Are you a music fan? A classical music fan? I am. I love the great symphonies – Beethoven’s Fifth, his Ninth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Dvorak’s From the New World, and many others – they just bowl me over. I can sit down in a concert venue and no matter what emotional state I may be in, a good symphony or concerto can overcome it – cynicism, depression, grumpiness, whatever my condition may be it will be conquered by the music and I will be uplifted. It doesn’t even have to be live in a concert hall. Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit out of sorts, I’ll put on a CD or an MP3 and just let the music fill me. At its best, music literally lifts me up and sets me dancing. In fact, in the proper setting, even badly played band music can have that effect.

When our family moved from Nevada to Kansas in 1993, my wife Evelyn was unable to accompany the children and me. We had been unable to sell our home and she was unable to transfer her job for several more months. So she stayed in Las Vegas while in August the kids and I moved into an A-Frame farmhouse on 40 acres just outside the town of Bucyrus, Kansas. The kids enrolled in Circle Grove Elementary School and our son Patrick decided he wanted to learn to play a musical instrument in the band. So he started instruction on the clarinet. Three weeks into the semester, the Fifth Grade Band had its first concert. Believe me that I am being inordinately charitable when I describe it as abysmal – it was SO bad!

Several weeks later Evelyn was able to join us for a few days at Thanksgiving and it just happened that the band was giving its second concert, a holiday offering, while she was with us. Well . . . to be honest, once again, with still only three months of instruction, the band was terrible. But they were so much better, by orders of magnitude better, than they had been at the end of September that I just couldn’t shut up about how good they were. Evelyn looked at me like I had lost my mind; four months in Kansas had clearly unhinged me! But I just had to get up and run down to the stage to tell the band instructor what a marvelous job she had done! I was simply dancing with excited praise for what she had accomplished.

This is precisely what is happening in John’s First Letter. He is so excited about the love of God, so effusive that words just keep flowing across his page: I can see him sitting with his stylus scribbling away, trying to find new ways to write about this wonderful new Christian faith. The way he repeats things, the way his ideas tumble over one another, you can tell he’s just bubbling over with enthusiasm and eagerness.

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.[1]

In fact, John’s vision of the Christian faith is just like my experience of listening to music. The way my mood, whatever it may be, is overcome by the music is the way John envisions the world being conquered by the faith of Jesus Christ. Jesus calls us to love our God and our neighbor in such a way that the world can’t help but be won over. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”[2] And John’s epistle assures us that this call is not burdensome.

It may not be burdensome . . . but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take some effort, does it?

There is a story of a young sailor on a small ship sailing through the night. The captain instructed him to take the helm while the captain went below for a brief nap. “All you need to do,” explained the captain, “is follow the North Star,” which he carefully pointed out to the sailor. “Do you think you can do it?”?“Yes, sir!” the sailor replied. “You can count on me” as he took the wheel and the captain disappeared below.

Several hours later the captain woke from his nap and came up on deck. One look at the sky he knew immediately that the ship was off course. “Sailor,” he said. “What have you been doing? Why aren’t we headed toward the North Star?”
“Oh, sir!” said the sailor. “We passed that an hour ago!”

Keeping one’s eye on the Pole Star and staying on a heading for it . . . it’s not burdensome, but it takes effort. The sailor must steer the rudder and trim the sail to compensate for ocean currents and the wild wind which, as Jesus reminded us, “blows where it chooses, [we] hear the sound of it, but [we] not know where it comes from or where it goes.”[3]

I’ve heard, as I’m sure you have heard, several sermons in which the preacher has used sailing as a metaphor for the Christian life (and I’m about to do the same), but I sometimes wonder whether some of those preachers have ever actually been on a sailboat! They often suggest that in our sail through life we have to “surrender control . . .The Holy Spirit calls the shots, not us . . . [so] you have to take yourself out of the driver’s seat.”[4] I know what those preachers are trying to say, but that’s a really terrible use of that metaphor because letting go of the rudder and losing control of the sail is the last thing you want to in a boat! You’ll go nowhere fast if you do that, because not only does the wind blow where it will, there are the currents and tides of the water acting on your boat.

“A strong current can be friend or foe, helping to carry you where you want to go or rapidly carrying you off course.”[5] In fact, water currents always cause a boat to drift off course: “As a vessel moves through the water, it moves ‘off course’ in the direction of and at the speed of currents in the water.”[6] You must adjust your sails and steer with your rudder to stay on the course set by reference to the Pole Star, or the currents will take you some place else.

In theology there is a concept called adiaphora. It means “things indifferent” and refers to matters which are debatable or spiritually neutral. There are essentials of the Christian faith such as the deity of Christ, Jesus’ physical resurrection, the centrality of the Sacraments in worship, and so forth. But there are also lots of things that we get exorcised about which are non-essentials, things that are neither commanded nor forbidden in Scripture. The adiaphora through the church’s generations have included such things as whether to use candles or not, whether to furnish a worship space with chairs or pews, what time of day our services should be held, whether to have music and, if so, whether to use musical instruments, what sort of music to sing, and so forth.

There was a time when the church fought pitched battles over what clergy were to wear while presiding at worship. On the one side were those who believed that Anglican priests should only and always wear what I am wearing tonight: choir dress – a cassock, surplice, and tippet (and academic hood if entitled). They held sway for quite a while. There were others who argued that the vestments of the Catholic tradition — the alb and chasuble, like Fr. Radzik is wearing — should be permitted, but they were not. Clergy who wore them could be brought before church courts; there were (and still are) places in the Anglican Communion where a priest could be deposed from ministry for wearing a chasuble. That began to change during the late 1800s and the early 20th Century. By 1920, eucharistic vestments were not the norm, but they were generally, although not universally, tolerated.

In his Concluding Address to an Anglo-Catholic Congress held in London in 1923, one of my heroes, Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar, reminded his fellow High Churchmen that this had all been a distraction. “You’ve won,” he told them. “You can wear your vestments.” He said:

You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.[7]

Bishop Weston was saying that the vestment controversy was adiaphora. It and all such controversies are like the currents through which a boat sails. They distract us from Jesus and cause us to go off course. “Stop being distracted,” Bishop Weston was saying. “Stop letting the current pull you off course.”

Today, there are larger and more important issues that we also grapple with such as war, abortion, marriage equality, healthcare, welfare, and a host of other current issues, but these, also, are nonetheless secondary. These also are adiaphora; they can, and frequently do, command our attention and distract us from keeping our eye on the Pole Star of our faith, which is Jesus!

As business coach Steven Covey might put it, we forget that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”[8] The main thing, Jesus said, is this: “[T]hat you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”[9] That is not a burden, but it does take effort because of all the distractions churning about us in this world, all of the currents and tides pulling us off course. This is what T.S. Elliot wrote about in the poem Burnt Norton one of his Four Quartets, in which we find these lines:

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.[10]

I love that image, “At the still point of the turning world . . . .” For a Christian, that “still point” is Jesus. “At the still point of the turning world . . . there is only the dance.”

If I hadn’t been afraid it would clash with the beautiful mass setting the choir is singing tonight, I would have asked that we sing Sydney Carter’s 1963 folk-inspired hymn The Lord of the Dance at this service:

I danced in the morning when the world was begun.?
I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun.?
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth;?
At Bethlehem, I had my birth.?
Dance, then, wherever you may be.?
I am the Lord of the dance, said he,?
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,?
And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.[11]

Wonderful, joyful piece of music. The tune is based on the Shaker melody, ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple, which Aaron Copland used in the ballet suite he composed for. Martha Graham, Appalachian Spring; that’s another of those orchestral pieces of music that can pull me right up out of any funky attitude into happiness.

Have you ever heard the term “dance for joy”? Did you know that’s from the Bible? The Prophet Jeremiah wrote that God will come and gather his people like a shepherd gathers his flock, that there will be an abundance of crops, of grain, of oil, of herds, and that “the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in.”[12]

Jesus said in today’s gospel lesson that joy is the very purpose of his not-terribly-burdensome command: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”[13] That’s where the whole gospel is headed, where the whole arc of salvation history is taking us, where are Pole Star is leading us, where God wants us to be. Our Christian faith is taking us – to joy, to the kind of joy that lifts us completely and fills us like a good symphony, to the kind of joy that makes us dance. And that is why our faith is “the victory that conquers the world” at the still point at which there is only the Lord of the dance.

From time to time, we need to be reminded of this. The goal of the Christian faith is not purity; it’s not morality; it’s not bringing world peace or world dominion; it’s not the right to life or the right of reproductive choice; it’s not the sanctity of marriage or marriage equality. Yes, these are important current issues, but they are the tides and currents through which we sail our course. They are not the course itself; they are not the goal. The goal of the Christian faith is nothing less than joy, a joy that fills us completely and fulfills itself in love. If the way we deal with these important-but-secondary issues, these adiaphora, does not reflect, generate, and reinforce love and joy, then we are going off course; we are losing our way.

We . . . each one of us individually, and all of us together . . . need to remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, to follow the Lord of the dance, to keep our eye on the Pole Star of our faith, on Jesus. Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Sixth Sunday in Easter, May 5, 2024, to the people of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest preacher.

The lessons for the service were Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; and St. John 15:9-17. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

The illustration is by photographer Ruby Washington of the New York Times for an October 31, 2014, article on the seventieth anniversary of Appalachian Spring by Siobhan, “Decades Later, a Quintessential Journey Continues to Resonate.”

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

[1] 1 John 5:2-4

[2] John 15:9-10

[3] John 3:8

[4] Joss Daffern, 4 Ways To Adjust Your Sails To The Wind Of The Holy Spirit, Patheos: New Wineskins, June 15, 2015, accessed 19 April 2024

[5] Polynesian Navigation, LearNZ (T?tai Aho Rau CORE Education), undated, accessed 15 April 2024

[6] Don Gilzean, Set and Drift, Navigation in a Modern World: A Mariner’s Guide to Navigation and the Weather, undated, accessed 15 April 2024

[7] Frank Weston, Our Present Duty: Concluding Address, Anglo-Catholic Congress: 1923, Project Canterbury

[8] Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill, First Things First (Simon and Schuster, New York:1995), p. 75

[9] John 13:34

[10] T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton (Harcourt, New York:1943)

[11] Sydney Carter, Lord of the Dance (1963)

[12] Jeremiah 31:13 (CEB)

[13] John 15:11