Chaplain to the Caboose: Sermons of Faith, Hope & Love

By David Bynum

In Chaplain to the Caboose: Sermons of Faith, Hope, and Love, David Bynum plumbs the depths of his Christian faith through the lenses of his keen intellect and his fragile humanity. Most of the sermons in this collection were delivered in the late 1970s at the Church of the Advent, an Anglo-Catholic church on Bostons Beacon Hill, where David Bynum was first a curate and then Acting Rector. The first half of the collection roughly follows the church year, and the remaining sermons address various Scripture passages and Christian themes. Although sermons are primarily an oral genre, these sermons translate well into written form.

This collection of sermons is intended for all who struggle spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually with their faith and how they live their lives, as did the author, with the hope that in sharing our perceptions, we may help each other to arrive at some partial, tentative answers. Enough truth for now. Enough truth to live by.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475971866

David Bynum

David Bynum was born on February 26, 1937 in Coffeyville, Kansas. He was ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church in 1971 and served on the staffs of the Church of the Advent, Boston, and Trinity Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma. David Bynum died in Tulsa on October 16, 1990.

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CHANGES

As Alfred North Whitehead put it, life is a flux, a process in which the past flows into the present, which flows into the future, which in turn, becomes a past. We would like to think that the movement between these phases of our lives would go smoothly—a gentle easing from one to the next. But life has a way of bringing what T. S. Eliot might call its Aprils, its cruelest months. It has a way of turning an unexpected corner, a way of making all that gave stability to our lives crumble before our eyes.

At one time, we may have thought, as Muhammad Ali would say, that we were the greatest. But then we discovered that we were not. We may have thought that we would spend the rest of our lives in a happy relationship we considered a nearly perfect marriage. But then we were faced with the brutal reality of divorce. We may have been thankful that as the years had rolled by and we had become old, we had at least one son or daughter who would love us and look after us. But then one day, we learned that he or she had a terminal illness, and that in six months to a year, they would be dead and we would be alone.

Our lives have their Aprils, their cruelest months. They have a way of turning an unexpected corner. At first, we try to block it out, to deny that anything has happened, to pretend that the old configurations are still in place and still make sense. But to do so is only to become part of the emotional and spiritual walking wounded of this world. Life is a flux, and our task is to find something true and lasting in the midst of it all—to find some life-line that weaves its way through the twisting and turning that time and circumstance bring—to find through it all some spiritual base that will give cohesion and depth and meaning to our lives.

One of the most poignant and moving accounts of people struggling with their Aprils, their cruelest months, is to be found in the history of ancient Israel. The Israelites thought they were the greatest. The Israelites were God’s chosen people. They were selected for a special relationship with God, a relationship through which God would reveal himself to the world. Quite naturally, the earliest expectations of the Israelites were that this would bring them great prosperity and power, for they, after all, were to be given a promised land, a land of milk and honey.

But the land of milk and honey is a rather strange way to describe ancient Israel, and its history is anything but a story of success. The promised land turned out to be a small, not terribly prosperous land, wedged in between much more powerful nations. In spite of the rhetoric of the Old Testament, for a short time Israel managed to come up roughly to the level of its neighbors, but because of internal dissensions, it then split into two kingdoms, both of which were finally destroyed, and great portions of the remaining populations were carried off into exile.

From the standpoint of human expectations, the history of Israel was a colossal failure. And yet, the truth is that it was only through this series of painful human experiences that the ancient Hebrews could finally come to grasp the true meaning of their relationship with God and the true nature of the promise made to them.

To do that, the Israelites had to open themselves to seeing things in ways they were not accustomed to seeing. The ancient Hebrews, for example, had such a strong identification of themselves as part of their nation, and such a sense of their God being their God, that it was only during the difficult period of the exile that they were able to learn that God had cared for them not merely as parts of the corporate state of Israel, but also as individuals in exile—and that he cared, moreover, even for those who held them in exile. The destruction of Israel, then, whatever hardships it imposed, also set the Hebrews free—free from the political fetters that had bound them in their religious faith. Through pain and suffering, they were able to see beyond their human expectations to the new spiritual depths of God’s expectations.

As it was with the old Israel, so it was also with the new. The promised Messiah had to die as a failure in the eyes of this world in order to reveal to us the blindness of our spiritual vision. As St. Paul put it, in the cross, God rendered foolish the wisdom of this world.

What I am saying is that the retention of some spiritual meaning from the flux of our lives, that our basis for hope, lies not in the events themselves, but in how we respond to those events. We must learn to see in ways we are not accustomed to seeing. We may have failed to reach the lofty heights of our grandiose dreams for our lives. We may have learned that we are not the greatest. But when reality has destroyed our childish fantasies, we have a chance, if we have the courage, to learn who we really are—a chance to see what is good and true and even rich within us. A divorce is a painful, truly shattering experience. But if we have the courage to come to terms with what really happened, we may free ourselves from our old, superficial, insensitive ways of relating to other people. We may learn something of the depths of human love. We may learn what it really means to make a commitment to a common life with another human being. We may learn something of what the sacrament of marriage is all about.

The death of a child or a parent, the death of a spouse or even a friend, may seem, for the moment, to bring to an end all the happiness in our lives. And yet, it is sometimes only after someone is gone that we really come to know them and understand what they meant to us. Our knowledge and love of someone can grow enormously, even in our memories. Sometimes it is only in the face of death, sometimes only when we face our own death, that we are able to grasp the sanctity of human life.

All this is not to say that events like disappointment, divorce, or death are good and to be welcomed. No one would be so callous or foolish as to say that. The human misery is still there; it is not covered over; it is not changed. The risen Christ, as the disciple Thomas so graphically discovered, still had the wounds in his hands and in his side. God does not redeem our lives by erasing that which is bad. He redeems them by helping us to see through the pain and suffering, and even the evil, what it means to love and to do good and to live in the spirit of God.

We see, as St. Paul put it, through a glass darkly. Yet, it is not a flat glass into which we look, but a prism, and when the prism turns, the image changes. Our lives have their Aprils, their cruelest months, and when some new unexpected event comes crashing in upon us, the prism moves. The images change, and we know that they will never be the same again. It is at once both terrifying and magnificent.

Life, by its very nature, is for every human being a journey through a sequence of events, some predictable, some unpredictable—a journey through the changing images of the prism. There is a sense in which we all take the same journey, and a sense in which we all take separate journeys. We all have loves and hates, dreams and disappointments, but for each of us those are something particular, something unique. It was a certain dream on which we soared; a certain set of eyes filled with anger and hatred; a certain flesh pressed close to ours. We are like a thousand rivers flowing across the land, crossing and re-crossing each other at innumerable points, each filled with the same mysterious water, and yet each flowing a course different from all others. To understand the flow of our own river is our human occupation. To understand the flow of other rivers as well is our religious occupation. To understand the flow of all rivers is to dwell in the mystery of God.

MICHAELMAS: THE FEAST OF

ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS

On the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels we commemorate beings who occupy a venerable position in both Scripture and tradition. The Bible, in fact, contains nearly three hundred different references to angels. Cherubim guard the gate of the Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve. In Exodus, God appoints an angel to guard the camp of his people and bring them to the promised land. In Isaiah and Job, they form the heavenly court and sing praises to God. And Jesus is surrounded by angels at almost every important point in his life. They announce his incarnation and his birth; they minister to him in the desert; and they are the first to proclaim that he has risen from the dead.

And although little attention was given to angels during the first few centuries of the church, angelology came in time to claim the attention of some of the finest minds in Christendom: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus among them. It was Dionysius, in his treatise on Celestial Hierarchies, who combined Scripture and tradition and set their number of different orders at nine and arranged them in hierarchical groups of three.

But in spite of all that, the Feast of Michaelmas, while extremely festive, is also an occasion that raises doubts about some aspects of Christian belief in the minds of all thinking Christians. Do angels exist? Are they merely fantasies of overly romantic, devout Christians who accept their existence because of Scripture and tradition, but, if they are honest, really have some nagging doubts? Most people, particularly those who are not practicing Christians, and many who are, think that the belief in angels is ridiculous.

The truth is that there are few of us today who give any serious thought to angels. Most of us, I suspect, only have a rather fuzzy idea of what they are supposed to be, even if they do exist. Michaelmas is a popular feast day more because of when it occurs than because of any serious devotion to angels.

Our skepticism about and lack of interest in angels has some rational basis. We tend to take seriously beings about whom we know something. We know almost nothing about angels. Although Scripture tells us they are such a great host that they are numberless, we are given the names of only four: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. And what little we know about them is only episodic. They appear at certain times and do certain things. But for none of them do we have any biographies. They seem, in fact, to have no histories. They tend, therefore, to seem more like literary creations than actual beings.

Scripture and tradition tell us that angels are created above men and below God, that they are something between God and man. They are a different order of creation than human beings. But that means they are not objects around which we can pattern our lives. How can we strive to be like beings about whom we know almost nothing and who are said to be a different order of creation? We can strive to be like God only because of the incarnation. God became one of us and showed us by his example what he was like and what he wanted us to become. But no angel has ever become incarnate—at least not that we know of. Therefore, they stand somewhere outside the parameters of our spiritual discipline.

What, then, are we to say about angels? Can any sense be made of the concept of angels? Perhaps the way to approach an answer to that question is to ask a more basic question: Does it really matter whether or not angels exist? In any rational understanding of life, both earthly and heavenly, physical and spiritual, what function do they perform?

Personally, I suspect that it does not really matter whether angels exist. But the concept of angels points to several very important aspects of our spiritual life. First, it points to God’s concern for us. One of the primary functions of angels is to be guardians. According to tradition, specific angels are assigned the task of guarding over each one of us. It is a sentiment lovingly and warmly, albeit romantically and sentimentally, expressed in the lines from Humperdinck’s opera, Hansel and Gretel.

When at night I go to sleep,

Fourteen angels watch do keep,

Two my head are guarding,

Two my feet are guiding,

Two are on my right hand,

Two are on my left hand,

Two who warmly cover,

Two who o’er me hover,

Two to whom ’tis given

To guide my steps to Heaven.

Whether or not such an angelic coterie exists, the concept expresses the fact that God cares for each one of us, and by some means, expresses that care. Perhaps the problem here is that as finite human beings, we cannot imagine one being capable of such intense concern on an individual basis for such a multitude of people, so we think that, as the Great Chairman of the Board up yonder, he must have delegated such authority to appropriate spiritual beings. They could not perform that function without being something higher than us in the spiritual hierarchy, and yet they could not be equal with God without being gods themselves. Hence, angels as middle-management in terms of spiritual