Author: John Drymon

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

I saw a meme online earlier this week that often gets shared around this time of year with a toddler in a tuxedo looking very insistent, and saying “if Pentecost is the birthday of the church, there better be some cake at coffee hour.”

We often refer to Pentecost “the birthday of the Church”, but why? There seem other likely candidates. Take Christmas. The Son of God is born in a manger in Bethlehem. He’s surrounded by his Blessed Mother and her spouse, by shepherds and angels, and all are engaged in reverent worship. That sounds like it might have been the first Christian worship service, the beginning of the church as we know it. The church’s birth.

Or, for that matter, what about Easter. Christ is risen from the dead and it is by his resurrection that the community of the disciples and all Christians who follow are given new life. What’s more, it’s not only the faithful, but all of creation that is profoundly changed, is radically re-created, by Christ’s conquest of death and his victory over the grave. It seems like the church is born, at least in a sense, fifty days prior to Pentecost, if not thirty-three years.

Perhaps something different from the “birthday metaphor” might capture the essence of Pentecost more fully, or at least in a new and interesting way. Maybe it’s just because it’s that time of year, but I wonder if Pentecost might be more like the “graduation day of the church.”

Graduations have been on many of our minds of late. Several of our own have received degrees and diplomas in the last few weeks. Graduations tend to effect the relationships between parent and child. Often it’s the immediate precursor to moving out, that bittersweet moment in which a child goes off to college or moves into a new apartment and gets a job or gets shipped off with the service or whatever.

The relationship between parent and child is changed. Hopefully it remains a supportive relationship for the child, but it’s a very different kind of support. Hopefully direction is still provided, but it’s likely to be to a different degree. A little more (or a lot more) independence is expected of the child and a little more (or a lot more) trust is required of the parent.

Christ is ascended into heaven. God is no longer experienced in quite the same way as when a man named Jesus, who is God, was walking around in ancient Palestine and you could touch him. The initial, natural response to such a reality is the response of the disciples- feel abandoned, get frightened, lock yourselves up in a room in Jerusalem just like when you thought Jesus was dead forever. The good news of Pentecost is that God has not abandoned us at all. He is still present and active in our lives and in the life of the Church, albeit in a new and different way. He still supports us, the support is just a little different. Direction is still provided, it’s just in a different way. A lot more independence is expected, and a lot more trust is required. You see, it’s a little like growing up- graduating and moving out and the rest. God’s still here, it’s just different, because we’ve grown up a little.

We miss this if we take a purely functional view of the Holy Spiri. We’ll explore this a little more next week, on Trinity Sunday, when we confront the truth that the Trinity is not about division of labor but, rather, the nature of relationship. For now, let’s just take the Holy Spirit as an example. We miss the point of Pentecost and the Church’s life after it, if we think about the Holy Spirit entirely in terms of what He does. We can start to think about the Holy Spirit as some obscure agent who accomplishes tasks. He’s kind of like the universal translator in Star Trek (you know, the device that let the crew of the Enterprise talk to Vulcans and Klingons and the like in more-or-less proper English). That’s kind of what he does on the first Pentecost. He’s also kind of like a prayer partner. Paul says he cries “Abba, Father” within us to bear witness that we are children of God. He’s also kind of like a counselor. That’s what the word Advocate (or Paraclete) from this morning’s Gospel means. He comforts us when we’re in pain (like a therapeutic counselor) and he intercedes for us in the court of heaven (like legal cousel).

But, like I said, if we get bogged down in tasks which we tend to attribute to the Holy Spirit, we miss the larger point. The important truth about Pentecost is that God is still with us, but not in the same way he used to be. The Father has given us a little more line. God, the Holy Spirit, still directs us, but we’ve grown up and we’ve got to get on with the Christian life as adults. We can come back home from college for Christmas and sit at the dinner table for a while, but we can’t linger forever anymore. We can, and must, come back to church week-by-week and feed on the goodness of God in the sacrament, but we don’t have the luxury of staying put anymore. We don’t have the luxury of hanging out in Galillee with Jesus all the time. We’ve got to get back into the mission field, beyond these walls, to get on with the work God has given us to do.

The blessed assurance of God’s continued presence, which is the Holy Spirit, rousted the apostles out of their fear and their complacency. It got them to grow up, to go out, and to spread the Gospel. That is the promise and the challenge of Pentecost for each of us and for the Church as a whole. We’ve got the freedom to do God’s work and the promise of his presence. When we’re dismissed from Church we’re dismissed with marching orders (pay attention at the end of the service). Let’s actually make a point of “going in peace to love and serve the Lord”, of “going forth in the name of Christ” to do his will, of “going out into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.” We may be assured that when we do, God will not abandon us, but he will give us the room to do his work ourselves, if we have the courage and conviction to try.

+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 a consequence of both having poor eyesight and being a rather clumsy person, I’ve never much enjoyed the dark. I dislike that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling around to find my glasses, perhaps tripping over a cat or the shoes I left in the wrong place or whatever. I’m lucky to live in the developed world in the twenty-first century where electric lighting is ubiquitous.

Several years ago I read Bill Bryson’s amusing, discursive history of domestic life titled At Home, and I learned that the world in general and houses in particular were much darker places prior to the last century. I’m afraid that if I had lived in those days I would have either broken the bank buying candles or else would have met an untimely end on some shadowy staircase.

Imagine, then, how surprising the imagery in this morning’s reading from Revelation would have been to people living in a literally much darker world:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day–and there shall be no night there … And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Light and dark imagery is seen throughout scripture, and I suspect it would have been more striking to these ancient people for whom the dark was a very dangerous reality. Bandits and predators struck in the dark. At nightfall you’d lock the gates to the city, and you’d probably stay in your house unless you were looking to get into some mischief.

And as dangerous as the literal darkness would have been, the metaphorical darkness in which the early church operated was a necessary evil. The church was being persecuted, and the best way to avoid death was to act like the bandits- move in secret, don’t get found out, worship God in locked rooms and catacombs.

How heartening, then, was this message of daylight! No longer would Christians need to scurry about in the dark, hiding from their torch-bearing persecutors. Finally, the true light which came to enlighten humanity could shine for all the world to see! The glory of God and of the Lamb would shine into every corner, bringing the righteous into a new and everlasting day and showing the designs of the wicked to be but vanity.

And now for the really interesting question, the question which makes the book of Revelation such a problematic text: Has this taken place? Are we, God’s faithful people, enjoying the light or is it an as-yet dim but growing hope.

As my sermons over the last few weeks implied, I think it’s both. On the one hand, the majority of Christians can now be pretty open about their religion. Since Constantine, the Church has enjoyed a privileged place in Western society, even if it no longer has the authority it once had in the day-to-day lives of adherents and the larger culture. The Church continues to grow in the global south, and societies which once saw the Faith as a threat are starting to loosen up on enforcing laws which discriminate against Christians. Things are by no means perfect, but they’re getting better, at least in some parts of the world.

But we’ve not yet reached that perfect state of light. Sin and death are still with us. The vision of Revelation is not just about Christians escaping outright persecution (though that was the prevailing issue when the book was written). It’s also about all things being made subject to the reign of Christ. We’ve not yet seen “the kings of the earth bringing their glory into [the city of God].” It may have seemed like that for about a millennium, between Constantine and the Reformation, but the story was and remains a great deal more complex than that.

So, as much progress as has been made over the last two-thousand years, there is still darkness. There are still corners into which the salvific light of God has not shone. The nations have not been fully healed. Not all have the name of the lamb inscribed on their foreheads and in their hearts.

So, the image of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is still a hope. It is a hope for which we’ve been given a foretaste in the Church and Her Sacraments, but all is not yet accomplished.

And so we pray and we work for the Kingdom, in the sure and certain hope that it is our birthright in Baptism. We don’t just wait around waiting for “pie in the sky when we die, by and by”, because the vision of the Holy City is a vision of the coming reality of this world, too. Rather, we light a candle here and there, causing the gloom to take flight, and one day, perhaps when we least expect it, the world will be so full of the light of Grace that the darkness will have no bastion remaining, and all things everywhere will be transformed into just what God intends for them.

+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.

“See, I am making all things new.” God’s proclamation from the throne struck me in this week’s reading as it had not done before, because I had always heard it in the older translations, which I usually prefer: “behold, I make all things new.” The two translations seem to indicate two quite different things- the former, newer translation implies a process of re-creation; God is making all things new. The latter, older translation seems to imply a more instant re-creation, at whatever point in the future the vision from Revelation becomes a reality.

The more modern, process oriented translation might strike us as being more compelling. It suggests the re-creation of the world, the making of all things new, might already be in process, and we might have a part to play in it. If such were the case, there would be great fodder in this little verse for an inspiring sermon about how we’re building the city of God now, so let’s all join in and help.

Unfortunately, the more modern translation which we heard read this morning, as is too often the case with the particular translation (the New Revised Standard Version) which we use and which has gained a great deal of currency in the Church, makes an interpretive leap here. The verb ποιῶ, or make, is found in the verse in question in the present active indicative, which could be understood as bearing either of two aspects (something we don’t have to worry about in English), either the linear or the punctiliar, that is, either the continuous or the complete. While older translations seem universally satisfied with the latter, the NRSV opts for the former, I suspect, though I cannot prove it, based on what last week I called an “idealist view” of Revelation.

This is an important translation issue, and not just from a Greek scholar’s perspective. It is important, because the older, and I believe more faithful, translation implies a reality which is hard for us relatively progressive Christians to hear- namely, that the Kingdom of God is not primarily some building project in which we’re involved as architects and workers. Rather, the Kingdom of God, at least as it is in its fullness after the general resurrection, is a project whose blueprint is already drafted in the mind of God and whose completion is God’s alone to effect.

This fact has, during certain periods of the Church’s history, been ignored. Most notably, as I suggested last week, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Industrialization had taken hold in Europe and the United States, the pioneers were moving farther west on our own continent, and relative peace and prosperity had been established. Theologians believed that the world was in the midst of a process leading to perfection through human ingenuity. Growing peace and prosperity, along with a particular interpretation of the work of Charles Darwin, had led many to believe that humanity was evolving into the Kingdom of God, that the establishment of God’s reign on this earth was within the grasp of men meaning to help build it. If God were making all things new, it was believed, now had come the time to accomplish God’s work for him.

Of course, all this came to a crashing halt with the eruption of the First World War. Humans had not lifted themselves from the reality of sin and death by their own cleverness. They had not grown to the point where they could accomplish all of God’s work for him after all.

There are, however, still some who hold the view of the nineteenth century liberal movement, who believe that if they just try hard enough, they’ll build the City of God. They have the best possible intentions, and no doubt many have accomplished great things for the sake of the Gospel. Even so, nothing we do or have within ourselves by virtue of being ourselves can possibly effect the glorious vision God has given us of the life of the world to come, and we need the humility to recognize our limitations in this regard. Hear again, the vision God gave to John of Patmos of the Kingdom at its completion:

I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.”

We are no doubt called to make the world a better place, but if we think our own efforts can eliminate all our ills, we are sadly mistaken.

This might at first sound discouraging, but it is, in the final analysis, very good news indeed. It means that eternal life in the presence of God is not some metaphor for peaceful human society built by human ingenuity, but is exactly what it sounds like: eternal life with God. It’s good news because it means that it’s not all on us to make it a reality. God makes all things new. He’s not in some process of helping humanity perfect itself and build its own Kingdom; he will on the last day raise us from the dead and he will come down to dwell with us into eternity. This takes a lot of the pressure off. It does not, of course, exempt us from living a Christian life and loving our neighbors in word and deed; but it does mean that our own eternal happiness is not ours to effect, but God’s to give as his greatest gift. We need only to be humble enough to recognize that it is God who gives us the victory and not we ourselves, and to offer Him the only thing we can, which is genuine thanks.

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