Sermons

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

Many of you know that Annie and I have four cats: Genevieve, Hildegard, Jerome, and Alban. Three of the four have been acquired since we came to Findlay six years ago- Jerome wandered up to the back door of the rectory and just stuck around; we found Hildegard seemingly near death in a ditch while we were taking a drive in Putnam county and I pulled over to grab her and take her to the veterinary hospital, assuming they’d have to euthanize her and delighted that she pulled through; and we Alban famously adopted Alban after our parish’s service day at the Humane Society two years ago. Genevieve is the old lady of the house, whom not only preceded our moving here to Findlay but actually preceded our marriage by four years. That being the case, I was more or less the only human she interacted with consistently for the first third of her life, and she’s developed a strong attachment to me.

This becomes obvious whenever I spend any amount of time away. I was at our annual clergy conference in Geneva-on-the-Lake earlier this week, just two nights out of town, and ever since she’s been pretty much on top of me. It can make it hard to read or do anything on the computer because she’s not satisfied just to sit on my lap; she wants to be right up in my face. Some of you know I’ll be away for the whole month of July this summer, first at the Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention in Baltimore and then as the chaplain for the Merchant Marine academy’s training voyage in the North Atlantic. I can only imagine how clingy this cat is going to be when I finally return.

You’ve all hear the idiom “herding cats”, meaning trying to control an unruly group of people or a chaotic system. This, presumably, is meant to contrast with herding sheep, who are reckoned more docile and obedient. Now, I know it is technically true that sheep tend to be compliant; they are fully domesticated whereas housecats are reckoned only half-domesticated, which is to say that they’re still half wild. My experience, though, is that our cats know our voices and they follow, just like a sheep is meant to do, and just like the sheep of Christ’s fold, whom Jesus mentions in today’s Gospel are meant to do.

I will take this one step further. I wonder if most of us most of the time are worse off than either the sheep or the housecats. We are a lot more clever, if not any wiser, than the innocent creatures of the earth, which means we can convince ourselves we have no need to follow the voice of Jesus, our shepherd. Jesus’ task is harder than herding sheep or herding cats, because we human beings are just a little too smart and a little too wild to be fully- or even seemingly half-domesticated sometimes.

The most important thing about seminary–as great and necessary as all the classes in scripture and theology and church history were–was the expectation that we all attended chapel three times a day every day for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Eucharist. In the center of campus was the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and above the altar, flanked by statues of Old Testament Patriarchs and New Testament Apostles, in the very center was a ststue of Christ the Good Shepherd, holding a lamb which clearly wanted to be as close to Christ as it could get. It was getting right up in his face, just like my cat does when I’ve been gone for too long. And that, I think was what we were meant to be doing in this thrice daily retreat to the chapel–getting as close to Jesus as we could do, because even if we wandered from time to time, we knew his voice and we loved him and in the deepest part of our hearts we simply wanted to be with him, even if we didn’t always acknowledge that.

What if we acknowledged this truth about ourselves, our need to be held in the arms of Jesus simply to be close to him, more often than we do? What if our heart’s desire was simply to rest in his arms more often, to look into his face more often, to find that in following him he simply bids us rest in his presence? That, I think, is why we come to this place week in and week out, whether we know it or not. That, I think, is why in the midst of all the busyness of life, we must take time daily for prayer. We will hear his voice. We will see his face. He will hold us close to his sacred heart. We need only let him lead us. We need only, sometimes, to let him carry us beside still waters to refresh our souls.

+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 book of Revelation has, since before the establishment of the New Testament Canon been among the most controversial inclusions in the bible, largely I think because it is so obscure, its imagery so prone to misinterpretation, that there is always a danger that wild theories might pop up from those not especially careful about poring through the treasure-house of historic interpretations by the great theologians of the church. Thus, even Cranmer, who crafted our first prayerbook in the mid-16th Century, in his lectionary for daily bible readings included everything (even the more dull genealogies and regulations in the Old Testament) with the exception of large passages from this book. Indeed, from medieval apocalyptic cults to the nineteenth century dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby still popular among fundamebntalist protestants (which I’ve mentioned from this pulpit before) to wildly irresponsible popular literature like The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series of novels, there has been no shortage of “bad takes” on what this book means.

I think this is because Revelation is in a sort of code language; it uses symbols to stand in for figures and events from the first century which were too politically dangerous to make explicit. There is a great deal about the anti-Christ and the number “666” and the beast from the sea and so forth which first-century Christians would have been able to understand as speaking about the Roman Empire and its leaders, particularly the Emperor Nero who was violently persecuting them, but which to pagan Romans would have just seemed like strange fever dream kinda stuff. So, that said, let’s look at the eery symbols in this morning’s reading. What might they stand for in John’s peculiar symbolic language?

First, the four beasts. In the previous chapter, John had described these living creatures in some detail. One was a lion, one an ox, one an eagle, and one a man. Traditionally, these have been seen as symbols of the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – and their writers. The problem with this interpretation is that there were not four canonical Gospels when revelation was written. In fact, there was at the time no New Testament Canon – no list of what books were in and out of the bible as we have received it today. I want to suggest, then, that the identification of the creatures and the evangelists is of later origin. It is certainly a part of the Church’s Tradition and worthy of consideration and appreciation, but it is not the only valid way of viewing the symbol.

Here is my interpretation of the symbolic nature of the beasts. It is based on centuries worth biblical scholarship, not just my own opinion, and I find it the most compelling explanation, but it is just one of many interpretations. The lion represents political authority. The lion had served as a symbol for the tribe of Judah throughout the Ancient Near East and was meant to highlight that tribe’s power, as it ruled in Jerusalem. Jesus himself is referred to the “Lion of Judah” in Revelation in relation to his status as King of Kings. We find lions in medieval heraldry for much the same reason.

The ox symbolizes cultural and religious authority. Oxen were important both to agriculture in the Ancient Near East (they plowed the land) and to the cult of the temple (they were sacrificed in religious rites). For the average Israelite, the political power had a great influence on life in the form of law and taxes, and the authority du jour was an occasionally beneficent (as in the case of the Persians) and often malevolent (in the case of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans) determinant of wellbeing. The religious power was just as important. They levied their own taxes, ruled on issues of orthodoxy, and promised either redemption or condemnation based on the quality of sacrifices made at the temple. It’s notable that the chief priest and his advisers were as instrumental as Herod and Pilate in Jesus’ execution.

Then we have the eagle and the man, which I believe to be symbols respectively of human potential and the reality of human frailty. We try and sometimes succeed in accomplishing great things on our own steam. But the greatest of us are eventually brought low, by death if by nothing else.

So we’ve got the two greatest sorts of authority humanity experiences on the macro level (political and religious authority) and the two prevailing aspects of the human experience on the micro level (potential and limitedness).

Then we have twenty-four elders. Again, we are told in the preceding chapter that they are clothed in white (a symbol of purity) and that they are seated on thrones (a symbol of rule). These represent the Church as a whole. All have been made clean in Baptism and all have been made kings and priests, as the apostle tells us. Perhaps there are twenty-four of them as a symbol of the unity of and equality between Jews and Gentiles in the Church. There were twelve tribes of Israel, and the inclusion of non-Israelites doubled the size church (though eventually there were far more Gentiles than Jews in the Church as the Good News spread swiftly throughout the known world).

Finally, we see the Lamb standing as though it had been slain. This is a lot easier to interpret. Revelation is, as I said earlier, rarely explicit, but this image is hard for a Christian to miss. The lamb is Jesus himself, who was slain but now stands.

And now, at last, we get to the point. The lamb is in the center of the scene and the beasts and the elders bow down and worship, burning incense which is described as being “the prayers of the saints.” The lamb, Christ Jesus, is the only one deemed worthy to open the scroll which holds within it the things to come. Earthly kings cannot do it, nor can some high priest. No human effort can change the course of things, neither can human frailty cause the divine plan to fail. Even the Church, that gift from God which is the Body of Christ here on earth, cannot determine the course of human history. Only Jesus can, and all any of us can do is acknowledge his supremacy.

This is very good news, indeed! There are scary and disappointing things in the world right now, as there always have been. Who knows what on earth Russia’s endgame is? The experience of pandemic has laid bare some of the pernicious problems we have in this country, both culturally and institutionally. We’re ever on the precipice of climate catastrophe. Things seem awfully bleak. But in terms of eternity, we can have hope.

Humanity’s inherent goodness and humanity’s inclination toward wickedness have made micro-loans to peasants and poisoned their water sources. Humanity has educated girls in Afghanistan and now permitted their progress to be rolled back. We’ve set up charity clinics and we’ve made it even harder for the poorest among us to receive medical care. But in terms of eternity, we can have hope.

We cannot use our hope for justice in eternity as an excuse for the evil we do and the evil which is done on our behalf now. But we can give thanks that all the powers of this world have got nothing on Jesus Christ. We can give thanks that while we will be called to account for our actions in this life, the fate of our world is in the hands of the all-merciful. We can give thanks that all things will be subjected to the rule of him who is the first and the last and the living one, who will, on that glorious day, put all things to rights for us and for those whom we have wronged. Thanks be to God who gives us and our neighbors and our enemies and the stranger the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

+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.

We get the story of our risen Lord appearing to St. Thomas and the apostle’s doubt on this Sunday every year, and I’ve noted before that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas.

This year I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- viz., a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to make a normative judgment about it. This goes both ways, you might say. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. I don’t think I’ve ever been of that opinion. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their own beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions (it’s the philosophy major in me, I guess) and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about some article of faith. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt.

What if, however, we didn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness (or happiness to use the more literal translation of the Greek Μακάριος) of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by that small seed of faith, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel.

Even so must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honestly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

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