Author: John Drymon

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

Many of you know that one of my passions is the study of historical theology, particularly looking at theological trends in reference to the social, political, and intellectual contexts of various periods of the church’s life over the last 2,000 years. One of the issues which has come up time and time again, especially over the last 500 years, is the question of whether or not we can be assured of our salvation.

Nineteenth century hymn writer Fanny Crosby seemed to have worked it out. You might have heard her words before if you grew up in a different Christian tradition (it’s sadly never been in our hymnal tradition):

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Perfect submission, perfect delight!
Visions of rapture now burst on my sight;
Angels descending bring from above
Echoes of mercy, whispers of love.

Ms. Crosby might have worked it out, but the man who started her own Methodist flavor of Christianity, John Wesley, could not. While he taught that humans could have some level of assurance, he – who though not having Crosby’s visions of rapture and of angels descending, had felt his heart strangely warmed in a moment of conversion – could not ultimately confirm that he was certain he had been saved. Perhaps he had backslid back into his high church Anglicanism.

Puritans (like Bunyan whom many of us are reading and like those who would emigrate to New England and have such an impact on our own American culture) had similar concerns. While you’re not likely to hear it preached down at First Presbyterian (as our reformed brothers and sisters have understandably deëmphasized the theology of John Calvin), those of the reformed tradition – Puritans and more moderate Presbyterians alike – believed that we couldn’t have assurance of salvation, but only clues (signs of election they called them) based on things like domestic tranquility and personal wealth – blessings from God which suggested to them that they were favored and thus saved. The result was the development of the Protestant work ethic (you’d work hard to evince these signs of election for your own surety and the recognition of your coreligionists) which works out well if you’re trying to establish a peaceable and productive society, but you alse get a bunch of people worried that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Likewise, a case can be made that the Protestant Reformation itself began less because of Roman Catholic abuses (selling indulgences and the like, as important as that was as a tipping point) and more because good old Martin Luther was so terrified at the church’s ambivalence on the matter of salvation that he needed to create a system which provided more certainty to the believer that he or she was heaven-bound rather than damned.

Folks, I’ve got some good news for you. You don’t have to worry yourself to death; or maybe put better, the fact that you may be worried might ironically be the best evidence that you needn’t worry that you’re going to Hell. You have been been saved by Christ’s one sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction on the Cross. you have been saved in the regenerative waters of Baptism. You are being saved as you continue to receive the Grace of Christ’s Body and Blood and as good fruit is borne through your faith by the work of the Holy Spirit, even if your own participation that is simply sincerely saying “God, work through me though I am too weak to do your will.” Now this is dangerous information to give out. It’s dangerous information, because people who are afraid of Hell can sometimes behave a lot better. Geneva, when Calvin was more-or-less in charge was one of the most peaceful, prosperous, democratic places in the world.

And as much as I hate to admit it (and as I implied just a moment ago) the Puritan history of our own country’s early years had much the same effect. While our Anglican forebears on this continent were growing fat and lazy and treating humans like property in the Southern Colonies, the Puritans up in New England were creating communities of mutual responsibility and laying the foundations for a country that could get on without a king, because they were so darned law-abiding and committed to equality. And, contrary to popular fiction, they even killed fewer purported witches than our spiritual forebears did. Unfortunately, they were so good at obeying law and setting up the foundations of modern civil society because they were afraid that if they didn’t they’d go to hell quite literally. One takes the bad with the good, I guess.

The theological truth is socially dangerous, because people realize that they’re not going to burn just because they’re bad, because we’re all pretty bad by nature thanks to the fall and only good by the grace of God. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Or maybe I do, but thank God I’m not God. I’m certainly not as loving and gracious and forgiving as God. In today’s Epistle, we get a pretty broad, generous view of salvation. We are all children of Abraham, and God has reckoned us all worthy of Salvation because of the Blood of Christ. In his conversation with Nicodemus, the only litmus test Jesus gives is that we be “born again” or, to use a better translation of the Greek “born from above.” He says we must be born of water and of the Spirit, which is to say (at least as I read it) we must both be born physically and then receive the New Birth of Baptism. Most of us (myself included) receive that new birth when we’re too young to understand its nature, and we are merely passive recipients of God’s Grace. But that I think is ideal, infant baptism being normative just means that we’re being honest about the nature of the Sacrament and of Salvation, because even baptism of those of riper years, as older prayerbooks put it, is essentially a passive reception of God’s Grace, which we can only will in part to be recipients of.

So the good news is that we don’t have to worry. We’ve been saved. God’s promise is irrevocable. The difficult news, though, is that we’re not off the hook.

Okay, you’re not going to hell. So what? For about the last half millennium we’ve been obsessed with the question of justification and its mechanics. Who’s saved? Who’s not? How does it happen? What if I’m not saved?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but this is not really the question we who are not systematic theologians need to spend all our time and energy sorting out. God has saved us through the blood of His only Son. We didn’t deserve it. We’ll never earn it. We got it anyway. The precise mechanics of how it works are interesting, and I love being a part of those discussions as an academic exercise, but the God’s honest truth is that you don’t have to listen to my expositions on Greek verbs to be saved.

The really interesting stuff is what comes afterward. God loves you. You are baptized into Christ’s Body. You have been born anew, born from above, born again whether you knew it or not. You have a mission. Faith without works is dead, says St. James. That doesn’t mean your or my inadequacy in doing as many good works as we might will send us to Hell. So what?

The reality of being saved and not doing anything about it seems worse to me, somehow. It means you’ve been given something and haven’t done anything with it. And it’s so simple to take that gift and use it. You’ve just got to love your neighbor. As I’ve said before, that means a lot more than having warm feelings for them. You don’t even need John Wesley’s strangely warmed heart. There are people I deal with in life who don’t get the cockles of my heart much above absolute zero. But I love them. Or at least I try to do. And that’s what we’ve all got to do. To be loving. To return the gift of Grace which we’ve been given. As absolutely wretched as we may be, as much as we may spurn or resent God or take Him for granted, He still loves us, so we ought to do the same for our sisters and brothers.

+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.

“And lead us not into temptation.” We make this prayer to our heavenly Father every week, and some of us more than once every day. This makes God’s action in this morning’s Gospel very curious indeed: “After Jesus was baptized, he was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” What God does is precisely the opposite of what is asked of God in the Lord’s prayer. By the Holy Spirit God the Father leads His Son directly into temptation.

And, in some ways, our own forty day sojourn in the wilderness, our observance of Lent, is a time in which God leads us into temptation, too. If you’ve given something up—meat or chocolate or selfish thoughts or whatever—you’ve probably already been tempted by opportunities to avail yourself of that old comfort or that old habit. I know I have. If you’ve taken something on—a prayer practice or other spiritual discipline—you’ve probably already been tempted to be less than conscientious in keeping it up. The old ways are more comfortable; they’re safe. It is significant that in addition to power, the devil tempts Jesus with comfort (the comfort of a bit of bread in the midst of his fasting) and he tempts our Lord with safety (specifically, protection from falling down a cliff).

But why might God lead us into temptation? Why was Jesus led by the Holy Spirit into a time of trial rather than flight from it? Well, the simple answer is that sometimes God answers our prayers with a “no”, and that includes our perennial prayer to “lead us not into temptation.” But that doesn’t get to the larger question, the “why?” question, so here is my humble attempt at an answer.

It has been my experience that during the periods in which I’ve been most conscientious about prayer and fasting, in which my own relationship with God seems strongest, that I have been most open to temptation. It is usually the temptation which the church calls “sloth”, one of those deadly sins: laziness not in completing tasks at work, but in maintaining rigor and regularity in the very practices which has forged my relationship with my Lord, namely prayer and fasting. I find myself in pretty good company in this struggle. Ascetics and mystics from St. Anthony to Teresa of Avilla to Thomas Merton have noted the same struggle. Precisely when their prayer life seemed most effective, just when they seemed closest to God, was when the temptation to slack off a bit seemed most prevalent and most disastrous.

On one level it is because the enemy redoubles his efforts when he’s losing, when the faithful Christian has turned more profoundly from his crafts and wiles toward the loving God. The first Sunday of Lent is as good a time as any to remember that radical evil exists, and that the defeat experienced by the agents of said evil incites them to tempt the faithful with even more resolve.

But this still doesn’t explain why God led Jesus and why God leads us through the valley of the shadow of death to begin with, why God gives these tempters the chance to snare us.

The answer is paradoxical but at the same time unsurprising. God leads us into temptation because God loves us. God loves us so much that He trusts us, which is perhaps the ultimate expression of love. God trusts us enough to give us the freedom to be petulant children if we choose, to rebel if we choose, and like the prodigal son to choose once again to return and be forgiven and to be given the fatted calf of boundless mercy.

God trusted Adam and Eve enough to place the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. God loved them enough to give them the freedom to choose, to choose whether to obey or to yield to temptation. God loves and trusts us enough not to coddle us, but rather to give us the opportunity to choose to deny Him and disappoint Him. In other words, God gives us freedom to be adults. But God’s love and trust is even greater than this, for God gives the children of Eve the chance to return after countless mistakes—countless occasions in which we indulge in the same forbidden fruit as our forebears—to return and be saved, to make another go of it through fasting and prayer.

We may, of course, still ask God to “lead us not into temptation”, to deliver us from the time of trial, and God will sometimes answer with a “yes”. God knows what temptations will destroy us when we’re at a point of weakness, and we can be thankful when God spares us from the opportunity to fall back into a destructive pattern. But we can also be thankful, as hard as it may be sometimes, that God respects us enough to let us choose to rage and rebel. We can be thankful, as one prayer in the BCP puts it, for those failures and disappointments which remind us of our dependence on God alone. May this holy season of Lent, then, be for us not just a reminder of our sinfulness and our need for repentance, but also a joyous celebration of our redemption and of the freedom God gives us to accept it. Let us be thankful that the chance we have to confess Christ with our lips and to believe on Him in our hearts means something, because we’re not automota, because we’re not robots who couldn’t choose otherwise, because being an adult is hard but God trusts us to grow up. Be thankful, and with thanksgiving return to the Lord who richly pardons and brings us to new and unending life.

+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.

Today, I am reminded that I am a sinner and I am going to die. And I love it! Now let me explain. I think there is a generational dynamic at work here. Please take the following not as a denunciation of one generation over another–either the dismissive phrase “okay, boomer” some of my cohort are known to use as a cudgel or the “millenials are ruining X” (X being all the things my generation’s influence on the market is purported to be ruining from chain restaurants to golf to paper napkins to the very idea of home-ownership). Anyway, there’s a lot of blame to go around, but I think in mostly equal measure.

That disclaimer out of the way, I did not grow up during a time in which children were expected to be seen and not heard. I grew up long after the decline of civil society and institutional loyalty and social and familial responsibilities being a given had already begun in earnest. These trends largely began as a reaction to what was likely an overemphasis on the collective versus the individual.

Instead, I grew up during the period in which young people were told they were special and could do anything they put their minds to and that the greatest goods were individualism and self-determination. Since I am married to somebody who works in the children’s department of the public library I have confirmed that this is still one of the primary perspectives being championed by children’s literature today.

I think we are only now starting to see that we may have over-corrected to our peril. I am not suggesting that self-esteem is bad or that people (adults as well as youngsters) shouldn’t value the gifts they have to contribute; those gifts are ultimately from God, after all. I do think, though, that this has led so many of us as a generation into unrealistic expectations about what life will be like and what we are owed and, at the same time, a pernicious assumption that we must be perfect because we naturally have it in ourselves to be perfect. We’re all special snowflakes (right?) and how this assumption plays out can have diametric but, perhaps, equally dangerous implications. Either we can be selfish monsters who rage when the world doesn’t give us what we deserve or else we can start to believe we were simply lied to and must be worthless or something because all that special “snowflakeness” didn’t pan out, and we’re underemployed and living in our parents’ basements and we choose to do the wrong thing sometimes even though we were told doing the right thing was just a matter of fiat, of willing to use the gifts we had, which we were told was enough.

This is a sort of straightjacket, this perfectionism and entitlement combining to immobilize us. And what is the way out out of it? I think step one may be the hardest, but the most necessary- “acknowledge the following proposition: ‘I am a sinner, and I’m going to die.’”

All I’ve said about generational concerns notwithstanding, I think this point is in fact universally applicable, it may just strike those who grew up under a moral-therapeutic model of human identity and value as more acute, because that model (the model of what I’ve called before from this pulpit the Stuart Smalley approach – “you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and, doggone it, people like you”) makes the basic emptiness of such an approach more acute. In simpler terms, we all need to be freed from the impossible expectations of moral perfectionism and total self-sufficiency. We all need to be reminded that we are sinners and we are going to die.

This naturally lets a lot of the pressure off, but it’s about more than that. I said earlier that this is just the first step to the solution of getting us out of the straightjacket of perfectionism and entitlement. After that realization we are able to see that there is a way out of this dilemma. When we see we simply cannot measure up by virtue of our own will and efforts, we are able to call on the one who is our helper. When we say that we are sinners, that that is central to our being, not just the agglomeration of personal mistakes, but rather a flaw in our nature we cannot fix on our own by just being good, then we can finally do the one needful thing, call upon the one who doesn’t just teaches us how to be better, but whose own righteousness makes us better despite ourselves and our perennial inability to learn or remember that moral lesson. When we are told we are going to die, that we are mortal, we are given the opportunity to rely on the one whose very nature transcends our basic finitude and contingency.

So, that is what we are about this day, but I’ve been asked why we have to keep doing this. Is there not, I’ve been asked (perhaps in a slightly accusatory tone on one or two occasions), a point at which we can stop talking about sin? My answer is that I cannot speak for anybody else who may have achieved some degree of sanctification in this life greater than my own rather low level of achievement in this regard; I personally need this reminder daily, sometimes hourly, and especially on days like today, as we enter a season of more intense and intentional reliance on the one who saves us. I need it, because I so easily forget and fall back into the sort of pride that has me convince myself that I can do it on my own. To use the language of Paul and of the Reformers, I need the Law continually to convict me so that I can accept the Grace God offers through his Son.

This affirmation–“I am a sinner and I’m going to die”–then, is not gloomy, but liberating, because just the other side of that affirmation is the realization (whether for the first time or the millionth) that we are redeemed and we are promised new life. Thanks be to God!

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