The Third Sunday After Easter (April 21, 2024)

“Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world” (CS Lewis). To be human is to be a pilgrim. Despite all of our various disagreements, this seems to be a commonly accepted way of speaking about being human that transcends cultures, time periods, political thought, and philosophical presuppositions. All our great stories involve journeys, either literal or metaphorical. One of the foundational acts of devotion in Islam is to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In Christianity, it’s common for believers to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land or to other holy sites, like the tombs of great saints. We often talk about our lives as a journey. There is really no disagreement about this; we are pilgrims on a journey through this life. The disagreement among humans arises when we ask what we’re journeying towards. And our propers today ask us to consider where this journey of life takes us. But before we go there, it might be helpful to contemplate what the world tells us about this life of pilgrimage so that we can juxtapose it against what Jesus says.

It’s not that most reject that there is a God or some higher power; it’s that they reject the claims a higher power may make on them. You can see this in our culture with the rise of the Nones. While it seems to have reached a plateau in the last year, over the past two decades, there’s been a sharp increase in what is called the Nones. These are people who identify as religiously unaffiliated. It’s not that they’re atheists; they’re just “nothing in particular.” At this moment, they make up almost 30% of Americans. For many, divinity is an ideal that’s always unreachable: they don’t think they’ll find it in church or “organized religion” so they often go it alone. (What I always say to someone who thinks organized religion is harmful is that they should check out the kind of harm disorganized religion does). But I think for most people, there seems to be this hard and fast barrier between the divine and our human reality; they may feel that the divine exists as some sort of ideal, but that it’s not really attainable because reality always pulls us away from reaching that perfection. And in the face of that frustration, there are a host of different responses, all of which are damaging. Some look at that gap and decide to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and just try to do their best; this is what you find in the Greco-Roman myths about great heroes: despite the oracle, Oedipus tries to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother; Icarus tries to fly higher than he should because he doesn’t believe he can be brought down. I think in our culture, you see this most obviously in sports: players who want to be the greatest are willing to sacrifice not only their bodies, but in some cases even their families in order to achieve a kind of mythical immortality. But they will die, their records will go away and even one day be forgotten. Another way to respond to the frustration we experience by the perceived disconnect of reality and divinity is to despair or give into angsty at the absurdity of life. This is the approach of the existentialist philosophers: if God either doesn’t exist or is so hidden, than life should just be whatever you want it to be. This pilgrimage is whatever you want to make it. The Canadian Anglican theologian Robert Crouse, analyzing the Greco-Roman approach says “heroic aspiration is heroic hubris, and is destined for defeat. That is the worm at the heart of pagan spirituality: the endless cycles of aspiration and despair.” If it’s true, as the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, that God “has put eternity into man’s mind” (3:11), then when we cannot find it, it ends in frustration and disintegration.

And this is the fundamental difference between Christianity and paganism. The pagan spirituality is characterized by constant disappointment because the divine is always just out of reach: the gods build you up and then knock you down right before you get there. But in Christianity, God doesn’t stand far off. When the Psalmist asks, in Psalm 10, “Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?”, God doesn’t remain silent. God comes near to us in the Incarnation when he takes on flesh like our flesh and a soul like our souls not only to stand in solidarity with us, but to show us the way back to God. And so we shouldn’t be surprised when Jesus speaks of himself in terms of pilgrimage: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But this doesn’t mean the Christian pilgrimage is easy. In our reading from St. John this morning, Jesus has to explain to the disciples that this life is not going to be smooth sailing: “A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.” The disciples can’t understand what he means and so Jesus has to explain to them that in this life, they will sill weep and lament while the world rejoices. It will seem like evil is winning. Indeed, this is probably why John wrote the Book of Revelation: to explain to the Faithful what was really going on behind the machinations of our word. Because at the heart of our faith is the promise of hope, the confident boast that one day our “sorrow shall be turned into joy.” And so Jesus employs a vivid metaphor of a woman in labor. What great pain childbirth is. In fact, it’s a reminder of our exile from the Garden. But even that great pain melts away when the child is delivered because of the great joy. So our pilgrimage takes place in the context of an exile: we have been thrust out of Eden and we live in this world where death seems to reign supreme, where the wicked prosper and justice seems to be one of those ideals that is never fully realized. But for Jesus, these powers don’t have the last word: “ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.” Hope will not disappoint us because our hope isn’t in our aspirations like it was for the pagans; our hope is in him who has proven himself to be ever trustworthy.

If we embrace the Christian perspective of pilgrimage that differs so greatly from the world’s, then we must understand that this comes with a new way of living and it’s not going to always fit in with how the world thinks we should live. This is why Peter says “I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims.” We don’t belong to the order of this world; we are citizens of heaven. And so our behavior needs to match this. For Peter, the first characteristic of pilgrim behavior is to abstain from the fleshly lusts: those lusts that won’t the wrong things, at the wrong times, in the wrong ways. These lusts are the world’s way of stopping us from making our heavenly pilgrimage and we know that our enemy prowls like a roaring lion seeking those he may devour. But the second characteristic of Christian pilgrimage is that it makes the pilgrim a living testimony that brings others to God. “Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.” Christian pilgrimage is never done in a vacuum, it’s always done in relationship with others. And so rejecting our passions is necessary not only for the benefit of our own souls but as an act of witness to God. In this way, our pilgrims make us his servants. And so today, we should resolve with St. Augustine: “I shall not turn aside until I reach that place of peace, Jerusalem, my dearest mother, where my first-fruits are already, whence comes my certitude; I shall not turn aside ‘till Thou, my God, my Mercy, shalt gather in all that I am, from this dispersion and deformity, and confirm it and confirm it in eternity.”

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.