—and I think our discomfort is of precisely the same nature which causes others to be uncomfortable with the propagation of very different kinds of truth. Our discomfort may well stem from the very same post-modern rejection with absolute truth and the completely incoherent claim that what might be the truth for one need not be the truth for another.

If we truly believe that Christ is risen, we believe something stronger than the claim that “for me Christ is risen, but perhaps not to somebody who rejects my meta-narrative”. We believe Christ is risen. We’re making a claim which believe to be as true as “gravity exists” or “the earth orbits round the sun”. We’re not just using code language to point to some personal feeling. We’re making a claim about the truth of a fact, a fact which is not cotenable with every other religious claim that could be made. So important is this truth, so potentially life-changing and world-changing is this truth, that we should find it to be a truth whose universal acceptance would be a positive thing. Indeed, I believe it would be the most positive thing possible. I realize this puts me at odds with the pluralist spirit of our age and of much of the church, but there you have it.

Let me anticipate the objection one of my frequent interlocutors makes when I say things like this. I did not just say that if you’re not Christian you’re automatically going to hell. Never said that. I did, however, say that I believe the truth claims of creedal, orthodox Christianity, when they contradict some other view, provide the fact of the matter, render the other claim false, and I can wish everyone accepted that, even while I don’t treat anyone who disagrees as anything less than a human being who has inherent diginity.

I press this point so hard because I believe oour discomfort with it suggestion cripples our witness. A friend of mine once said that Episcopalian evangelism is like building the most beautiful, well-appointed boat ever constructed, taking it out into the middle of the ocean, and waiting for the fish to jump in. Needless to say, you’ll not catch many fish that way, but sadly I think the analogy rings truer than we’d like to admit.

But, considering the fact that the people we live among are more like those disciples on the road than we might have thought—considering the fact that we now have a couple generations of people who might not have read Heidegger or Derrida or Foucault, but who nonetheless share their rejection of modern logic and argumentation—our approach must be different, and Jesus is once again the model.

We’ll not convince many people that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” by setting forth propositional arguments. Listen, I’ve tried. We may, however, help others see the risen Christ when we break bread with them, that is, when we build relationships of love and mutuality with them. The good news of the Resurrection is not limited to what it means for us who have been baptized on the last day–the new heaven and new earth and inhabiting the City of God together as God had always intended. It is that, but the Resurrection also means that we’ve already been risen with Christ, and we, the Church, constitute his earthly body here and now. So, when we nurture the kinds of intimate relationships with others that are manifested most powerfully in Christ’s breaking of the bread, we open a window of insight into the Christ of whom we are a part. We permit those who do not yet believe to have opportunities for the same recognition experienced by the disciples.

Our earthly relationships are ideally reflections of the primary relationship God has with us. This is why the marriage rite makes clear that the love shared between husband and wife is a sign of the love “betwixt” Christ and his Church. This is why parents and godparents are so intimately involved in the rite of Baptism (and why, for example, I insist on having parents and godparents hold the child during a baptism rather than doing it myself: it’s not, contrary to some speculation, because I’m afraid of dropping an infant, but because parents and godparents will ideally serve as more important models of Christian love than some chap in funny dresses).

You see, our domestic community (that is, our household) as well as our ecclesial community (that is, our parish church) are primarily contexts in which we humans in very human ways try to reflect the love of God.

It is appropriate that we remember this today, as we are still being required to remain physically apart from each other. We are nonetheless able through other means–electronic, telephonic, and postal–to share our common life and the love of Christ with one another, praying for the day when we can literally break bread together again. How important, then, that we each do what we can to let our hearts burn within us as we remain on the eroad to an Emmaus that may turn out to be farther away than we had at first hoped.

In all events, we learn from this morning’s Gospel that the most compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is not to be found in any scientific enquiry, but rather in the love we show and are shown. May we be brought to daily conversion, to slowly turning ourselves back toward God when we experience the love His people show toward us, and may we break bread with others (now from a distance and then face-to-face) in the hopes that they, too, catch a glimpse of the risen Christ.

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

Alleluia, Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!

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

The Easter proclamation may seem peculiar to say this year. Perhaps some of us are not quite “feeling it.” The church calendar tells us that this is the Feast of the Resurrection, even as many of us feel we are still in the tomb, thanks to the isolation brought about by the current pandemic.

Well, let me just say this is not the first Easter the church has ever experienced without bonnets and processions and egg hunts for the children and all the rest. This is not to in any way to minimize our current pain and sadness about not being able to be together; quite the opposite, I hope that this will be taken as a word of encouragement. There have been periods in which the church is intensely persecuted; indeed, in some parts of the world this persecution persists. The feast of the Resurrection has been and is still being celebrated furtively, in homes and back-rooms. Yet Christ is still risen; they still shout alleluia! On battlefields and in hospice wards and in prisons and in slums there are no lilies or lamb-shanks. Yet Christ is still risen for them; they still shout alleluia! And our burial office puts it perhaps most poignantly–“All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Indeed, we may be experiencing now something more akin to the first Easter morning. The apostles were huddled in their room, justifiably afraid of what fate they might face should they leave. Would they be mocked? Would they face mob violence? Would they, like their Lord, be tried and executed for sedition? And so it was a woman, Mary Magdalene, tending our Lord’s grave (providing an essential service which no doubt put her in danger as well) who was first to receive the Good News.

Whatever our circumstances, whatever trials we face, whatever the power of evil tries to throw at us to make us lose heart, Christ is still risen from the dead and we still say alleluia.

There’s a gospel song I’ve heard our presiding bishop mention in one of his sermons that I think captures this sentiment, and it is with those words I’ll close:

I believe I’ll testify, God’s been good to me. Through every test and trial, I’ve got the victory. The enemy has tried his best to make me turn around, bring me down, but my God’s never failed me yet, so I’m gonna stand my ground.

No matter what comes my way, I’ll lift my voice and say, hallelujah anyhow.

Wait a minute, one more time, think I’ll say it again. God’s been so good to me, and He’s my closest friend. I’ve come too far to turn around now. I’m gonna stand, I’m gonna wait, watch God work it out somehow.

Oh hallelujah, hallelujah anyhow. Hallelujah, hallelujah anyhow. Hallelujah, hallelujah anyhow.

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