Author: John Drymon

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

My sermons of late have, I reckon, become more pastoral than usual and less didactic–thanks both to the season in which we find ourselves in the church year as well as the very strange season of our individual and communal lives thanks to the necessity of remaining physically distant one from another in response to the pandemic. No doubt, I’ll mostly keep this approach for a while, but there is nothing wrong with a little teaching in one’s preaching even now, so I want to say just a bit about a more academic issue tonight, namely hermeneutics–that is, the study of principles for biblical interpretation–and understand I am winding up here to something which I hope is both pastoral and practical.

Those of you who have attended my theology, church history, or confirmation classes may remember that our centuries long experience of reading the scriptures as the church has evolved over time to include not only many methods of exegesis, but an insistence that the bible can be read on more than one level, revealing (I like to say) the surplus of meaning contained within holy writ. There is a literal/historical meaning, a moral meaning, a symbolic meaning, and an eschatological meaning often overlapping in the same passage or verse, each reading being just as true and faithful as the others. This doesn’t mean scripture means anything you want it to–that it’s just a matter of interpretation–but that, thanks to the Holy Spirit’s inspiration it can mean a number of true things at once.

One of the most interesting an illuminating ways the church has read the bible since the time of the Fathers (the first four or five centuries after the Apostles) is known as the typological reading of scripture. This method views events and prophetic utterances in the Old Testament in light of the new. So, for example, the servant songs of Isaiah might on one level, the historical-critical, refer to Israel as a whole, but on the typological level it refers to Jesus. Both are true readings, because the text can mean more than one thing.

Likewise, the Old Testament lesson we heard a few moments ago is on one level about an historical fact–the Passover meal shared by the Israelites in Egypt before their exodus, God’s judgment against the Egyptians, and the mercy with which he spared his chosen people. On another level, it is a type of both the supper Christ shared with his apostles, thereby instituting the Sacrament. It is also a type of the Crucifixion, in which God levied judgment against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the mercy he would show to all who would call upon the name of Jesus, that the wrath of God would pass over us, too. Just as the lamb’s meat was eaten and it’s blood placed on the lintels of the children of Israel to strengthen and protect them, so do the body and blood of the lamb slain for us strengthen us for the journey when received in the most holy sacrament, and so does the body broken and blood shed on the cross protect us from the wrath to come.

There is yet another way in which I think we can read this night’s texts faithfully. This would be what the medievals would have called either tropological or anagogical. I’ll not get into the distinction between the two, and I think whether it is one or the other depends on how our current crisis shakes out (let the reader understand). Setting that issue aside, I believe these texts speak to what we are all experiencing right now. The children of Israel and the Apostles were hunkered down in their homes. They were, you might say, self-quarantining. They were receiving what sustenance they could before a long and difficult time in which they would suffer privation. The Israelites would wander in the desert lacking food and water. The disciples would be left without their Lord physically present, locked in their rooms for fear of what lay outside their doors. We, too, are now bereft. We cannot be in each other’s company. We are locked in our rooms. And, perhaps worst of all, we are most of us denied the outward and visible sign of the Sacrament, even as we are assured of its inward and spiritual grace granted us by means of our intention being met by God’s miraculous provision.

And yet, we can set our confidence in God’s promise, which will never disappoint. However long we remain captive, God will grant release. However long we wander hungry and thirsty in the wilderness, the promised land is ahead. No matter how long we remain locked in some upper room, the risen Christ will burst in and we will go out, with him, into a world yearning to hear the Good News that he is risen and has freed us once again.

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

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

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” We behold our Lord today at the end of his rope. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem has led to bloody death; Jesus has gone from an adoring crowd lining his way with branches to the gibbet, surrounded by those who would mock and torture him.

To cry out, to express one’s sense of abandonment in the midst of profound grief and trouble, even accusing our Heavenly Father, is no sin. It is, we see in the Passion, a practice to which even the Sinless One made recourse. Jesus, you may know, is quoting the 22^nd Psalm in his lament, but I don’t think we should see this as mere play-acting, as saying the right words to give a biblical reference to prove the prophetic nature of the Old Testament. That would hew dangerously close to a rather gnostic view of the crucifixion. No doubt Jesus actually feels abandoned, and he is using the words of scripture to express, in good Jewish fashion, what he is experiencing.

I think this gets to a point made by one whom many of you know is among my favorite biblical scholars, N.T. Wright, in a Time Magazine article last week. Bishop Wright reminds us that Christianity is not a faith of easy answers. We cannot take any example of profound human suffering and respond with an easy answer about God’s plan, and this includes, the bishop wrote, our current crisis with the coronavirus and all its attendant human suffering. Rather, we have the language already in our tradition to respond with perhaps the only honest words we can say about our difficulty–not with puffy platitudes about God’s will but with the biblical language of lament. These are sentiments we will hear expressed through all the Holy Week liturgies this week, and we certainly hear them today coming from none other than God Incarnate, experiencing the greatest human suffering on our behalf and responding just as the psalmist or Job or the Prophet Jeremiah in his Lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem. These are appropriate feelings to have and they are appropriate to express to God in prayer.

We should not view this as a lack of faith on our part when we, too, express such desolation and even when we accuse God. Remember last week, I said that Jesus wept over Lazarus even when he knew that he would raise him from the dead. Today Jesus cries out and accuses the Father of abandoning him, even though he knows his situation would lead to Resurrection. When somebody dies, I often tell the family of the departed one that grief is no sign of a lack of faith. It is a normal, human response to loss. We may be confident that God will get us through our current difficulties–our isolation and loneliness and anxiety and grief in the midst of the pandemic–but that doesn’t mean we are faithless if we need to express our sadness and fear and anger. God can take it; he’s big enough to manage our human responses to difficulty and even our anger at him.

Every year our bishop sends his clergy a book to read during Lent, and this year’s couldn’t have been more perfect for our current situation. The Hope of Glory is a series of reflections on the seven last words of our Lord from the Cross by John Meacham, the prominent historian and Episcopal lay leader whom many of you may have heard give eulogies at the funerals of his friends and fellow Episcopalians George and Barbara Bush when they both died in 2018.

I want to conclude my sermon with an excerpt of his reflection on Jesus’ lament “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” in which this pulitzer prize winning layman puts better the point I’m trying to make in a few words than I could in ten-thousand:

We do not know [why so many suffer]. The world is a tragic place: it will never finally, fully conform to our wishes.

Sometimes the things in front of us, including the cross, are the things we notice the least. We do not genuflect to images of an empty tomb, or of a discarded shroud. We genuflect, rather, to a representation of a place of suffering and of sweat, of blood and of death. Tragedy is ever before us. From the cross, Jesus asked the same question we ask in hours of darkness and despair: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? God has thus known grief. He has experienced the pain of his people. He has wondered why.

Then his Father’s will was done, and from darkness came light, and death was conquered. This is our story, our faith, our consolation.

And so we watch and we wait, revering the cross, caring for the widow and the orphan, and holding fast to the belief that someday, in some way, all things shall be made new. For that hope is all we have to hold on to, however tenuously, in the hours when we, too, feel forsaken by the Father, and far from his care.

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

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

“Jesus wept.” This verse, found in this morning’s Gospel, is famous for being the shortest in scripture, though taken in its context I believe it has much to say to us today. Jesus’ friend Lazarus has died, and yet Jesus knows how this story ends. Just in last week’s Gospel, in which Our Lord says the blind man’s condition allowed God’s power to be made manifest, so does he say of Lazarus’ condition: “This… is for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” Jesus, who tarries two days in Jerusalem upon hearing of his Lazarus’ sickness, knew by the time he had left for Bethany that his friend has died. Upon his arrival he informs Martha that he intends to raise Lazarus from the dead. And yet, upon approaching the tomb, Jesus weeps. He knows Lazarus will live again, yet his grief is no less real.

My friends, none of us knows how God, in his Providence, has determined to use our current crisis to his own divine ends. None of us knows how long this will last, who will become ill, who will survive and who will die. God knows and will transform whatever the power of evil throws at us to mysteriously and miraculously work his own purposes out. Even so, because we have a God who is not only high and lofty, but who has chosen in Christ Jesus to take on our very nature, we also have a God who despite knowing the ultimate triumph of life nonetheless weeps with us in our grief. I said last week that having a God who suffers with us is not sufficient if that’s all we have to say about God. But thanks be to God, we also have a God who is in control, and this reality of having a Lord who is both provident and incarnate is, I believe, the only thing that can satisfy the longing of our hearts for hope in the midst of adversity. To put it plainly, I don’t know how one gets through our present reality without utter despair without Jesus; thank God we have Jesus, who is our help and our salvation.

Now let me turn to something I want to say to you as your pastor along very practical lines, which I assure you has spiritual significance as pedestrian as it may seem. Our hope remains in the work of God-in-Christ alone, not in anything we do, yet there are some things which we must be doing to express our faith and hope in the providence which we trust. And forgive the moment of levity, but this struck me due to another verse in today’s Gospel. When Jesus approaches the tomb Martha, always the practical sister, warn him, “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” Perhaps some of us feel like we might be a bit like Lazarus, in our tomb-like rooms for at least a week now. But, friends, we’re not dead yet, so this need not be the case.

So, here’s my godly counsel, pedestrian though it may seem, and this is likely the most directive any of you have ever hear me be. Get out of bed when you normally would, even if you don’t have to right now. Shower, shave if you’re a man, brush your teeth. Dress yourself. Eat nutritious, balanced meals. Go outside (maintaining appropriate physical distance from others, of course) and walk or jog or do something to get your heart rate up. Telephone or “skype” people you’d normally see on a daily basis (and consider “zooming in” to coffee hour immediately following this liturgy). Don’t have your televisions on and tuned-in to news broadcasts all day long.

If you find yourself constantly anxious and engaging in what psychiatrists call rumination (that is, focusing on your negative thoughts) pay attention to your breathing and slow it down, focus on a prayer that you can repeat with those breaths. And consider the following, which is not just my own barmy idea, but a suggestion from a mental health professional I trust: you may need to let yourself ruminate and worry a bit (or more than a bit), but find a place and a time–a chair you don’t normally sit in and a set half-hour period in your diary, for example) and try to limit your worrying to that place and time. Then when that niggling anxiety pops up out-of-hours, as it were, say, “I’ll have to worry about that in the old armchair between 3:30 and 4:00 this afternoon.” Maybe you’ll need to attend to that worry at that time-certain and maybe you’ll have forgotten it or realized it’s resolved itself, but it’s worth a shot.

Finally, and most importantly, say your prayers. Many are tuning in to our daily morning prayer live-stream and that’s a great start, but find additional ways to do this. Say the Lord’s prayer when you wake up, right before you get out of bed and as you lie down before you fall asleep. Consider using the “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” found in your Book of Common Prayer starting on page 136. There you will find very brief devotions for morning, noon, evening, and night. If you’re like me, you have a calendar on your smart phone that beeps at you when you’re supposed to do something; maybe set those times of prayer in that calendar and be faithful about stopping and praying at those specified times.

And once you’ve got into that habit,(and I know this is something many of you have heard me say before) consider expanding that practice to include the more fulsome offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. Unfortunately, the current prayerbook has so many options that how to do this is not as readily apparent as it was in the 1928 and earlier Books of Common Prayer, but neither are the rubrics impenetrable if you’ve got some spare time to figure it out. I posted a primer on how to do this from the Society of St. Nicholas Ferrar on the parish’s facebook page a few days ago which you may find helpful. There are some good websites, my favorite of which is St. Bede’s Breviary, which I will link to you, and believe me when I say, nothing would make me happier than to start fielding a lot of phone calls and “Zoom” meetings to teach people personally or in small groups how to pray the Office. Take me at my word on that, please, and let me know if I can help. These services of prayer are not primarily intended as “just the thing you do on Sundays when the priest is on vacation”, neither are they intended to be something clergy and “spiritual athletes” do because the former are required and the latter are just “better than the rest of us” or something. When Cranmer produced the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, his intention, and that of the church, was that it would be an expectation of all the faithful to keep these times of prayer. So ponder that in you hearts, and let me know if I can help.

I realize this is one of the stranger sermons I’ve ever given you. These are strange times. Please remember, God is with you in the midst of this. God loves you and will, as the psalmist says, “bear you up lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Likewise, the church is with you, I am with you, and am holding you I my prayers before God every day. Please, of your charity, do the same for each other and for me. Your prayers are coveted, and I am certain they avail much.

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