Our Monday eucharistic gatherings are a wonderful time to celebrate the lives of faithful followers of Jesus throughout the history of the Church. The Episcopal Church has provided us a useful resource in its publication, Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (2010, Church Pension Fund). There are many more lives remembered and stories told in this book than in Lesser Feasts and Fasts. In fact, if there's a problem with Holy Women, Holy Men, it is that this is a collection of saints with a small "s": followers of Jesus whose lives provide us examples of holy living, but who aren't necessarily famous. Day after day, with no distinctions in page layout, we come upon the ancient apostles and Fathers of the Church and the newly recognized; the major and the minor; even in some cases, people who hated each other, mistrusted, and in a couple of regrettable cases, killed each other, for the sake of their vision of the claims of Christ. Some days, there are several saints designated. The calendar in the front of the book, on pages 7 - 21, gives us information about who is newly included, and which saints' commemorations are major feasts of the Church.
The total effect is, to my mind, a little chaotic. But it helps us see that in every case, saints are saints because of the Grace of God. In every life, it is about giving glory to God. In every life, sainthood is not about perfection but about being God's beloved instrument to accomplish God's purposes.
Today, August 29, we recognized John Bunyan. Bunyan is not universally beloved of Anglo-catholics or theological liberals. Several sets of eyebrows were raised this morning when I said we would be giving thanks for Bunyan's life and witness. Apparently, a previous Dean of the Cathedral preached an infamously long sermon series based on Pilgrim's Progress. Several people whose spiritual journeys had led to the Episcopal Church via the Baptists said Pilgrim's Progress represented a perspective that they had wanted to leave behind.
John Bunyan was born in 1628, 17 years after the King James Version of the Bible was published, and about a century after the first printed copy of the Bible had appeared in English. His parents were poor. His father was a brazier. It is likely that he learned to read by reading the Bible. He was a soldier in the English Civil War. He married, and his wife introduced him to two influential books in a newly-developing genre of devotional books in the English language: Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent and Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly.
In 1653 he was re-baptized into the Baptist Church. (In Holland, in a congregation of English-speaking Puritans, in 1609, John Smyth baptized himself and another member of his church, and the Baptist Church was born. Baptist congregations independent of the Church of England sprang up in England during the 17th century.) His gifts as a preacher became apparent. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Baptists and other independent groups were no longer permitted to meet. All worship was to be according to the Church of England. John Bunyan was arrested while preaching in 1660, and spent a dozen years in prison. While there, he wrote the book that made him famous, the long allegory called Pilgrim's Progress.
I first learned of Pilgrim's Progress through the eyes of the March girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a novel I probably read twenty times when I was a girl, and then read again aloud to my children. I remember young Jo, the second-eldest sister of the four sisters, the would-be playwright and novelist, describing herself as being in "the Slough of Despond." I wanted to read Pilgrim's Progress because of the high place the allegory had in the lives of the Little Women:
Mrs March [said]...in her cheery voice, "Do you remember how you used to play Pligrims Progress when you were little things? Nothing delighted you more than to have me tie my ice bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks and rolls of paper, and let you travel through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City." "What fun it was, especially going by the lions, fighting Apollyon, and passing through the valley where the hob-goblins were," said Jo.
"I liked the place where the bundles fell off and tumbled downstairs," said Meg.
"I don't remember much about it, except that i was afraid of the cellar and the dark entry, and always liked the cake and milk we had up at the top. If I wasn't too old for such things, I'd rather like to play it over again," said Amy, who began to talk of renouncing childish things at the mature age of twelve.
"We never are too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the time in one way or another. Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City. Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before Father comes home."
"Really, Mother? Where are our bundles?" asked Amy, who was a very literal young lady.
"Each of you told what your burden was just now, except Beth. I rather think she hasn't got any," said her mother.
"Yes, I have. Mine is dishes and dusters, and envying girls with nice pianos, and being afraid of people."
Beth's bundle was such a funny one that everybody wanted to laugh, but nobody did, for it would have hurt her feelings very much.
"Let us do it," said Meg thoughtfully, "It is only another name for trying to be good, and the story may help us, for though we do want to be good, it's hard work and we forget, and don't do our best."I'm pretty sure that John Bunyan would not have approved of the moral that Meg drew from the Christian Pilgrim and his journey. I think he would have said it is much more about holding to one's beliefs in Jesus as Savior, despite all the challenges and temptations we meet in life. I think many of us this morning, however, might have been more comfortable with the more generalized, "transcendentalized" hermeneutic of Louisa May Alcott as articulated by the March family.
A peek inside of Bunyan's book reminds me why some of my contemporaries would like to leave it behind. It is full, at every turn, of parenthetical proof texts from the Bible. It starts from a point of fear of hell, damnation, and the wrath of God. The Pilgrim, suffering, asks, "What must I do to be saved?" He meets a guide, Evangelist, who asks him about his troubles, and Pilgrim replies: "Sir I perceive by the book in my hand, that I am condemned to die, and after that to come to judgement; and I find that I am not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second." The Pilgrim is urged to "flee from the wrath to come." His neighbors and friends and family dissuade him from undertaking the journey.
Interestingly, the Pilgrim is called Christian, not at the end of the journey, nor even from the time when he is released from his burdens, but from the moment he resolves to set out. I think many on the fundamentalist side of the Christian faith fail to recognize that. They seek a "Get out of Hell Free" card; they see "getting saved" as the finish line of a race, rather than the beginning of a journey.
That really is my point in bringing up John Bunyan and his very influential allegory. In the great tradition of Dante Alighieri, Bunyan's allegory plays on the metaphor of journey. Early Christians called their life in the community of the Risen Christ "the Way." There we were this morning, in the company of others on the Way, on the Christian journey. And we were gathered together to share a meal, to strengthen and sustain us.
We were giving thanks for the life and witness of John Bunyan, creator of Pilgrim's Progress. We were doing so in the context of the Great Thanksgiving, in which we bless bread and wine, and by God's Spirit, they become the Body and Blood of Christ, sustenance for our bodies and souls for the Great Journey we take in response to God's call. Many of the elements of Bunyan's theology may not be to our taste. Many of us in our lives have had Bunyanesque language crammed down our fearful throats. But all of us there could recognize that Bunyan was on to something about the importance of our lives being a journey to God. We might, rather, prefer the way a colleague of mine, an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek, expresses the journey: "We come from Love, we return to Love, and Love is all around."
Bread and Journey: Two great metaphors to which Christians come again and again as we seek to articulate our experience of knowing and being known by God; of loving and being loved by God.
So the title of this blog is "Waybread." JRR Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, writes of a light and tasty bread that the Elves of Lorien give to the Company of travelers who join the Hobbit, Frodo on his journey. "We call it lembas or waybread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men," they say.
I hope that this blog will be a place for us to reflect on the joys and challenges of the Christian journey; and on the blessing of times of refreshment when we, the Body of Christ gathered, share the Body of Christ in the Bread broken and shared. Then, nourished and strengthened, we take our next steps on the Journey.
