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Sermon — September 29, 2024Michael Fenn, SeminarianLectionary Readings

Admittedly, there are many paths a sermon on this gospel reading could take. Off the dome there are four different, very intense, moments that could each be their own sermon. There is the stranger performing exorcisms, there is the drowning oneself, there is the cutting off of various limbs, and the business about salt and fire. When this is the case in preaching, I actually find it helpful to “zoom out” and get a better sense of how we got to such an intense place.

Intrepid observers may have already realized that today’s gospel actually picks up right where last week’s left off. John’s piece of dialogue picks up right after Jesus’ remark about welcoming the children from last week. Which is not actually that easy to catch if you are not paying close attention to the verse numbers–our reading starts with what is arguably an interruption of a longer speech from Jesus. This seems particularly true because his speech that spans last week’s and this week’s readings appears in the Gospel of Matthew without John’s interruption about the exorcist.

Here I will say that throughout my Biblical studies, I have developed a favorite group of characters. The disciples of Jesus across all the gospels are by far my favorite characters. For many reasons, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest: they are almost constantly wrong. In so many instances, at least one disciple is misunderstanding, misinterpreting, or acting out of turn in the gospels.

We have a prime example of this in John’s interruption in today’s reading. To me, it appears almost comical for John to stop Jesus in the middle of this speech about welcoming children, not overlooking them, and helping them in their faith. To tell him about something that probably could have just waited until after he was done.

Not only is John acting out of turn in his interruption of Jesus, but his acting out of turn is compounded by what he interrupts to tell Jesus. The disciples have stopped a strange man from performing excorsisms in the name of Jesus. To which Jesus informs them that they have actually missed the point entirely. Stopping someone in doing good works is not a part of the plan– and creating both a divide (the man is not one of us) and a hierarchy (we get to decide who gets to do what), is also not part of the plan.

Getting back to Jesus’s speech, after that annoying interruption (or introduction, depending on how you look at it). We get to the good stuff where Jesus gets to finish his speech with the millstone, the drowning, the limb cutting, and the salt and fire business. Welcome the children, do not cause them to stumble, do not let yourselves stumble, and be at peace with one another. All easy enough, cut and dry.

But what does stumbling actually mean? And really, why keep the interruption in this Gospel when they got rid of it in Matthew? There are, in fact, about seven other times in the gospel of Mark where demons are cast out, and such a remark would have been more natural. The gospel writers could have taken this into account when writing it down, made a minor editorial choice to make things flow better.

I suspect that the interruption is not, actually, an interruption in the end. The actions of John, I would say, are a pretty clear cut example of “causing one to stumble”, in the way that he stops the man from performing exorcisms, which is a good deed (it is also important to bear in mind that exorcisms in the ancient world were life-restoring acts, not the “Emily Rose” situations we might think of today). Also, I think John’s actions are even what it means to “stumble” for oneself. In stopping this man from performing his exorcisms, John has set himself up as someone with the power to decide what should happen, and who should get to do it–and he has created an exclusive group of Christ followers.

To return to my question–to stumble, then, is not to do something “bad” or something that is against a “law”–though maybe those are included, and I would not say Jesus wants us to do bad things. Rather, stumbling seems to have a few different definitions depending on the person and situation: to stumble might be to be stopped in your faith, or to create division in the community, or to think so highly of yourself as to stop someone else in their faith.

The aftereffects of stumbling should not be taken lightly either. And I suspect the warning from Jesus is so grave not because God looks for our self mutilation or our pain, but because these kinds of things are so easy to fall into–or to stumble into, to use a different phrasing. By thinking highly of ourselves, and by creating divisions where there should be unity, and by creating hierarchy– we reject the need for our togetherness. We reject the command that Jesus gives at the end of this week’s gospel lesson: to have peace among ourselves. I think the warning is stark because the presumption that we are right, that we know better; the pride that we should be able to handle things ourselves; and the assumption that we should tell that strange guy to stop doing exorcisms, are all such incredibly easy things to do.

As Christians, it seems that this story would call us to get off of whatever high horse we may be on, and to stay off it. It is a call to seek out a way to end divisions, to include those who we might otherwise exclude, and to rid ourselves of the assumptions that we are the ones who know best. One example that comes to mind as a huge church nerd, is the fact that the Episcopal Church and Methodist Church have finally decided that unity is more important than our own sense of self importance. This past summer, the United Methodist Church voted to enter into full communion with the Episcopal Church, our vote to affirm this is expected the next time we convene. What this does, in short terms, is recognizes the validity of the other denomination, and allows adherents of both denominations to work together without fear of reprisal from their respective denominational authorities.

As people, the call of this story would seem to be into a sense of unity and togetherness; to think that we actually do want the stranger performing exorcisms to keep doing exactly that; to think that we actually should not endeavor to do our lives, work, and ministry by ourselves or in our exclusive groups. This is echoed in our readings outside the Gospel for today. God’s solution when Moses complains about the burdens of leadership, and the hardship of the desert, is not to give Moses more power; nor is it to tell Moses to “buck up”. God’s solution and God’s involvement in the life of Moses is to give him more people to do the good work with him. In James’s letter, he does not tell the people to anoint themselves, or to pray for themselves, or to help themselves out of their own sinful ways. The solution James understands for the problems of his community is the unity of people in their faith.

My friends it seems that stumbling is not such an easy act to define, and is clearly seen only in what seems to be an interruption. When we exclude those who are doing good work–we stumble; when we think ourselves to proud to include the exorcist we do not know–we stumble, when we overlook the children and little ones in our midst–we stumble; when we act out of our own sense of importance and impede others–we stumble. The solution is never to divide and exclude, nor to assume that we will make it on our own (without the exorcist, without the additional prophets, without each other). God’s solution to Moses is togetheness, and God’s desire in Mark is for unity. Nowhere is the final blessing we hear in our services more needed than in these moments of stumbling–be swift to love and make haste to be kind: to the strange exorcist be swift to love, to the little ones who beleive in Jesus be kind, and “have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another”. In the name of the one who loved us first.

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Sermon — September 22, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Sometimes we talk about our spiritual lives as a kind of quest, an adventure toward an unknown destination in the hope of finding treasure along the way. We seek enlightenment. We look for meaning. We talk about finding God in the sunset, or in the woods, or finding God in other people.

And life is a quest, a voyage into the unknown. The world is a complicated and strange place, and let’s face it: You can show up to church every week, you can try to spend some time in meditation or in prayer, you can talk a walk through nature or through the city as often as you like, but you never know quite when or where you’re going to encounter God.

Except, here’s the thing: Jesus tells us exactly when and where to find him. It’s just that when we do, it sometimes doesn’t quite feel how we expect.

So, the New Testament and I have been on close personal terms for a while now, and I can think of four different places where Jesus tells us where we can find him when we go looking.

First and foremost, he says that we can find him in the Eucharist, in the bread and wine that we receive, after he hear him say, yet again, “This is my Body,” and “This is my Blood.” However physically or spiritually you want to interpret that, the Church has always believed and the experience of individual Christians has often confirmed that we encounter God in a unique way in this communion meal; that this is not only a symbol or a reminder of Christ’s life, but a place in which he truly does become present. So, place one: bread and wine.

Place number two, Jesus tells the disciples that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) And we tend to extrapolate from there—where two or three or thirty-tree or three-hundred-and-three are gathered in Jesus’ name, there Jesus is among them. So when we come here, on Sundays; or when a smaller group gathers on Thursday mornings for our Bible study, or Thursday evenings for Centering Prayer; whether it’s the choir rehearsing or the Garden Committee pruning or the children of the church stampeding around, wherever two or three are gathered in his name, Jesus is there.

Third: Jesus tells us that we find him in people who are hungry and thirsty, sick or in prison or in need of clothes. He tells us that whenever we feed someone who is hungry, we feed him; whenever we clothe someone who lacks clothing, we clothe him; whenever we visit someone who is sick or in prison we’re visiting him. And after listing each of these specific cases, he states the general principle: “Truly I tell you,” he says, “just as you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:31-40)

These three are the ones we tend to repeat in the Church. The high church folks will tell you about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The low church folks will tell you about finding Jesus in a small group gathered for prayer. The social justice wing of the church has started whole ministries on the basis of this last quotation from Matthew 25. Heck, just this week one Episcopal Church out in Oregon just won a $400,000 lawsuit against their city, which tried to shut down their ministry to people who are homeless and hungry, because a federal judge agreed that feeding people who are hungry is a religious act.

But we don’t often talk explicitly about the fourth place Jesus tells us we will meet him in this world, the one that he tells us about in the Gospel reading today.

The disciples are arguing with one another about who is the greatest. They have, as usual, completely missed the point. They’ve forgotten the reminder that if they want to follow him, they should take up the cross. They still think they’re going to find greatness in this world; that following the way of the cross on which Jesus will die will somehow lead to glory.

So he tells them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all, and servant of all.” And then he takes a “little child” and he “puts it among them,” and he says: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:37) And that’s the fourth place you can find Jesus, according to him. Not only when you receive communion or gather in his name; not only when you feed the hungry, or visit the sick; but even when you welcome a child in Jesus’ name, you’ll find Jesus there.

You might draw a connection to Jesus’ message about what true greatness is. You might even draw a connection to words we heard just before it, from James. The disciples are full of the wisdom of this world. They have “bitter envy and selfish ambition” in their hearts. They are, as James says, “boastful”; their arrogance will lead to “disorder and wickedness of every kind.” (James 3:14-16)

But then Jesus shows them a child. And on the one hand, the ideals of childhood seems to match so much of what James has to say. It’s the children of the world, Jesus might seem to say, the innocent, pure, humble children of the world, who are the model for the adults; it’s not the leader who’s the most arrogant or brash who is the greatest, but the one who is the most child-like.

On the other hand: Have you ever met a child?

I love children. I really do. I love my child, I love the children of this church. Taking children seriously, listening to their hopes and their concerns, is as much a part of my job as listening to the rest of you. And really, it can be pretty fun.

But I have never yet met a child who is “peaceable” and “willing to yield,” “full of mercy” and “without a trace of hypocrisy.” Sometimes it feels like half the day is taken up with “coveting something” that they “cannot obtain,” and that’s not to mention the inevitable “disorder… of every kind.” Not to mention, if Jesus’ issue is that the disciples are standing around arguing about who’s the best, then I don’t think being more like children is going to solve the problem.

Only: That isn’t what he says.

He doesn’t tell the disciples that if they want to become great, they should become more like children. He tells them that if they want to become great, they need to be willing to care for children. He tells them that they need to get down off their pedestals and welcome a child. They need to give up their pretensions to theological perfection and get their hands dirty instead, sometimes very literally.

Caring for children doesn’t always feel like a spiritual practice. It doesn’t tend to replenish and refresh us in the kind of way we’re looking for when we say we’re seeking God. There are moments of awe and wonder, of course, and plenty of fun, but “welcoming children,” in Jesus’ name or not, is exhausting work. Jesus tells us that when we do welcome children, we will encounter God there. But it doesn’t always feel like we’re encountering God. Sometimes it just feels very loud.

But of course: That’s true for those other three places, too. We don’t always feel God where we know we meet God. It’s a rare person who comes to communion every week and experiences a deep sense of spiritual fulfillment. We feel this way sometimes, but less often than we hope or need.

Wherever two or three are gathered in his name, Jesus may well be there. But churches are made of people—that’s the problem—and they are as full of rudeness and bad behavior as any other collection of people is. Many, many people burn out on the church, not because of any big trauma or abuse, but because of a thousand small frustrations that lead them to wash their hands of it all.

It’s easy to romanticize the act of feeding people who are hungry, or visiting people who are in prison; even visiting someone who’s sick isn’t always so pleasant. People act like people do, and even more so when they’re going through a hard time.

And yet, Jesus tells us that we will find him there. This is what it means to do what he said last week: to take up our crosses and follow him. This is what it means to be great in the kingdom of God, to roll up your sleeves and serve. To do something that might not feel like you’ve arrived at an enlightened state; but to do something to care for someone whom society considers “the least” of its concern. And to remember that even if you don’t feel God in that moment, Jesus is right there.

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Sermon — September 15, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters,
for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” (James 3:1) Amen.

James’s warning seems both funny and appropriate today, as we plan to bless our students and educators, to offer prayers for those who learn and, perhaps especially, for those who teach. Classes, after all, have begun, from kindergarten all the way through college. Our Sunday School classes will begin next week. Our Thursday-morning group is already underway. We’re making plans for possible confirmations later this spring. And of course, every Sunday includes a moment of teaching right here, during the sermon.

James may be writing mostly about the kind of teaching we encounter in church. He’s warning his readers about the dangers of the preacher’s untameable tongue, about the higher bar that’s set for theological ramblings from the pulpit than casual conversation among friends. We entrust clergy with an uninterrupted fifteen minutes a week, and we have the power to do great good and/or great evil, depending on what we say, to be sure. But teaching isn’t just something I do, or something teachers do. It’s something we all do.

Every day of all our lives, every one of us is demonstrating something to the people around us. Every word we say models what is it to live a kind and loving life to the people around us. Or it doesn’t. And if what James has to say is true for all of us, because we are all subject to the power of the tongue.

The bit in a horse’s mouth is tiny, James say, compared to the huge body of the horse; (3:3) a rudder is small, and yet it can turn the whole ship. (3:4) A small flame can start a forest fire, he says, and you better believe that the tongue is a fire. (3:5-6)

You may already know this to be true. If you’ve ever hurt the feelings of someone you love by saying something you shouldn’t—has this ever happened to you?—then you know what James means when he says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” And you can probably agree when he says, “My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so!” (3:10)

And yet, as James says, “All of us make many mistakes.” (3:2)

Our Gospel reading proves the point. It’s incredibly easy to say something wrong, even if most of what you say is right.

Jesus is walking with his disciples through the villages near Caesarea Philippi, thirty miles or so north of their home base in Galilee. And he asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They tell him there’s a rumor going around that Jesus is John the Baptist, returned from the dead to take vengeance on Herod and finish the work of repentance he began. Others say something even grander, that Jesus is Elijah, who had been taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire a thousand years before, and who was supposed to return before the Messiah came. Others are little more down to earth: he’s a prophet, and that’s reason enough to follow him.

“But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. And the disciples are silent. Maybe they’ve been listening to James. Maybe they’re afraid to make a mistake. All of the disciples are silent except one. Peter answers him, simply, “You are the Messiah.” (Mark 8:29) And while Jesus warns them not to tell anyone, (8:30) Peter is right. For now.

And Jesus begins to explain what being the Messiah means. What he says might seem familiar to us, because we already know how the story unfolds. But it’s shocking to them. Yes, Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one of God. But he hasn’t come to resurrect the royal line of David and set up a new kingdom here on earth. He’s here for something else. This Messiah is going to suffer, and be rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And I get the sense that Peter is so outraged by the first half of all that that he doesn’t even hear the end. He’s so upset about the failure and suffering of Christ that he doesn’t even hear the part about the resurrection. Peter takes Jesus aside and starts to rebuke him: Bad, Jesus! No! (8:32) But Jesus turns it right back around: “Get behind me, Satan!” (8:33)

Poor Peter. This is why nobody else wanted to raise their hand in class.

Of course, Jesus isn’t rebuking Peter because his answer was wrong. Jesus is the Messiah. He’s rebuking the temptation that Peter offers. And this makes sense based on who “Satan” is in the Bible: Satan is the accuser, the tempter, the one who afflicted Job to see if he would curse God, the who enticed Jesus with food during his wilderness to tempt him during his fast. Here, Peter is the tempter, the one who tries to lure Jesus away from the hard road toward the easy path. Surely, if he’s the Messiah, he doesn’t need to suffer. Surely he doesn’t need to die. But Peter’s temptation doesn’t undermine Jesus’ courage. It doesn’t turn him away from sacrificing himself to save us all. He rebukes Peter for his mistake, and then he explains: If you want to follow me, don’t try to tempt me away from a difficult life. If you want to follow me, then follow me along that same road. Take up your cross, he says. Make your own choice to sacrifice something for the good of someone else.

Words matter. But actions matter even more. Following Jesus isn’t just going to be a matter of saying, “You are the Messiah.” It’s going to take a willingness to give something up for love.

I wonder what that might mean for you. I wonder what it might mean to “take up your cross.” It doesn’t mean what it meant for Jesus. It doesn’t mean that you need to endure violence or pain at the hands of another person. You don’t, and you shouldn’t. But it means something. It means that if you want to follow Jesus—if you want to walk in love, as he loved us—You’re going to need to give up whatever is hindering your ability to love. And I can’t tell you what that is, for you. But there’s a chance that you already know, and it’s just that taking up your cross is hard.

And that’s the bad news, or the challenging invitation, for today.

But there’s good news, too, and it’s as much a part of this letter and this story as the rest. “All of us make many mistakes,” says James, the Brother of Jesus, Bishop of Jerusalem. Not “all of you,” but “all of us,” who teach. And yet his very words, his very teachings, still stand, two thousand years later, a part of the Bible’s canonical text. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter seems to say to Jesus, the Son of God. “You’re wrong about what the Messiah is supposed to do,” he tells the Messiah. This isn’t the high priest or the Roman governor, a Pharisee or Sadducee—this is Peter, who used to be Simon except that Jesus named him Peter, which means “Rock” in Greek, because he is the rock on whom Jesus will build the church. I love to point out from time to time how wrong or foolish Peter can be. Not because I want to put him down, but because it’s an incredible symbol of God’s forgiveness and grace that a person who is so imperfect, a person who makes so many mistakes, can still become the chosen and beloved instrument of God’s work in the world.

And so can you, you beloved, imperfect, child of God. Unless you are, as James says, a perfect person, you have made and you will make many mistakes in this life, including and especially with your tongue, with the words that come out of your mouth. But mistakes are not forever. Mistakes can be forgiven. The bit that turns the horse one way, can turn it back the other. The rudder can turn the ship to starboard as easily as to port. Mistakes can be forgiven, and mistakes can be corrected. And in a life which sometimes feels like it’s full of tests—whether we’re in school or out of it—it’s good news to remember that the one who’s grading you loves you so much that he took up his cross and laid his life for you. Amen.

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Sermon — September 8, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

After Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, our political leaders restarted their recurring theological debate over the effectiveness of prayer and its importance relative to action in the face of the crisis of gun violence in America. I’m a little disturbed to admit that on before the shooting, on Tuesday afternoon, I spent some time with our reading from the Epistle of James and then sat down and wrote most of a sermon about the connection between early Christian debates over faith and works and the modern American debate over the use of the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” On Tuesday, it seemed like a decent way to connect the Bible to the real problems of our world. By Wednesday, I just felt sad, because the need for public figures to offer such thoughts and prayers over and over again is sad.

But here we are in church. And so I do want to begin not by offering my thoughts and prayers in the abstract, but by actually praying…

You’ve probably never heard a politician stand up at a campaign rally and declare, “Faith without works is dead!” (James 2:17) But the debate over “thoughts and prayers” pretty closely follows this other, theological debate over the relationship between two sorts of things that we sometimes shorthand by calling them “faith” and “works”. In both cases, it’s easy for things to become overly-abstracted into phrases like “justification by grace through faith” or “Second Amendment rights.” What I love about James is that he makes things very concrete. “If your brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’… What is the good of that?” (James 2:16) When you see someone cold and hungry and offer them a prayer for warmth instead of your spare coat, are you “loving your neighbor as yourself?” (Jame 2:15–16) James’s answer is simple: no, you’re not. Faith alone, without work—prayer, alone, without action—is dead.

James lists food and warmth. We might add safety to the list, and we might ask in James’s words: If a person offers prayers for our children to be safe, but does not use the power they have to make them safer, “what is the good of that?” (James 2:17)

I want to step back and provide some of the theological context for this debate over faith and works, words and action. It’s a debate that began in the early Church with the apostles James and Paul, was picked back up in Martin Luther’s criticism of the late-medieval Catholic Church, and has continued to the present day.

Indeed, you’ll sometimes hear James’s “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” countered with the words of the apostle Paul, when he writes, in his Letter to the Galatians, that “a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 2:16) This is part of Paul’s broader understanding of salvation. The requirements of the law are so strict, the burden of the law is so great, Paul suggests, that none of us can fulfill it. If God is going to judge us on how precisely we’ve followed God’s commandments, then we’re all in some serious trouble. But there’s good news, Paul says; we are “justified,” we are restored to right relationship with God, not because we’ve fulfilled every point of the law perfectly, but because we’ve put our faith in Christ. It’s Jesus who has fulfilled the law on our behalf; only Christ the King, Paul reply to James, can truly fulfill “the royal law of love.”

Of course, It’s easy to see how you could take this much too far. If we are justified by faith, and not by works, then why do good things at all? If we are all sinners in need of redemption, then we can excuse any amount of bad behavior, so long as the person later says that they repent. If we’re free from the law and we depend only on God’s grace, then why does it matter whether we act? God’s in charge. Paul himself rejects this misunderstanding. But it’s clear that many people took his wrods this way.

Paul is really writing against people who claim that Gentile converts to Christianity need to adopt all of the law, including practices of circumcision and kosher food regulations that essentially mean that they must first convert to Judaism in order to become Christian. James is really writing people who think they need to keep none of the law, not even to feed and clothe their neighbors. If they’d just sat down, you might think, they could’ve worked this out. And in fact, they did. Paul and James and Peter and John met up in Jerusalem, and they agreed that Gentile converts didn’t have to follow the whole body of Jewish law, as long as Paul and his followers agreed to remember the poor, and so it was: faith and works exist in a balance, although we’ve been arguing about the balance ever since.

Our tradition offers us a beautiful image for this relationship, right there in the Historical Documents section of your Prayer Book, in Article XII of the 39 Articles. These articles are the classic formulation of the Reformation-era faith of the Church of England, and while they don’t always capture our own lives of faith perfectly well, they’re full of little gems. Article XII says, “Albeit that Good Works… cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment… yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruit.”

Elizabethan theological prose is not always easy to parse by ear, so let me explain. Our good works alone, the Article admits, cannot atone for sin. We cannot, by working hard enough, earn our way into God’s good graces. (And so God comes down, in Christ, to bridge that gap instead.)

Nevertheless, the Article continues with a very English kind of reasonableness. The good things we do are “pleasing and acceptable to God.” And more than that. They’re not just nice to have, they spring “necessarily” from a true and lively Faith. There is no stark conflict between “faith” and “works”; when a person is filled with faith, it inevitably bubbles up out of them in good works, such that that you can actually know a “lively Faith” by good works, just as you can know a living tree from its good fruit. And this is what it means that “faith, if it has no works, is dead.” Just as the lack of fruit on a tree might be evidence that the tree isn’t thriving, the lack of love and kindness might be evidence that your faith is dying. In a strange way, praying for something to happen and refusing to make it happen shows a kind of lack of faith; a lack of faith that God might answer your prayers through you.

There’s only one person for whom faith and works are the same, and it’s Jesus. Only for Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, are words the same as deeds. Only Jesus can say “you may go—the demon has left your daughter,” and simply make that true. (Mark 7:29) Only Jesus can simply say, “‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened,’” and open someone’s ears. (Mark 7:34) For Jesus, prayer is the complete action; for the rest of us, prayer is only the beginning.

So here’s your homework for today.

In a few minutes, we will offer our thoughts and prayers. We’ll pray for the Church and for the world in ways general and specific. We’ll pray “for the peace of the world,” and for specific nations engaged in war. We’ll pray for “the welfare of the holy Church of God,” and for people we know and love who are unwell. We’ll pray for the widowed and orphans, for the poor and the oppressed. And our prayers are good. Our prayers are worthwhile. But none of us is Jesus. None of us can just say “Ephphatha” and make it so.

So I want to invite you to pick one prayer that you’re going to turn into a deed; one part of your faith, from which a good work will spring. Pick one of the politicians we pray for today, and write them a letter about something that you care deeply about. Or pick one person on the prayer list, who you know well or not as well, and give them a call.

Not because God will condemn you if you don’t. Not because you will be justified by works of the law if you do. But simply because if our prayers are genuine, they should not end in our hearts, but should move us to do something with our hands. Because if we truly believe God is answering our prayers, we need to be ready to accept that we might be part of the answer.

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Sermon — September 1, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Well, it’s Labor Day tomorrow and only the real hard core has showed up to church today, so we’re going to have fun. I’m going to see if, in the next thirteen minutes or so, I can convince you to become full-on Bible-thumpers. In a way. My crazy proposition for today is this: Sometimes the only way to defend yourself against the moralistic criticism of the holier-than-thou is to know the Bible well. To put it another way: If someone’s trying to condemn you or control you in the name of God, sometimes the Bible is part of the problem; but often, it’s part of the solution, too.

And Jesus knew this well. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus confronts a group of people who try to use their own religious beliefs to condemn his disciples, and he doesn’t do it by backing off from Scripture. He does it by embracing what’s actually in the Bible; by insisting that if Scripture doesn’t require him to do something, neither can you, and thereby setting his disciples free from their demands.

This confrontation isn’t about any of the culture-war issues of our day. The Pharisees aren’t arguing with him about sexual orientation or gender identity, the ordination of women or access to abortion or any of the many other things on which churches today disagree. They’re attacking him because they see thatsome of his disciples are eating with unwashed hands.

This is not advice for your Labor Day barbecue. They’re not talking about washing your hands with soap and water before you cook or eat, to wash bacteria and dirt away. They’re talking about a ritual purification. In some later Jewish traditions, it takes the form of pouring water from a cup over each hand three times before a meal. It’s not about hygiene, but about purity.

The very fact that this practice existed, and was widespread enough that Jesus could be criticized for some of his disciples not doing it, reflects a trend in ancient Judaism of expanding the scope of purity laws from the Temple to daily life, from the holiest days to the everyday.

In the system of Biblical law in the Old Testament, “purity” is not a moral or an ethical status; it’s a ritual one. It’s not “wrong” to be impure. Sometimes it’s right, or even required. Impurity results from a wide enough variety of things that an ordinary person living an ordinary life should expect to be in a state of “impurity” with some regularity. And that wasn’t a problem. Purity was only required in the presence of holy things in the Temple, a place where most ordinary people only went for major holidays a few times a year. If you were just living in a village somewhere in Galilee, the whole system of purity laws meant you needed to immerse yourself in a ritual bath every once in a while, before the highest holy days. As far as religious rituals go, these purity regulations were not really a big deal.

Now, this is deeply dissatisfying to the pious religious mind. Surely, we devoted people tend to think, religion must be harder than that. If it’s good to be pure in the Temple, then it’s good to be pure all the time. And there’s clear archeological evidence that over time, these practices of purification took on a life of their own. We find ritual baths spread throughout the ancient Jewish world, even far from Jerusalem, and descriptions of purification that are detached from the Temple, as people who technically didn’t need to be “pure” began to practice ritual purification as part of daily life.

Handwashing is just a small example of this trend. It originates in a single commandment in Exodus that instructs the priests, the sons of Aaron, to wash their hands and feet before they go to the altar, to ensure that the hands that touch the holy food offered to God are not impure. (Ex. 30:17-20) But like many pious practices, it expanded over time. If it’s good for the priests to wash their hands before they touch the food that will be sacrificed on the altar, isn’t it even better for us all to wash our hands before we touch food of any kind? It certainly can’t hurt.

And the context is important, too. Remember that Mark is writing down Jesus’ words a few decades after Jesus spoke them, most likely a few years after the Temple had been destroyed. When the rituals in the Temple could no longer take place, the rituals that had happened around the worship in the Temple began to take their place: and so as early Christianity began to emerge and separate from the rest of the Jewish society around it, these practices like handwashing became even more widespread, even though the reason for ritual purity to exist was no longer there.

Jesus didn’t mind, either way. Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples not to wash their hands before meals because in the Bible, that was only required of the priests. And you can tell this because the Pharisees’ concern is that some of Jesus’ disciples weren’t washing their hands, which means that some of them were. But the Pharisees come to Jesus and confront him. They ask, “Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5)

And that’s when Jesus gets a little mad.

“Now just you wait,” he seems to say. “Now I know who Isaiah was talking about when he talked about people who worship God in vain, ‘teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” (Mark 7:7) It was you! There’s nothing wrong with adopting some extra pious practice for yourself, but don’t you dare insist on it for everyone else. You can hear the echo of our first reading from Deuteronomy in Jesus’ mind: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything away.” (Deut. 4:2) But the Pharisees have elevated their own traditions, which are fine in and of themselves, to the status of God’s own law.

And then Jesus goes on, turning things around with an accusation of hypocrisy. You, who are not priests descended from the sons of Aaron, follow commandments you don’t need to, in line with human traditions that say you should; but you abandon the commandments of charity and love. You lose sight of what it is that really defiles, he says: not impure hands touching food before it goes into our mouths, but impure hearts from which evil intentions come. I don’t know whether Jesus’ accusation is fair. Perhaps the Pharisees in front of him weren’t quite so bad as that. But he’s making a real point, recalling people’s attention to the commandments at the heart of what it is to follow God.

In this story, Jesus defends his disciples against a pious complaint by adopting a kind of strict Biblical interpretation. And he can only do this because he’s deeply familiar with the text. He knows where the commandment in Exodus ends, and where human traditions begin. He’s confident in quoting Isaiah off the bat. He doesn’t use this knowledge to condemn those of his own followers who want to adopt this special pious act. But he does use it to defend those who are under attack.

Jesus would make a darn good Episcopalian, I think. Or rather—we Episcopalians have a chance here, to become even better followers of Christ: to embrace and act upon our values of inclusion and love, not by shying away from the text of the Bible but by diving further in, by finding and learning

To take just one small example: Over the summer, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. For centuries, women’s ministry had been restricted to the ministry of laypeople; for more than a thousand years, women were told there was no place for them at the altar. Sometimes the Bible was quoted. Sometimes it was human tradition, whether religious sexism or misogynistic philosophy. But in fact, the Bible is relatively clear. Women played a leading role in the leadership of the early Church. Not only the women who followed Jesus to the tomb, and were the apostles to the apostles, the first ones to proclaim Easter’s good news. Not only the women like Lydia who led early gatherings of the disciples. But women who are given the titles of what would become ordained ministries, like “Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae,” (Romans 16:1), and Junia, who is “prominent among the apostles.” (16:7) It’s no surprise that it was the most Protestant churches, least bound to human tradition and most drawn to the Bible, who began ordaining women first, then Episcopalians later with our murky in-between, and who knows whether our more siblings in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where tradition is elevated to the same level as Scripture, will ever allow the same.

So, okay: Maybe you’re not ready to Bible-thump quite yet. But I want to encourage you to read the Bible, at least; to mark, as one of our prayers says, and learn, and inwardly digest it; because it can be not only the source of inspiration, comfort, and strength; it can be the source of liberation too, as Jesus knew so well.

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Sermon — August 25, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

There comes a point in every one of our lives when we must make a choice between two different paths. There’s no compromise, no way to split the difference. There are two roads laid out before us, one here and one there, and we have to decide which one we’re going to follow.

I’m talking, of course, about the difficult choice between following the road signs and the GPS.

Now, I drive a remarkably-reliable eleven year old car, which came with a wonderful but now quite unreliable built-in navigation system. It’s the kind of early 2010s device where if you want updated maps, you have to send away for a USB drive to plug in and update them, and I have to admit, I never have.

And so there are certain parts of certain routes where, a decade after installation, my GPS is just entirely wrong. Sometimes this happens when I know the route, as when the GPS tries to send me whirling around a rotary that no longer exists, somewhere in Somerville. It more often happens on some highway somewhere out of state, where the entry and exit ramps have moved around, and the GPS tells me to go straight for half a mile, then change between I-95 and I-91 by sailing off through the sky on a ramp that’s no longer there. (Which, to be fair, would not even be the worst driving I’ve seen in New Haven, Connecticut.)

Anyway, at those moments you face a choice between two different sources of authority offering two different visions of reality, and you need to choose which one to trust, and which one to follow. And in a way, this is what every one of our readings this morning is about.

Our first reading tells the story of the choice that Joshua offered to the ancient Israelites at the very end of their journey into the Promised Land. The people have crossed the Red Sea on their way out of slavery in Egypt, led by Moses. They’ve wandered forty years in the wilderness, complaining all the way, and Moses has seen the Promised Land from the mountaintop before he dies. Now Joshua has led them in, and they’ve battled with the people of the land. And years later, after a long time of peace, Joshua’s life is drawing to its end, and he gathers all the people and offers them a choice.

Remember the stories of your ancestors, he tells them: remember Terah and Abraham and Nahor, who lived beyond the river and served other gods. Remember their descendants, you parents and grandparents, the ones who were enslaved in Egypt, and served Egyptian gods there. Remember the gods your ancestors served, and how that went for them.

And remember the story of the God we now serve, and what that God has done for you. Remember how he brought your parents up out of slavery. Remember how he protected them through those long years in the wilderness. Remember how he led you into this Promised Land.

(And for this Sunday, at least, let me just acknowledge that the old stories of conquest and violence as the people came into the land have echoed down the ages, with very real effects. And let me say that if you’re curious about the intersection between these stories and Israeli-Palestinian relations today, I’m happy to talk about that any time; even though I’m not going to talk about it right now.)

So Joshua offers a choice between two ways: you can choose the gods your ancestors served long ago and far away, you can follow their traditions and practice their ancient rites; or you can choose the God who brought you up out of Egypt, and set you free. But one way or another you must “choose this day whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15)

More than a thousand years later, another Joshua arose, another leader among the people of that land. We tend to call this one what the Greeks and Romans called him. Their languages had no sh sound, and ended masculine words in s, and Hebrew pronunciation had changed as well, so they spelled his name not Yeshu’ but Jesus. In other words, we call him Jesus, but Jesus and Joshua are the same name.

And like that ancient Joshua, Jesus offered the people around him a choice; implicitly, this time, but a choice all the same. He didn’t ask them to choose between one god and another. Nearly everyone who appears in all the stories in the gospels was faithful to the one God of the Jewish people. Their choice, in our reading this morning, was whether they could accept the strange teachings of this man, the almost-grotesque idea that they should “eat [his] flesh and drink [his] blood,” which we talked about at some length last week. (John 6:56)

“This teaching is difficult,” his disciples said when he told them this. “Who can accept it?” (6:60) And it’s actually unusual, how this story goes. Here, it’s not “the Jews” or “the Pharisees” or “the Sadducees” who criticize Jesus’ teaching, as the various gospels often say. It’s “his disciples,” the people who’ve faithfully followed him so far. He teaches something strange and hard, and they complain. But Jesus doesn’t yield, he doubles down on his claims, and “because of this, many of his disciples turned away.” (6:66)

But a faithful remnant remains, a core group built around the twelve, the ones who we will come to call apostles. And they don’t stay, you might notice, because they think that this teaching is easy to believe. They don’t even acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. They don’t stay because they accept his words. They stay because they believe in him. They trust him. And so, Peter answers on their behalf, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (6:68)

They’ve made the choice that he’s the one who knows how the right directions, and they’re going to follow him, wherever the rest of the traffic may be going. They’ve decided that, however strange some of what he says may seem, he is, to paraphrase what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel of John, not only “the truth” and “the life”; he is “the Waze.” (I’m so sorry. I am, in fact, a dad.)

So the disciples choose to follow Jesus. And they choose again to stay the course, to remain faithful when others back away. But it’s not until much later that the disciples feel what Paul calls “boldness.” It’s not until much later that their faith transforms from something that they have to struggle to accept, to something that gives them strength, a shield and helmet and armor that protects them from all the evils of the world. This “boldness” is one of Paul’s favorite words, and he means the kind of extraordinary strength it takes to stand up and declare the truth when it’s much easier to say nothing. To stand for what is good in a world that’s often beset by evil. And to remain not only confident in but comforted by what you know to be true, even when the people around you are shocked.

There’s a kind of growth in these stories, from decision to faithfulness to boldness. And you could imagine this as a typical trajectory in spiritual life. The story of your faith might have a beginning, when you make the decision to follow, the decision to choose which god to serve; when you choose who gets to be your judge and what values will shape your life. This is when you choose which way to go. The story might have a middle, in which your faith is tested; in which the road becomes more difficult, when you’re not so sure that your decision was right, or something unexpected happens, and you wish you’d gone the other way, after all. And then later, the story might end with a kind of boldness, a sense of certainty that you’ve gone the right way, and a comfort that the destination is finally in sight.

And yet the story of a life is rarely as simple as 1, 2, 3; decision, faithfulness, boldness. They’re not really three phases of a story, after all, neatly ordered in a row. They’re three episodes, three common patterns of life, that we cycle through again and again and again. It sometimes seems that every week or every month or every year, we have to choose to commit ourselves again to the things that we believe, and it can become a burden. But it’s also a gift: the fact that we need to choose again and again to do the right thing means that we get to choose again and again. We are given a thousand chances to follow in Jesus’ way of love, and when we choose the wrong path, it’s never too late to get off at the next exit, and take a U-turn, however inconvenient it may be.

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Sermon — August 18, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to the crowd who have come to hear from him, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) And over the course of history, down to the present day—perhaps down to this very morning—people have responded to these words in many ways. But there are three kinds of responses I want to talk about especially today, and I’ll summarize them as: 1) “So gross!” 2) “So great!” and 3) “So what?”

(As with anything a preacher says, this is a massive over-simplification. But you and I both know that, oratorically speaking, at least, things always go better in threes.)

So, first: “So gross!” In the Church today, we tend to use phrases like “receiving the Body of Christ” when we talk about Holy Communion. Jesus’ own language seems blunter, almost cruder. “Eat my flesh.” “Drink my blood.” That’s kind of gross!

You might think that there’s something lost in translation, here, of course, either linguistically or culturally. Sometimes that’s the case with the Bible. It’s often the preacher’s task to talk about the nuance of a Greek or Hebrew word, to share some detail of history or culture to help the text make sense. I’m sorry to say, this morning it only makes the problem worse. There are, in typical style, two different ancient Greek words for “eat,” but the one used here is in fact the grosser word;. It’s not just the general word φάγω, which is where the Greek yogurt brand FAGE gets its name: it means, “Eat!” It’s the word τρώγω, which one dictionary defines as “to bite or chew food,” and to “eat (audibly)… chew, nibble, munch.”[1] It’s the less abstract, more mechanical word.

It’s not a question of cultural context either. This talk of “drinking blood” might’ve been even more repulsive to Jesus’ fellow Jews than it is to us. Many Christian cultures include things like blood sausages or black pudding, but the Torah explicitly forbids the eating of blood—including for Gentiles, by the way, since it was part of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood—and many of the practices of kosher butchering are specifically intended to ensure that people eat no blood. Talking about consuming blood at all would be shocking enough, let alone human blood. So if you hear Jesus’ words, his repeated insistence that we eat his flesh and drink his blood, and you feel uneasy—well, you should. And you’re not the only one. We’ll hear next week how Jesus’ words start to drive away the crowd, and no wonder, because this is so gross.

And yet in some ways, Jesus’ words here also sound so great when you put them in the right context: not a historical or cultural context, but a liturgical and theological context. What if this is about the Eucharist? What if Jesus is talking about receiving Communion? “Eat” and “drink,” “flesh” and “blood,” naturally remind us of “bread” and “wine,” and we know where to find those. Even by the time the Gospel of John was being written, this was most likely an intentional connection: for two thousand years, we’ve had a weekly ritual of eating and drinking. Jesus is just telling us what it means.

And this is a remarkable thing. Nearly every ancient religion (and most modern ones) has religious rituals around food. Typically, you’d come to worship with a gift for your god, often a sacrifice of food. You’d burn for the god to eat, you’d eat some, and you’d think this was a holy thing: you were sharing a meal with your god. The Eucharist is something more. You’re not hosting a meal for your god, and eating in the god’s presence; God is feeding you from God’s own being. It’s entirely an act of grace.

I think often of the vow I took at ordination to “nourish God’s people from the riches of God’s grace,” and I try to do that as well as I can. But really, it’s God who nourishes each one of us from the riches of God’s grace. It’s Jesus who nourishes each one of us from his own body. Our true “soul food” is his own flesh and blood, and this becomes the foundation of a lifelong bond, a connection which we’re invited to renew week after week after week.

This meal isn’t only a memorial. It isn’t only something we do to remember something Jesus did. It’s something God does to feed and sustain us now and always. Eating flesh and drinking blood may be pretty gross; being fed week after week by God is pretty great.

But there’s something strange about Jesus’ words here. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51) “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” he repeats later, (6:54) and he concludes, “the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (6:58)

And yet we die.

Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died; but you will live for ever, Jesus says. We know that this bread doesn’t make us live forever. It might bring us into closer communion with God. It might be an incredible gift that feeds and sustains us in this life. But it doesn’t extend our lives; there are no thousand-year-old saints among us. And even though we’re fed and nourished by God in this life, life is still pretty hard, and we still hunger and still thirst, literally and spiritually. And so you might be left with the question, “So what?” as in, “If we don’t live forever, and our hunger isn’t sated, Jesus may be living bread, but so what? What difference does it really make?”

I think it makes all the difference.

I think I’ve said this to you before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the most meaningful part of our whole liturgy for me is what I get to I say as I distribute the bread: “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” Every week it moves me, as I walk along that rail. This is the bread of heaven. This is what they’re eating there. This is a taste of the feast God’s Wisdom has prepared, which we will one day share, not only with one another, not only with God, but with the whole heavenly host, with all those who have gone before us, and all those who will come after.

I think of that, every week, because I suspect that for every one of us, there is someone (or many someones), with whom we would give anything to share one more meal. There are people I think of, as I give this bread to you. People in all our lives who we have loved and who are no longer here. To me, to say that this is “the bread of heaven” is to say that they are sharing this meal now; that they are somehow here, and that this is just a promise of greater things to come.

That’s what “forever” means, when Jesus says we will live forever: not that we will live forever here, in this life on this earth, but that we will live forever there, with them. That we will live, as they will live; that he will raise us up with them on that last day.

Jesus doesn’t only offer a strange command in the Gospel today, to eat his flesh and drink his blood; a command so unsettling that it began to drive his disciples away. And he doesn’t only offer a meal, the promise of food that will feed us day to day, sustaining us on our journey through this life. He offers us a promise, the promise that this is eternal bread; that this is a meal that stretches beyond the boundaries of time, a foretaste of the meal that we will once again share with those who’ve gone before us.

The promise Jesus makes is that when Wisdom prepares that eternal meal, God will say to us, “Turn in here!” “Come, eat of my bread,” and we will share that bread of heaven again, no longer separated from one another by the barriers of death but finally restored to life and to love. And I don’t know about you, but that is a hope that really does feed my soul.

[1] BDAG, s.v. “τρώγω,” 1019.

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Sermon — August 11, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

You may know that I just returned on Thursday from a three-week vacation visiting Alice’s family on Long Island, which was exactly as chaotic and wonderful and relaxing as a family vacation with three kids six and under should be. You may not know that when we’re out there, I have a certain morning routine: I’ll wake up, and go for a run, and on the way home I’ll tend to stop for a treat, either at the Blue Duck Bakery to pick up a baguette and some sliced multigrain, or at NoFoRoCo, the North Fork Roasting Company, just down the street, which has some of the best pastries in the world as far as I’m concerned, but certainly the best in eastern Long Island. Or maybe at the farm stand up the road.

So as far as the saying “you are what you eat” is concerned, I return to you this Sunday consisting almost entirely of bread. And croissants. And peaches, actually, because it’s peach season in Long Island right now, and I could eat about a dozen of those a day. Also apricots. And figs.

But I have bread on the mind today, and so does Jesus.

“I am the bread of life,” he says. (John 6:35) And John’s gospel will spend the next few weeks exploring exactly what that means. It’s a rich image: Like so much of what Jesus says, it can’t possibly be true, it must be a metaphor, and yet there’s something more than metaphorical about this idea of the “bread of life.” On the one hand, we know that Jesus, when he says this, is not literally a walking, talking loaf of bread. He’s human being. We know that although we have come to Jesus, we still hunger and we still thirst. There’s clearly some spiritual meaning of “eating” and “drinking” in what Jesus says. Maybe it involves digesting and reflecting on Jesus’ words and teachings, because he quickly moves from this image of eating the bread of heaven, to being drawn to and learning from God in Christ. The hunger, at least in part, is spiritual hunger; the nourishment is spiritual nourishment.

And yet, on the other hand, we also find ourselves coming here to Jesus, week after week, and being fed; not just metaphorically, spiritually fed, but fed, with real bread, in which and through which we believe that somehow, mysteriously, Christ is here. We eat this bread, and even though the portions are small, it is real food. We digest it, and it becomes part of us, and the Body of Christ that we receive becomes part of our own bodies, and just as the living bread came down from heaven to us, we are brought up into the presence of God.

Both literally and spiritually, we are what we eat. We become what we consume.

I sometimes wonder about our mental or spiritual diets these days. What are we consuming, and what are we becoming?

We talk about “media consumption,” sometimes, and eating is a pretty good metaphor for reading, or watching, or listening to something. When we read anxious stories about the coming demise of the planet or the nation, we become more anxious. When we listen to angry diatribes about the people with whom we disagree, we become more angry. When we spend our summers watching Olympic commentary, we become opinionated experts on sports we only think about every four years, and in fact, that’s part of what makes it fun.

But I wonder whether the diets of our attention have become unbalanced, over time. Most of the media that we consume is the mental equivalent of junk food, in a very particular way. Just as food scientists carefully calibrate the balance of sugar and salt and crunch to make snack foods irresistible without providing much additional nutrition, our politically-polarized media outlets and especially our algorithm-driven social media feeds are designed to captivate our attention, not to feed our souls. Fear and mockery and anger generate a lot more clicks and a lot more ad dollars than joy and peace and respect. It becomes easier and easier over time to be sucked into a cycle of despair and fear, because we are what we eat; we become what we consume.

And I can’t help but compare what we become when we consume these kinds of media to the image Paul offers to the Ephesians of a life in which we’re filled with grace. Paul tells them, “Be angry, but do not sin… Let no evil talk come out of your mouths… Put away all bitterness and wrath and anger, wrangling and slander… and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Eph. 4:26, 29, 31–32)

For a minute, this morning, be honest with yourself. You don’t have to admit it to anyone else. Just think: How much of what you consume with your mind, how much of what you read or watch or see on your phone, fills you with bitterness and wrath and anger, with wrangling and slander? And how much of it is giving you a kind and tender heart? How much of it is leading you to forgive, as you have been forgiven? I suspect that for most of us, the ratio favors anger.

I don’t say this as if news or politics were bad. I don’t say this as if current events were unimportant. They’re very important. I say this because what the angel says to the prophet Elijah applies just as well to each one of us: “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” (1 Kings 19:7)

Elijah sits in despair, unable to go any further. He’s a prophet living in fear of what the people in power will do. He’s done what he can, and he’s all out of strength. But God isn’t done with him. God has greater things in store, and so God sends an angel, and says to him, “Get up and eat.” And Elijah eats, and goes back to sleep. And the angel wakes him up again, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much.” And he gets up, and eats, and travels forty days, and it’s then and only then that he hears that still, small voice of God.

This is not a theological statement about the nature of bread. It’s not a finger-wagging reminder or an exhortation to improve his diet, literal or metaphorical. It’s a simple statement of fact: if you don’t eat something that nourishes you, you’re not going to make it to the end.

Whatever your politics, the next three months or so will probably be an anxious time. Even politics aside, I can safely predict that this year will be full of opportunities to feed on anger, and anxiety, and fear, because every year is.

So what do you need in your spiritual diet this year to make it to the end of the journey? What do you need to put away bitterness and wrath, and to fill yourself on kindness and love? What sustenance do you need to “walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God?” (Eph. 5:2)

We’ll have a few weeks more to delve into the living bread: But what does it mean for you, today, for this meal to feed you, so that you can make it for another week?

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Sermon — July 7, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Almost fifteen years ago, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a wonderful TED talk with the title, “The Danger of a Single Story.” The talk was a series of stories about what happens when we reduce all the complexity of a person’s life or a nation’s culture to a single story, as if something could only be one thing at once. And she explored this through stories from her own life.

She began with a visit to her family’s servants in the village they’d come from. Like many middle-class Nigerians in the city, her family employed domestic help. And her mother always told her how poor they were, how desperate the lives of their families were out there in the countryside. Chimamanda was shocked when they went for a visit one day. Not only was their village more beautiful than the desperate poverty she’d imagined, but the servants whom she’d been raised to pity were local heroes—the ones who’d made it in the big city and came back to spread their wealth. Her mother had only told her one story about their lives; but there were many more.

The pattern was reversed when she came to America for college, and realized that the single story of poverty she had been told about her family’s servants was the same story all her classmates had heard about Africa as a whole. Her parents weren’t oil tycoons, but they weren’t subsistence farmers—they were university professors. And yet her classmates looked at her as the distillation of every news story about any country in Africa. They asked her how her English got so good—it’s the official language of Nigeria. They looked to her for answers about countries thousands of miles across the continent. They asked her to play the tribal music of her people—and they were shocked when she put on Mariah Carey.

The danger of the single story is that limits who a person can be and what they can do. When people tell a single story about you, they insist that they already know who you are—that they know your beginning, middle, and end. Chimamanda’s mother told a single story, and she was wrong. Her classmates told a single story about her, and she turned it on its head.

And in our Gospel reading this morning, the danger of the single story comes to Jesus, and it turns out that the story that the people get to experience is exactly the story that they tell.

Jesus has been traveling around Galilee for a while, sailing back and forth across the sea, healing people and teaching and casting out demons, as usual. And he finally comes back to Nazareth, and begins to teach there, in the synagogue, on the Sabbath. And the people who hear him are amazed. But not exactly in a good way. “Where’d he get all this?” they say. (Mark 6:1) Isn’t this Mary’s kid? That’s James’s little brother, right? Isn’t that his sister over there? He’s no preacher. He’s no rabbi. He’s a carpenter. What’s he doing in the pulpit? they ask. And they take offense. (6:2–3)

They already know his story. They already know his role. They already know his place, and he needs to learn what it is.

And remarkably, Jesus goes along with it. He shakes his head, and offers a wise saying about prophets and their hometowns, but “he could do no deed of power there… except” heal a few people who are sick. (6:5)

It turns out that if you want to stop Jesus right in his tracks, this is the way to do it. If you feel like there’s something changing in your life, some growth or development, some new opportunity or lost capability, and you want to resist what the Holy Spirit might be doing—you can. If you have the sensation that God might be extending you an invitation to leave something behind in your life and step into something new, and you want to decline that invitation—you can reply with your regrets.

Just stick to the single story you tell about yourself.

I can’t leave this job right now and take that one—I’m supposed to care about X, even though I’m really finding myself more drawn to Y. I can’t let my children take care of me, even though they’re fifty or sixty years old—I’m a strong and independent person, and strong and independent people don’t need help. I can’t become friends with this neighbor, I can’t cross this line in our community—I know what they are like already, and we have nothing in common, I’m sure.

If you want to try to put an end to what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life, you can.

But then again, here you are in church. So what if you want to cooperate instead?

The danger in the Gospel this morning is the danger of the single story. But the invitation is the invitation to be like the apostles, to live our lives like those disciples Jesus sent out two by two to teach.

He sends them out, leaving everything behind. They take nothing with them with them but a walking stick—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts. They go out, to share the love of God with the world, and Jesus tells them that they should be prepared to fail. He tells them that times will come when they’re treated like his old neighbors treated him—when people are so stuck in the single story that they tell, that they refuse to welcome this story of good news. And he tells them what to do when others try to dismiss them. Don’t fight, don’t argue, don’t wag your finger—but shake the dust off your feet, and walk away. And where Jesus had failed, the disciples succeed: they cast out many demons, and heal many people who are sick.

I wonder what it would be like to think of yourself, on your journey through this world, as being like one of those apostles. I wonder what it would be like to lay down all the stories that you tell about yourself, the stories that limit you to do what you have always done and be who you have always been, and listen for the story the Holy Spirit is trying to tell. I wonder what it would be like to go out on the metaphorical road, taking only your walking stick, bringing only your curiosity, and faith, and the good news that God loves you and everyone around you, and to see where that road leads. I wonder what it would be like to be prepared to fail, to know that when you come to a fork in the road and you choose the wrong one, when things don’t work out, you can always shake the dust off your feet.

Everyone in this room is on a different journey through the world. We find ourselves at different places on the road. But it’s all one road. Our lives, and the lives of the people around us all contain maintain stories, and yet they are all part of God’s one story of love for us. And we are part of that story, whether we choose to be active participants or simply to stand by.

So I want to close by offering again the prayer with which this service began:

O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Sermon — June 30, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

These two stories of healing couldn’t be more different from one another; but when you get down to it, they’re exactly the same.

Jairus’s young daughter is in an acute crisis, near the end of her life; the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak has been suffering chronically for longer than Jairus’ daughter has been alive. Jairus comes openly to Jesus before the crowd. The woman approaches surreptitiously. He begs him over and over to heal his daughter, she reaches out without saying a word. He’s is a prominent member of society, a leader of the local synagogue, with messengers and mourners waiting back at home; she comes to Jesus alone and bankrupt, and the only social contact we hear about is with the physicians, under whose care she’s suffered much.

Their circumstances and their behaviors couldn’t be more different, and in fact they find themselves somewhat in competition. After all, when Jesus and Jairus set out for Jairus’ home, to heal his daughter, there’s no time to lose. She’s at the point of death. But the woman touches Jesus’ cloak, and she is healed, and Jesus turns aside. “Who touched my clothes?” he says. (Mark 5:30)

And I can only imagine how Jairus must have felt, just in front of him, leading the way to his daughter’s sickbed. He’s rushed out to find Jesus, and he’s found him; even better, he’s actually convinced him to come heal his daughter, and now Jesus has stopped along the way to ask, “Who touched my clothes?” in the middle of a crowd. Even the disciples are amazed— “Look at all these people,” they say. How could anyone know? (5:31) But the woman comes forward and falls on her knees. And Jesus blesses her and sends her along her way. (5:34)

Mark doesn’t tell us what’s going through Jairus’s head. But we can guess. If Jesus needs to stop and heal somebody, fine. But why the conversation? Why the delay? This woman’s sickness is important, for sure, but not urgent, not like his daughter’s illness; and yet Jesus takes his time, and I imagine Jairus somewhere between impatient and afraid.

And his worst fears are about to be realized, because while Jesus is still speaking, while he is still stopped along the way, someone comes bearing a message from Jairus’s house. “Your daughter is dead,” they say. And Jairus, who was full of words at the beginning of the story, begging Jesus repeatedly to come heal his daughter, is left speechless as his relief turns into despair.

But Jesus simply says, “Do not fear, only believe.” (5:37) He sends away the crowd who follow him, and the crowd of mourners. And despite their incredulous laughter at the idea that the child who has died while Jesus dilly-dallied on the road is merely asleep, he says to her, “Get up.” And she does.

This is a long story, and it’s full of strange and enticing details. There are so many questions that you might want to ask. What does it mean to say that Jesus’ healing power can simply flow out of him, that miracles can happen without his knowledge just because someone touched his cloak? Why does Mark record what Jesus says to the girl in Aramaic, Talitha cum, while translating the rest? Why does Jesus do everything in secrecy, sending away the crowd and the mourners and telling the family and the disciples to tell no one what they have seen? What’s up with the snack at the end?

If you step back for a minute, you might ask a bigger question. I said that the two healing stories couldn’t be more different, but at the heart of things, they’re really the same: Two stories about desperate people putting their faith in Jesus. This isn’t faith as a statement of belief, a collection of well-thought-out ideas about God and the world. This is faith as the last desperate act of someone who’s tried everything else. This is the trust that his help might make a difference. Jairus is so convinced that Jesus can save his daughter, in fact, that he gives up his last chance to see her alive to come and find him.

And the faith of these two people seems to be the catalyst for the healing that comes. “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Jesus says to the woman he has healed. “Go in peace, and be healed.” (Mark 5:34)

If only it were so easy for us.

The connection between healing, faith, and prayer is one of the most difficult ones in spiritual life, in my experience. We want to pray for healing, for ourselves, for other people, for the world. We want God to act, to cure us of our ailments whether they’re physical, or psychological, or spiritual. We wish we could just reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak, and be healed. And sometimes, remarkably, it seems that we are healed. I don’t know about you, but I really have seen examples of this kind of change. Sometimes that means recovery from an illness or injury in a way that baffles doctors’ expectations. Sometimes it’s recovery from an addiction that seemed impossible to shake. Sometimes it’s a sudden about-turn in life, that can only be described as a divine intervention.

But then, there are all the other times. All too often, the healing that we pray for doesn’t come. Our sick friend gets sicker, no matter how hard we pray; or our seemingly-healthy friend is suddenly at the brink, at the very moment when things seemed like they were finally looking up. And the more we hope for a miracle, the more we pray for healing, the stronger our faith that God will surely help, the worse it feels when nothing seems to change. Like Jairus, we’re left holding the disappointment and frustration that comes when our hopes for something better are dashed.

And I think we find ourselves in this second situation more often than not. The story of the New Testament is the story of miracles that come one after another. The story of Christian life is a story of prayers that seem to go unanswered.

But if the story of Jairus’ daughter tells us anything, maybe it’s that sometimes, it’s just too soon to tell.

If you pause the story when Jesus sends away the woman who’s been healed, Jairus’s mission has been a failure. He thought his prayers were being answered, he got his hopes up, but God didn’t answer soon enough. Jesus delayed, and his daughter died, and the healing that he hoped for never came, and the story ends with grief.

But the story doesn’t end there. Within minutes, everything has changed. Jairus’s daughter is alive. She’s walking around, and having something to eat. His prayers were not unanswered; they just hadn’t been answered yet, and God was doing something that Jairus hadn’t asked for, something that he probably hadn’t even imagined was possible.

That’s the challenging hope of the Christian faith: God’s response to our prayers for healing is never “no,” but sometimes it’s “not yet,” and sometimes “yes” doesn’t come this side of eternity. Because we know, after two thousand years of Christian life, that we don’t get to have Jairus’s miracle in the quite the same way. We say every Sunday that we believe in the resurrection of the dead, but we don’t mean that that will come in this world. Like Jairus, we will see the people we have loved and lost again, but in the world to come. The pain of loss and grief are just as real for us as they were for him on that long walk home, and our grief lasts much longer. But given the choice between two worlds—the world in which God doesn’t answer most of our prayers, and the world in which God just hasn’t answered them yet, I know which one I’d choose, any day.

I don’t know which prayers of yours need answering today; where you need God to do something that hasn’t happened yet, where you need something to change in yourself or someone else, but the change has not yet come. I don’t know where your soul “waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning.” (Psalm 130:5)

But I hold onto the promise that’s at the heart of Christian hope: That there is a God who loves you, and who cares for you, a God who is answering your prayers, even if you can’t see it happening yet; that there is a future in which our divisions will cease and our pain will end—that however long the night is that we spend in weeping, joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:6)

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Sermon — June 23, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

I’m always amazed by whose daily work consists of dealing with relatively stressful parts of the rest of our lives. The surgeon who walks into a room and describes precisely how she’s going to slice through your heart, with no apparent anxiety about the procedure, because while this is the scariest moment of your life, for her, it’s just a Tuesday at the office. The skydiving instructor who casually launches people out of an airplane before jumping out himself, as he’s done hundreds of times before. The airline pilot who pops onto the announcements to say, “This is your captain speaking. It looks like we’ve got a little bit of bumpy air up ahead, so I’m going to put on the seatbelt sign…” You can’t see him through the door, but he’s probably up there popping Fritos while you’re clutching the armrests for dear life! These people can be soothing—surely, if they think it’s not such a big deal, maybe it’s not such a big deal. But they’re also unnerving—after all, isn’t there a chance they’re just completely nuts?

Jesus is one of these people, for sure. Jesus is with the disciples in the boat, but he’s acting in a way that’s not at all like the disciples in the boat.

As a matter of fact, he’s been with the disciples in the boat all day. Such a large crowd had gathered that morning that Jesus had gotten into a boat on the sea and sat there, while people crowded around on land to listen. (Mark 4:1) He told them parables about sowing seed, and hiding lamps under a bushel, and how the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and “on that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let’s go across to the other side.’” (4:35) Now, Jesus is tired—speaking to a crowd without a microphone will do that to you—and he falls asleep. Deeply asleep. A huge wind starts to blow, and the waves are breaking over the bow, and the boat is being swamped. You can imagine the scene: people rushing around, trying to bail out; throwing things overboard, and desperately trying to remember how to swim.

But in the stern, Jesus is asnooze. And they go back and start shaking him—“Teacher,” they say, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing!?” (4:38) And he wakes up, and yawns. And what does he do?

Does he start shouting orders, like a seasoned sea captain, like the commanding Messiah they might expect him to be? “Batten down the hatches! Ease the sails!” (I’m not a sailor.) No. He does not.

Does he call upon the name of God, like a wise pastor, praying in words that give voice to the fear and pain of his people and bring them comfort, that artfully articulate their deepest desires in the moment of their greatest need? “O God, you still the storms of the sea; surround us with your loving care; protect us from all danger; and bring us in safety to our journey’s end. Amen.” No. He does not.

Does he grab a bucket and start bailing? Nope. Does he panic, too? Of course not. He looks over the side of the boat at the sea, and he says, “You stop it! Chill!” And it does.

This little vignette tells us so much about God, and about Jesus, and about our lives, and I think it goes back to a distinction I noted earlier: just as Jesus was with the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, but he wasn’t like the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, Jesus is with us on our sometimes-stormy pathways through life—but Jesus isn’t quite like us, and that’s a very good thing.

Jesus is with us. And Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Our God is not a cruel god, playing with us for sport, creating storms to torment us. And our God is not a cold, clinical god, swamping us with waves to test our faith or improve our endurance. God is not an absent god, creating the universe and laying down a moral order and then gone off somewhere on vacation, while the world burns and our prayers pile up in the inbox. Our God is a compassionate God, a God who “suffers with” us—this is what “compassion” means, “suffering with”—a God who comes among us on earth, and experiences what we experience. God feels every wave as it hits the boat, and God knows what it’s like to be swamped.

God is with us, but God is not exactly like us. Jesus doesn’t panic, when the people around him are panicking. He’s not afraid of the wind and the storm. He absorbs their panic and their fear. Like that skilled surgeon or jaded airline pilot he remains unbothered, infuriatingly calm. But he doesn’t just stay calm. He acts, in an unexpected way. He speaks directly to the sea, and tells it to be still, and it is.

There’s a dramatic irony in this story, something we know that the disciples don’t. “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” they ask, and we know that in fact, he cares very much. He cares not just about them, but about all of us; not just about the fact that they might be perishing in that boat, but that we are all perishing; that we are all only mortal, in the end. He knows, and he cares, and he acts.

In this story, he immediately stills the storm. But there’s an echo of another ending here, another way that he could act. Did anyone hear the echo of the book of Jonah in this story? Jonah flees from God’s call, and gets on a ship, and God sends a storm. There’s wind and waves and the sailors are afraid, but Jonah lies asleep. The two scenes are the same. The sailors wake Jonah up, and tell him to pray to his god, like they are praying to theirs. And Jonah, like Jesus, chooses to act. Unlike Jesus, he doesn’t rebuke the storm. He tells the sailors, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea.” (Jonah 1:12) And they do. And the ship is saved. And that’s where the whale comes in, by the way—God sends a whale to swallow him up, and Jonah remains entombed in the belly of the whale three days, and then rises again. (Does that ring any bells?)

Jesus doesn’t throw himself into the sea to save his companions. Not yet. But that’s where the story is going. The echoes of Jonah are no accident. Jesus is going to throw himself off the boat, metaphorically speaking, to save the people around him. Jesus is going to hand himself over to death on the Cross, and after three days, rise again. And it’s that act of self-sacrificing love that saves us from the power of death so that we, too, can travel safely across the stormy seas to the other side.

Maybe this morning you feel battered by the storm, tossed around by the waves and barely hanging on. Maybe this morning you feel good, but you remember what that’s like. Or maybe you look around at a world that’s full of chaos, and violence, and war, and like the disciples, sometimes you feel afraid.

You’re not alone. God is with you in the boat. God loves you, and God cares that you’re in danger, and God comes to be with you there. And you are allowed to cry out! You’re allowed to say to God, like the disciples say to Jesus, “Don’t you care!?” That doesn’t bother God one bit. Jesus is calm, whatever the source of the storm. And when you bring that fear and pain to God in prayer, God can help to lighten the load, because God can carry any amount of it for you, and God will not be swamped.

Sometimes God works through other people, of course. Sometimes God is present to us in our own, quiet prayer, but often God is present to us in a friend’s listening ear, or in a conversation with someone we trust. You even pay someone to sit and listen while you talk to God sometimes, even if you think you’re talking to me. And that’s all well and good, and I hope that it helps calm the waves.

But God is not just a listening ear. Like Jesus, waking up in that boat, God chooses to act, in mysterious and sometimes surprising ways. I wish it were the case that God would simply still the storm. I wish it were the case that we could see such quick results. But who am I to try to guess where God is acting and where God’s not? I wasn’t there, nor was Job, when God laid the foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and the heavenly beings shouted for joy. (Job 38:4, 7) I can only trust that God is stilling the storm to a whisper, that God is working in our lives and in our world to calm the waves, and that God will one day bring us safely that distant shore.

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Sermon — June 16, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonI love the middle of June. For me, it’s the time when the world feels most vibrant, especially on a day when it’s 72 degrees with a light breeze, like today, and the wind is rustling through the leaves. Those leaves blow me away. They’re as green as the altar hangings. Greener, in fact, almost a truer kind of green that makes the sogginess of spring feel like it’s finally paid off. June is a time of transformation and growth. The school year is coming to an end, and summer vacation is beginning, and you can see it in the faces of the children on the street. The days are as long as they’re going to get, and you can hear it in the songs of the birds in the morning. The days are warm and bright, and all around Charlestown, on streets wide and narrow, utility trucks have sprouted up to jackhammer and to dig round the clock.

Even Jesus has joined in the spirit of the season. For his part, he gives us two parables of growth this Sunday, two images from the natural world to help us understand the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is like a seed, sown in the ground, he says; and the kingdom of God is like the mustard seed, smallest of all the seeds.

There’s a parade today, so that’s all the cute intro you’ll get. Let’s dig right in.

Actually, first, I should say a word about what these parables are about: the “kingdom of God.” Jesus doesn’t say “God is like a sower, who scatters seed on the ground.” And he doesn’t say that faith is like a mustard seed, which will grow in you—that’s a different parable altogether. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 13:19) These parables aren’t about you, or Jesus, or God, but “the kingdom of God,” and for Jesus, this is almost a technical term. It’s the main thing that Jesus teaches about. He isn’t here to tell us what to do, or even to tell us how to deepen our spiritual lives. He’s here to tell us something about “the kingdom of God.”

This “kingdom” is not a place—it’s more of a situation, or a state of reality. It’s the kingship of God, it’s the idea of God becoming king, and no one else. The people of Israel had been ruled in the past by famous kings, by David and Solomon and all their heirs, but they had gone astray; they were not “good shepherds” of the people. In Jesus’ day, they’d been ruled for hundreds of years by foreign kings, who had no interest in anything but their own power. The prophets had long foretold that there would come a time when God himself would become king, when God would give up on human rulers and come down to shepherd the people. So “the kingdom of God” is a kind of shorthand for what God is doing in this world to bring about God’s vision of justice and peace.

As Jesus begins his ministry, John the Baptist is preaching that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near!” (Mark 1:15) Jesus begins to teach the people what that means. And they’re curious: Will he lead them in a revolutionary war? Will they finally throw the Roman armies out? Will the kingdom of God finally come, with God ruling over the people in splendor and glory? Will there be a parade?

Not exactly.

I want to say three things about these two parables of the kingdom of God:

Thing Number 1: The kingdom grows slowly, on its own schedule, in unobserved and often-unobservable ways. It’s like a seed, sown upon the earth. Day after night, the farmer wakes up, and checks on the seed, and goes to sleep, (4:27) but nothing that the farmer does affects its growth, especially in the days before modern fertilizers and irrigation, when it was all just up to the soil and the rain. The farmer can’t even see the change: the seed sprouts and grows, but it’s down there in the dirt, and it’s not until it sprouts up that the farmer knows it’s growing at all. The earth “produces of itself,” our translation somewhat awkwardly says: Mark says in Greek that the earth bears fruit automátē, “automatically,” and I like that. (4:28) Whatever God’s doing in the world, it’s happening in its own way and on its own time, and we can barely even see it growing, let alone do anything to hurry it along.

And yet—and here’s Thing Number 2—things only happen slowly until they happen all at once. Night turns to day, and day turns to night; the farmer goes to sleep, and rises again, as the seed slowly grows into a plant: the stalk, the head, the grain, then BANG! The sickle comes out. (4:29) There’s nothing for the farmer to do, day after day until field of grain is ripe, and then there’s more work than there’s time, because the harvest has come. It’s like the parable of the leaven, when Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a little yeast mixed into some flour. The dough rises slowly, for a while, and then when it’s ready, it goes into the oven. God acts in the world through slow, steady preparation—then sudden transformation.

And what a transformation it is. That’s Thing Number 3: When God starts working in the world or in our lives, we can’t begin to imagine what’s coming on the other side. The mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds—not really, but whatever—but the shrub that grows is big. And this is a testament to the scale of what God can do. But the parable of the mustard seed isn’t just about God making something big from something very, very small. The shrub and the seed aren’t just different in quantity; they’re different in kind.

Who could look at a tiny mustard seed and picture the entire plant? Who could look at an acorn or a little whirligig and imagine the oak or the maple? Take a look at one of those trees outside, towering and green, and try to imagine its whole growth. And then run the process in reverse: If all you had were seeds, would you really be able to imagine those towering trees, with their bright green leaves?

We live in a world of seeds, just beginning to grow. And we can only begin to imagine what they will become. All around us, in our neighborhoods, in our families, in our own lives, the kingdom of God is growing like a seed. Whatever change God is bringing about, it’s going to come slowly, slowly, slowly—then all at once.

You might not notice it right now. The mustard seed, after all, is very small. And if you’re wondering how small, well… I don’t usually go in for gimmicky props in my preaching, but “for everything there is a season.” And all around this church I’ve hidden a dozen mustard seeds. And I’ve left a couple little bowls, on the way out the two doors, for you to take one home.

And your homework is this—It has two parts:

1. Keep your eyes open for the mustard seeds of the kingdom that are scattered around this church, and scattered around your life. Keep your eyes open for the actual mustard seeds, or Brian’s going to be very confused. But pay attention, too, to the changes you see in yourself, or in the people around you, and start to ask: Is this a seed of something God is doing? How will I know it’s sprouted and is ready to harvest?
2. Take a seed home. And try to keep track of it. And when you lose it, as you inevitably will, remind yourself that this is exactly the point; that the seeds of the kingdom of God are small, and easy to lose track of, but they are nevertheless there.

“For you have made [us] glad by your acts, O Lord,
and [we] shout for joy because of the works of your hands.”
(Psalm 92:4)

Amen.

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Sermon — June 9, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Have you ever heard the one about the college undergrad who wanders into a debate about the nature of free will?

So, a group of philosophy professors is meeting for their monthly faculty lunch. And they’re arguing about free will. Do we, as human beings, have control over our actions, or are they just the result of physical or biological processes beyond our control?

“Look, people are responsible for their actions,” one professor says over lunch. “Yes, of course they’re shaped by their experiences of the past. But we know that mature human beings make choices all the time between right and wrong. We have free will, and we’re responsible for what we do with it.”

“Oh, come on!” says the second one. “We can’t just work off intuition. Psychology clearly show that our brains make decisions for us before we’ve even consciously realized it, and then we come up with the rationalizations after. Our wills aren’t free at all; our actions are just the result of biology. Empirical science shows that free will is an illusion.”

“Science?” asks the third. “You want to talk about science? Don’t you know anything about how the advent of quantum physics has opened our eyes to a non-deterministic model of causality!?” Things are really heating up.

Just then, a sophomore who’s wandered into the room pipes up. “I’m not so sure about free will. I walked in here, and I saw your lunch buffet, and— I know it was wrong, and I knew I shouldn’t do it, but, well… I just couldn’t stop myself. I ate all the cookies.”

From the Christian theological perspective, at least, there are really two different questions about free will: “Do we have free will?” as in, are the choices we make totally determined by some outside thing, by biology or physics or even by God, or are they under our control? But there’s another question, too— “Do we have free will?” as in, “When we make a decision, whether that’s really an individual choice or determined by some outside force—can we actually follow through?” Are our wills free? Or are they somehow in chains?

The Apostle Paul famously wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) You may know the feeling. Our cookie-eating student certainly does. It’s what Martin Luther called, somewhat ominously, The Bondage of the Will, the fact that the human will is, in some sense, constrained; that there’s some gap between our conscious decision-making processes, and the things we actually do. And I think this is the more relevant question about free will. With all due respect to our philosophical friends, few people are bothered day to day about whether their decisions are predetermined by biology or physics or not; but many people struggle with the inadequacy of their willpower to carry out those decisions.

It’s a pattern that dates back all the way to the beginning of humankind, to this foundational story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had free will, and they gave it away. They received the command from God never to eat the fruit of the tree that stood in the middle of the Garden. But they ate it, anyway.

They try to pass the blame along. Both Adam and Eve try to claim that they didn’t have free will, that their actions had some cause outside themselves. “The woman whom you gave me,” says Adam, trying to pin the blame not only on Eve but on God, “she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” (Gen. 3:12) Then God turns to Eve: Don’t look at me! she seems to say. “The serpent tricked me, and I ate!” (Gen. 3:13)

It’s not a very good defense. God entrusted them with the freedom to choose, but told them not to eat the fruit, but they did it anyway, and so God put enmity between the serpent in the Garden and the woman, and between their descendants. And this sounds just about right, because here we are, all these generations later, still struggling against our demons.

You often find Jesus battling demons, too. That’s not just a cute segue from one reading to the next. Much of Jesus’ time, in his early ministry, especially in this early Gospel of Mark, is spent casting out demons of one kind or another. Before he even begins teaching the disciples anything, in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, here he is, so renowned for his demon-fighting skills that people have begun to speculate. Is he a demon himself? Or at least, demon-possessed? Is he a sorcerer who calls on one dark power to defeat another?

Not at all, Jesus replies. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” (Mark 3:23-24) To use evil to cast out evil would only weaken itself.

Jesus isn’t evil, or using evil powers. I assume we can all agree on that.

But Jesus continues with an interesting image, that’s a little less obvious: “No one can enter the Strong One’s house,” he says, “and plunder his property, without first tying up the Strong One; then indeed the house can be plundered.” (Mark 3:27) Of all the metaphors we have for who Jesus is and what Jesus does, this has to be one of the strangest: Jesus Christ, Burglar.

Here’s one way to understand what Jesus means: The house is the world in which we live. The Strong One is the spiritual force of evil, violence, and despair that Jews and Christians have sometimes personified as Satan or the serpent. Jesus’ ultimate battle is not with any of the smaller forces of evil, the demons that afflicted people in their lives. Jesus first needs to confront the great power, the Strong One himself, and tie him up; and when that power is bound, then the property in the house can be plundered; when the Strong One is held captive, then we can be freed.

This is, ultimately, the story of Jesus’ life, and of his journey toward the Cross. Jesus is headed toward a struggle against all the powers that hold us down, against the power of Death itself. And we live now, as always, in the in-between time, when Jesus’ victory has begun, but is not yet complete; when the Strong One has been bound, but we’re not yet fully free.

And so we have the ability to love. We have the ability to will and to work for the good. But our wills are not yet completely free to do what’s right, as perfectly as we might want.

So there’s the bad news: the human will isn’t free. We will never reach the place of perfect self-control, in which our conscious decisions and our actions are always perfectly aligned. We’ll never even reach the place in which our decisions or our values are exactly what they should be. We’ll never quite love God with our whole hearts. It’s unlikely that we’ll love our neighbors as ourselves; that bar can be very high, depending on the neighbor. We’ll come here, again and again, with the need to confess our smaller sins, our gossip or apathy, our harsh words or our imperfect compassion—and sometimes even bigger ones.

But that’s good news, too: the human will isn’t free. If you find yourself, coming here, again and again, just as imperfect as the week before— It’s not just you. And I don’t mean that to pass along the blame (“The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the fruit!”) I mean it as an antidote to shame. There’s no shame in being an imperfect person, in having imperfect control over your will. That’s not an individual flaw. That’s the human condition. And everyone else faces that struggle, too.

But there’s even better news than that, and it’s this: We’re not facing that struggle alone. The Holy Spirit is with you, in all the decisions and all the actions of daily life, strengthening you, helping you grow toward a more consistent and a more compassionate kind of love; pray for the Holy Spirit to guide you in those decisions and in those actions, when you need God’s help. Jesus has already gone before you, to bind up the Strong One so that you can be free, even if imperfectly so. And God is beckoning you forward, inviting you into a renewed and restored life, raising you up just as Jesus was raised (2 Cor. 4:14). So “do not lose heart,” as Paul says. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed, day by day.” Amen.

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Sermon — June 2, 2024The Rev. Greg Johnston“Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride,” one 16th-century Hebrew hymn begins, “Let’s welcome the face of Shabbat. To greet Shabbat let’s go, let’s be gone, for she is the wellspring of blessing… Shake yourself free, rise from the dust, dress in your garments of splendor, my people.” And to this day, in synagogues all around the world, this song is sung on Friday at dusk, to welcome the arrival of the Sabbath day of rest on Saturday. The hymn captures the joy of a day of rest at the end of a long week of work. Who among us has wanted to sing, on a Friday afternoon, “Shake yourself free, rise from the dust!” It’s a liturgical TGIF, literally.

It reminds me of something my friend Meg used to say, more informally. Meg was doing a master’s degree in Jewish Studies when I was in seminary, and we ended up taking a bunch of classes together, including one with a discussion section that met early Friday afternoon, just a few hours before Shabbat began. I remember Meg leaving class one day as exams loomed over us and we were all studying hard, and saying goodbye—not with the traditional Shabbat Shalom, “Have a peaceful Shabbat,” but with a hopeful and joyous phrase that I will never forget: “Shabbat sh’almost!” Thank God it’s Friday.

But keeping the Sabbath isn’t always pure joy. I think of the story of the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire. Going into the 1924 Olympics, Liddell was favored to win the 100 meter dash. But he ultimately refused to run because the heats for the 100 were being held on a Sunday, and as a good Scottish Presbyterian, he refused to violate the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy for something so frivolous as a footrace. The story has a happy ending—Liddell ended up winning the 400m race in Paris—but it’s a good example of the burden that observing the Sabbath can be in a world that doesn’t expect it.

You might think that we live in the best of both worlds. In our culture, many of us get two days off from work at the end of the week, not just one. We should have twice the TGIF joy as a 16th-century Jewish hymn writer. And at the same time, the days of wet-blanket Puritan restrictions are behind us. Shops and restaurants are open on Sundays. No one will scold you if they see you having fun on the Lord’s Day. And yet—I think we desperately need the Sabbath more than ever, these days.

The origins of the Sabbath stretch back to the beginning of time. On six days, God worked to create the universe; on the seventh day, God rested. And you, too, are to rest, God told the ancient Israelites. Not just the privileged who can afford to take the day of, or the especially devout who want to keep it holy; but everyone: you, your son, your daughter, your ox, your donkey; even the people from foreign lands living among you; even the people you have enslaved will rest, God tells them, because you remember that you were enslaved, and made to work without rest. (Deut. 5:14-15) And the descendants of those Israelites whom Pharaoh had enslaved vowed never again to give up the opportunity to rest.

The Jewish people were considered remarkable in the ancient world, in fact, for the custom of the Sabbath day. Ancient writers commented on this peculiar ethnic custom of taking a day off each work, something no other ancient people did. But the Sabbath was vital to Jewish life. Observing it is not just taking a day off from work. It’s taking a day off from work so that you can be with family, and community, and God. On the Sabbath, the people of God enter an alternate reality. They are free from the hierarchies of the everyday, in which their lives are determined by the boss’s instructions, or by the demands of productivity. And they enter a time of community and presence. “The Sabbath,” the great 20th-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

The Christian relationship to the Sabbath has always been complicated by Jesus’ own complicated relationship to the Sabbath, which is often misunderstood. Consider our two stories in Mark today. It may seem at first glance as if Jesus is rejecting the Sabbath entirely, flagrantly violating the Sabbath commandments. But this is only the case if you assume that the Pharisees are right about what is and isn’t allowed. Jesus’ disciples pluck some grain from the fields to eat; the Pharisees ask, “why are they doing what’s not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) But this is begging the question. It’s not lawful on the Sabbath to work; but the commandment doesn’t explain what this means. Are the disciples working on the Sabbath? None of them are grain-pluckers by trade. The rabbinic tradition would later codify thirty-nine categories of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but in the centuries around Jesus’ life it was all still open for debate.

Could you require your employees to work on the Sabbath? Absolutely not, and Jesus doesn’t say you could. Should you go to the syngagogue, to read and pray on the Sabbath? Yes, and Jesus regularly did. Could you save a person’s life, even if it meant violating one of the other laws? Yes, and any Orthodox rabbi today would tell you that you are in fact commanded to break the Sabbath to save a life. Should you heal someone today who could be healed tomorrow? Well, that was where Jesus and the Pharisees are having their debate.

If you assume that Sabbath observance is narrow and defined, it might seem that Jesus is rejecting it. But if you recognize that the debate over the Sabbath was in fact very broad, it seems clearer that Jesus is just participating in that debate. For Jesus, the emphasis seems to be on the joy of the Sabbath, an invitation from God to rest and be restored, rather than a series of limits to be obeyed. To eat and to be healed are part of that Sabbath restoration and rest.

Plucking a bit of grain when you’re hungry and walking through a field, is not like working for Pharaoh seven days a week. It’s not even quite like working in your own field, if that’s what you do every day. To say to someone, “stretch out your hand,” and to heal them as they do, is not work. Not for Jesus. It’s not something that distracts people from the presence of God, that defiles a holy day. It’s something that points them to God, that shows them God’s miraculous presence in their midst.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind,” Jesus says, “not humankind for the sabbath.” (2:27) And so he embraces the Sabbath principle of rest, that builds up humankind, and he tends to lean in the direction of allowing anything that builds us up, rather than discouraging anything that could be work.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind.” The Sabbath was made for you. God has invited you to cease your work; to lay aside, for one day, the things that others are demanding of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, and to take time to be with your community or family and with God, in a realm “where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

Embracing the Sabbath today is not about going back to some imagined golden age, where everyone spent a day together in rest and prayer. We’ll probably never return to a world in which shops and restaurants are closed on Sundays, so retail and service workers can have a the day off, too. And in fact, we’re moving in the other direction. It’s hard to get that Sabbath rest when your work can buzz at you from your project, any time. And whether you have paid work or not, we all have “work” from which we need to rest, housework and volunteer work and the thousand small chores that we feel like we should do, and it’s hard to assert our freedom from them.

But Sabbath is good. Rest is good. And so, I want to invite you to think: What is your Sabbath time, and how can you observe it and keep it holy? Maybe for you it’s on Sunday morning, here, or on Saturday some time. Maybe it’s Friday family movie night, where you can order takeout and watch the same four movies over and over again. Maybe it’s the Wednesday-morning walking group where you have some time to reconnect with friends. Maybe it really is a day, a full day where you can put down the phone, and turn off the TV, and be present with the people around you. Or maybe for you, the Sabbath is a place, where you can go during the week and simply be, and not do. But in the end, the Sabbath is really an alternate reality, a way of being in which you are free to stop for a while and rest.

Wherever the Sabbath is, whenever the Sabbath is, God made it for you. And God’s inviting you to accept it. It can be very hard to unplug, to put down the list of todos, to stop working and let yourself rest. But if you can find that Sabbath place in your life, if you can “shake yourself free, [and] rise from the dust,” you just might find you look forward to it more than anything else, and when it approaches, you find yourself thinking: Shabbat sh’almost! The Sabbath is almost here.

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Sermon — May 26, 2024 — Trinity SundayThe Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

There’s an emotion that our ancestors sometimes called “fear,” and which we’re more likely to understand if we call it “awe”: a feeling of reverence and wonder mixed with dread, inspired by finding yourself in the presence of something you can’t even begin to wrap your mind around. It’s something I remember feeling when I was ten years old or so, standing on a transparent footbridge above a waterfall, and suddenly realizing that there was nothing supporting me but some long-retired engineer’s calculations and a prayer. It’s what I felt when we were sent home from the hospital with a newborn baby, just a couple days old, and all the nurses and the helpers were gone, and I just remember thinking: “You’re leaving this thing with us?” It’s what I felt the first time I got the phone call to plan my first funeral, as a new priest; to be the one to bear witness to a family’s grief and to be with them through their process of mourning and remembrance.

When our ancestors talked about “the fear of the Lord,” this is what they meant—not that God is scary or intimidating. Not that we should be afraid of God’s eternal punishment. But that our God is an awesome god, in the full sense of the word—because the vastness and the strangeness of God has the power to fill us with awe.

Awe is what Isaiah felt, more than 2500 years ago, when he was confronted with the prospect of speaking the word of God to the people of God, and that same awe is what many modern preachers feel when we step into the pulpit: “Woe is me! I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips”—no offense— “yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5) How could we presume to follow “The Word of the Lord” with any word of our own?

One of my go-to prayers on a Sunday morning comes from a Lutheran book called the Minister’s Prayer Book, a set of daily devotions for pastors. In good Lutheran fashion, this book has a relatively low view of human perfection and a high view of God’s grace and mercy, and so in a section entitled “Prayers of Preparation for Ministry, On Sunday,” my favorite prayer reads: “Lord God, you have appointed me to be a…pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and were it not for your help, I would long since have ruined it all. Therefore I cry unto you… Lord, use me as your instrument, only do not forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.” (The book rotates between my desk and the sacristy, throughout the year, but it’s never far away.)

I don’t say this to fish for compliments. (I know you all think I’m great.) And I don’t think it reveals some hidden psychopathology. I say it because it’s true for me. Congregations entrust their pastors with many things—not just an hour of your time on Sunday mornings, which we’d better not waste, but the most precious and fragile moments in your lives, and a pastor who mishandles that trust can be just as devastating, in his own way, as a structural engineer whose hand slips on the slide rule. And so I approach my work with a certain sense of awe. But this isn’t just true for priests. I think it might be true for you, as well. The things we do in our lives are really important. Some of us are nurses or doctors entrusted with people’s health; some of us are teachers, or parents, entrusted with the care of children—all of us are human beings living as neighbors of one another and as stewards of God’s creation, and in these roles we are entrusted with incredible, precious, and fragile things. And from time to time I suspect we all feel that overwhelming awe—that reverence mixed with dread that comes when we suddenly doubt that we’re not quit up to the task.

Life is a series of challenges we are not adequate to face.

And yet.

Isaiah despairs. How can I be a prophet? How can I speak on God’s behalf? I am a man of unclean lips. But God does not despair. God doesn’t put Isaiah on a Performance Improvement Plan, and fire him if his prophecies don’t work out. God doesn’t criticize Isaiah from afar, or judge him for his many imperfections. God doesn’t say, “Stop worrying, you’ll be fine!” God sends a seraph with a coal from the altar and touches his lips. And you might think this is a painful thing, and maybe it was. But it’s not about the pain. It’s not a punishment. A sacrifice in the Temple would be made by burning incense, or grain, or meat at the altar. This live coal is the instrument of that sacrifice, the means of making an offering to God. God sees Isaiah, in all his imperfection. God sees him unable or unwilling to approach the holy place, and God reaches out. God brings the holy place to him, and marks him as holy, and says, You are worthy of offering yourself to God. And so when God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah has the strength to answer that call, with confidence—and maybe still with dread—“Here am I.”

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims the same cycle of God’s grace, the same invitation to become something greater than we think that we can be. None of us is Jesus, Paul readily admits. None of us is perfect; earlier in the letter, Paul reminds us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) But even though we are not the perfect Son of God, we are children of God; not by nature, but by adoption.

And this is an extraordinary thing to say. “You have received a spirit of adoption,” Paul writes, and the Spirit itself bears witness that you “are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the loving, perfect God-made-flesh who has always been God’s equal and heir. And yet God has chosen us, sometimes loving but rarely perfect, to be the siblings and equals of Christ. God has chosen us, God has chosen you, to inherit the kingdom of God. That awesome God, that One whose voice breaks the cedar trees, whose voice splits the flames in fire, so majestic that even just the hem of his robe fills the whole Temple, so vast that the overwhelming expanse of the Milky Way is just a drop in his Creation, has chosen you, in all your frailty, or inadequacy, or imperfection, to be a child of God, a sibling of Christ. And you are.

On the Sunday after Pentecost every year, we observe Trinity Sunday, a day devoted to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, to the proposition that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God. And this somewhat technical subject can sometimes drain that sense of awe. But the Trinity is not the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is God. And what’s so interesting about Christianity is not the doctrine of God; what’s interesting about Christianity is God, and what touches us the most is not what we think about God, but what God does in our lives.

So think, for a minute: Where do you feel the way Isaiah feels? Where is that sense of inadequacy for you? Where do you feel unworthy, or imperfect? If God appeared to you, and said, “I need you to—[fill in the blank],” what is it that would make you respond, “Woe is me!” because you were certain that you could not?

The Holy Spirit, is working in you, even now. The Spirit is working in you to bring about new life. The Spirit bears witness with your Spirit that you are a child of God, that you are good and you are loved. In your Isaiah place, whatever it is, in all your feelings of dread, in the sense that you’re not quite up to the task, God reaches out. God sends a seraph with a live coal in its hand, to say that you are worthy to offer yourself to God; that God knows your imperfection and God wants you nevertheless, and when God asks “Whom shall I send?” you are enough to answer, “Here am I; send me!”

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Sermon — May 12, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

From time to time in every one of our lives, a certain question arises. It can be born of frustration or confusion, dread or despair. It’s a question that arises at the intersection the big issues of value and meaning with the realities of daily life. It’s a question you may have even asked yourself once or twice this week:

“What’s the point of this meeting?”

Now, the exact situation varies from time to time. If you’re in school, you may sometimes wonder why you even have classes the last few days before summer vacation, when exams are over and all you’re going to do is watch a movie anyway. If you’re sitting in a monthly committee meeting, you may wonder why it wasn’t just canceled, if there’s nothing actually on the agenda. You may find sometimes that having a meeting is serving as a replacement for doing something. And sometimes, it turns out that there really is a point, it just takes a while to get there; for the first ten or fifteen minutes of a conversation, you wonder why this person wanted to talk with you at all, until suddenly the penny drops, and the true purpose is revealed—and then the whole conversation that’s already happened begins to make sense.

There’s a little bit of this third situation in the writing style of John. Both the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John reveal their meaning in a certain roundabout way. And you might think to yourself, as you read them or hear them: “I know there’s a point to this… But what is it?”

And then, toward the very end, both the Gospel and the Letter just lay it right out. Each one of them, in the closing chapter, tells you the point of the meeting; they tell you why they’re writing. And there’s a difference between the two that’s part of why I love the First Letter of John so much.

The Gospel of John comes to an end just after the Doubting Thomas story, when Jesus has revealed himself in resurrected form to this questioning disciple. We don’t have the clean ending of the Ascension story that we get in the Gospel of Luke, when forty days after Easter—that was on Easter—the resurrected Jesus finally leaves the disciples behind and ascends into heaven. John leaves the story open: “Now,” he writes, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31) At the end of twenty chapters of elevated theology and difficult discourses, John finally tells us the point: He’s written all this “so that you may come to believe,” and that through believing, “you may have life.”

There’s a similar statement of purpose in the closing verses of the First Letter of John: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13) And while this speaks the same language and shares the same vocabulary as the conclusion of the Gospel, it’s not quite the same thing. The Gospel is written “so that you may come to believe,” and through believing, have life; the Letter is written “to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

And this, to me, is a magnificent phrase: “so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

First, that verb: “Know.” The Letter isn’t written to convince or persuade you. It isn’t written to criticize or condemn you. It’s written to remind you, to help you know something. It’s there for what Christian theology traditionally calls “assurance,” the reminder that you don’t need to worry about salvation, or be afraid of judgment. John doesn’t want to teach you how to earn eternal life, he wants you to know that you already have it.

1 John reminds us to be honest about our failings, because “if we say we have no sin,” we deceive only ourselves. It invites us to be transformed and grow in the Spirit, because while “we are God’s children now… what we will be has not yet been revealed.” It reminds us that we ought to “love one another, for love is from God.” But in the end, what really matters is not what we do, but what God does. The power of our faith is not our love for God, or our love for one another, but God’s love for each one of us, for “God is love,” John writes, and “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” And this beautiful letter has been written to help that message of God’s grace and love sink in; John really wants you to know that you have eternal life.

And to know that you have it. And that’s a second important thing. The message of 1 John is not that you will “inherit eternal life,” which is a phrase common in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s not that one day, you’ll go to heaven and then you will have eternal life. It’s that you have eternal life, already now. “Whoever has the Son has life,” the letter says. And you have the Son. You have Jesus in your life. You have Jesus in your heart. You can have Jesus with you because, as the beautiful prayer for Ascension Day says, Jesus “ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” And because you have Jesus, you have life; already now eternal life is yours.

And this can only make sense if we clarify what “eternal” means. In Christian theology, “eternity” is not so much a quantity of time as a quality. In other words, the “eternal” in “eternal life” is not primarily a measurement of length, it’s a description of what that life is like. It is, as the Nicene Creed says, “the life of the world to come,” the life of the new creation God has in store for all of us. Now, we believe that in that world we do not get sick, or suffer, or die, and so eternal life does last forever; but that’s not its only quality. The life of the world to come, is a life in which we love, and are loved. It’s a life in which we will know one another, fully, and be fully known. It’s a life in which we will be reconciled to one another and to God, in which truth, and beauty, and peace are the organizing principles of life.

And the message of Easter is that that world isn’t only a future reality for which we wait. Christ is risen, and Christ is alive, and the process of renewing and restoring and recreating the world is already going on—even though it is not yet complete. Although the kingdom of God has not yet arrived in fullness, it is already present here, intersecting with our world in a thousand different ways. And so even now, we can begin to live the life of eternity; even now, while living in this world, we can live as if we were living in the world to come, and this is what John wants us to know: that even now, we have eternal life.

One of the great blessings of my life has been the presence of our brothers just up the river at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, in Cambridge. SSJE is an Episcopal community of monks, a dozen men who’ve devoted themselves to a life together shaped by service and prayer. The brothers are some of the most loving, authentic, and holy men I’ve ever met. And part of what makes them so loving and so authentic is their willingness to admit that being a monk is not all sweetness and light. Being a monk is, in large part, like being married forever to a bunch of people with whom you’re not in love; or being life-long roommates with a dozen guys with whom you have no bonds of family, or prior friendship; who are united only by the shared desire to abide in the love of God, and who sometimes get on your nerves. Monastic life is a constant practice of living the life of the world to come together, even amid the resentments and disappointments of the life of this world.

Because they are the Society of St. John the Evangelist, after all, the brothers have always had a special relationship with the Gospel and Letters of John, and so I’m going to let Brother David Vryhof have the last words in this sermon series on 1 John. Reflecting on the Gospel of John and on the life of the great mystic Brother Lawrence of the Cross, Brother David writes, “We, too, can learn to abide in God, to draw our strength from God’s life at work within us, to rely on God every moment of every day. We too can have this larger life, this eternal life, the very life of God as our daily fare… The larger life we are promised in Christ is not found by striving for success, social status or material gain; nor is it found in pursuing righteousness or holiness (witness the Pharisees). It is found by surrendering ourselves to God’s life within us and by trusting God’s strength to be made manifest in our weakness. This life is a gift – not to be earned, but received – the gift of living in union with God.”

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Sermon — May 5, 2024Pia Bertelli“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child as well. 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.”

If there was any question over the last four weeks about what it means to be an “Easter People”, there should be no doubt now. The first time I heard this term “Easter People”, I was in a baptism class for my now 27 year old daughter. Someone asked a question and the priest, Dean Wolfe, who, by the way, is now the rector at St Bart’s in Manhattan, threw up his hands and exclaimed joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!” It really made an impression on me and I began to say it to myself, to my churchy friends and, in turn, to embrace the idea. We are a people of great hope. Great hope for the victory of our faith in God’s love to conquer the world. How? How can that happen?

As I was trying to get an understanding of what was going on in this scripture passage, I had to draw a diagram. The words seemed to me to be going in a circle. It wasn’t linear and it didn’t stop at love. The writer of 1st John says that when we believe in Jesus we are born of God and if you love the parent, God, you love the child, not just his child Jesus, but we who are also born of God. Our love of God means we obey his commandments. We know from our reading of John 15, that commandment is to love one another, the other children of God. And in the middle, is the victory that conquers the world, our faith in this love.

Herein lies the difficulty though. We learned from Greg’s sermon a couple of weeks ago we are called to an agape love, a selfless love. It is a love we would show to an adversary or someone with whom we are not necessarily familiar. This is as opposed to eros, a romantic love or filia, a brotherly, familial love. This Agape love calls us to action. As Michael pointed to in his Boondoggle sermon, when we are called as Children of God, we are set on a new path. Changed metaphysically, beyond what is perceptible to those around us. Obedience to God doesn’t mean our lives will avoid struggle. In fact, it may often mean we will choose a difficult path. It is a mindset. Julian of Norwich called it the via positiva, the positive way. It is an attitude. It doesn’t mean we make light of our struggles, but with the power of the Holy Spirit we can prevail through adversity.

The Holy Spirit…Ruach in Hebrew. In both our Old Testament and New Testament, Ruach is translated into several English words – wind, breath, wisdom. This is not to turn the Holy Spirit into a natural force, but to help our limited human minds to begin to grasp the power of God. The Holy Spirit is wind; it is movement. The Holy Spirit is breath; it is life. The Holy Spirit is wisdom; it is charism, a gift endowed by the Holy Spirit.

Ruach was working overtime in Acts. This week we read about the third in a series of visions Peter has in addition to Cornelius’. Earlier in Chapter ten, Cornelius, a centurion, a man who lives worshipfully, was always helping people in need and had the habit of prayer, has a vision to go fetch Peter. He sends two men to Joppa to fetch Peter, who he knows from the vision is staying with Simon the Tanner. As the men are approaching, Peter is up on the balcony praying. It is lunch time. He’s hungry and thinking of food. He falls into a trance and has a vision of a blanket being lowered down by four ropes with every kind of animal, reptile and bird on it. Then he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Peter exclaims that he has never eaten unclean food. The voice tells him that he should not call anything impure that God has made clean. This happens three times before the blanket is lifted back up to the sky.

While Peter is puzzling out the meaning of this vision, Cornelius’ men knock on the door. The Spirit tells him to go downstairs. There are three men looking for him and he should not hesitate to go with them. Peter goes and opens the door. The men tell Peter that a holy angel commanded Cornelius to get him so they could hear what he had to say. He invites them in, makes them feel at home and the next day Peter, his Jewish friends and the travelers set off for Caesarea. When they arrive Cornelius is expecting them. Peter makes it clear that it is highly unusual for a Jew to visit a Gentile, but also acknowledges that God has led him here. Cornelius and his household are ready to listen and Peter explodes with the good news of Jesus and forgiveness!

While Peter is still speaking, the holy spirit interrupts him, descends upon them and the gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out on them. It has proceeded from the Father and the Son and been poured out on them. Imagine yourself as an empty vessel being filled by Ruach. They are speaking in tongues and praising God. Peter finally realizes that the Gentiles, these unclean people, are like the unclean food being offered to him in his vision. Like the unclean food God has given him to satisfy his hunger, the uncircumcised Gentiles in the crowd who, having had the Holy Spirit working in their lives, are now clean and want to be baptized.

In this scripture, we see the Holy Spirit interrupting Peter’s sermon. A point needs to be made. The gospel is proclaimed to and heard by everyone there, including those outside the Jewish circle, Peter says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And note, he is speaking to his brothers from Joppa; he is not alone on his mission. Peter’s rhetorical statement exclaims God’s acceptance. Peter embodies the gospel of inclusion. Love one another, Agape love. Here we learn about God’s character and his mission for the church. There is a new understanding of salvation. God does not discriminate.

Keeping people out, setting boundaries reinforces our identities – not God’s. I remember hearing a sermon on radical welcome by the Reverend Stephanie Spellers, who was previously in our diocese and is now Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation Care and is also, coincidentally, an Assisting Priest at St Bart’s in Manhattan. She spoke about how the church must change to be more inclusive. She spoke of a church in I think maybe Southern California, it might have been New York City. I think I had my hands up on my ears and was saying “nah nah nah” so I didn’t hear, because she was telling us about a church where they mamboed up the aisle as they lined up for communion. “Good God,” I said to myself. “This is the Episcopal Church. Have some dignity.” And then, in a tiny part of my ADHD brain, the Mambo scene from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story played and I wondered what that might be like to joyously dance my way up the aisle to take the Eucharist. I tried to convince Douglas to work in a Latin rhythm here, but he wouldn’t indulge me.

In all seriousness, whether or not to let uncircumcised men into the community of believers was a seminal question of the day. Changing the idea of who gets let in shapes the community of believers. Listening to God when God speaks to us through our prayer, visions or synchronistic moments, brings us closer to God’s vision for the church. The message you need to hear may come through the uncircumcised one challenging your prejudices and expectations. The Holy Spirit is disruptive. Be prepared; expect it.

I left copies of the poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke in all of the pews. For me it is about listening to God, and the action we are called to undertake. The flame is terrifying, yet there is a shadow in which we can move where we can hear God saying, “Give me your hand.” And when you are pushed to your limit of loving, with the communion of your brothers and sisters in Christ and with the power of the Holy Spirit, throw up your hands and exclaim joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!”

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Sermon — April 28, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God;
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

Four months ago at the Christmas Stroll, we stood out on the sidewalk on a cold night and handed out little bags of cookies and candy with information about Saint John’s and a friendly smile. And in each bag was a card with my favorite verse from the Bible, and the church’s website and logo. And I pulled one out to show you, and I realized that the citation was printed wrong: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. — 1 John 4:12” It’s actually 1 John 4:7, but shockingly enough we didn’t get any phone calls to the office in mid-December, correcting our mistake. I’m not sure whether it’s good news or bad news that nobody bothered to pick up the Bible and check, but then again, at least for me: ignorance is bliss.

It’s an interesting exercise, to pick out the one verse of the Bible you’d want to put on a card to hand out on the street. Maybe that’s your homework today. What’s one sentence that expresses your faith that you’d want someone else to hear?

You might even find it in the passage from 1 John we just heard. It’s one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It’s like a compilation of greatest hits: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us… No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…” and of course, there’s the verse that you’ll hear Michael paraphrase whenever he ends a sermon, “We love because he first loved us.”

As a person and as a Christian, I’ve always loved these words of love. I first read 1 John at a pivotal time in my life, on a Christmas Day long ago, when this reading is part of the service of Morning Prayer, and these words have been one of the touchstones of my faith ever since. Whenever I hear them, I’m comforted by the reminder of God’s love for me, which began long before I could begin to love myself or anyone else. I’m reassured by the reminder that although no one can see God, if we love, God lives in us, and so we can see God like we see the passing of the wind through the trees, in the ripples of love that flow between human beings. I’m challenged by the reminder that there is no fear in love—after all, what do I fear more than failing the people I love?—and then I’m freed from a little bit of fear by that promise that I can “stand with boldness on the day of judgment,” because in the end it’s not the perfection of my love that matters to God. In the end, my whole life is God’s love being perfected in me.

So as a person, I’ve always loved these words of love. But as a pastor, as a preacher—as a guy who occasionally stands out on the sidewalk with one chance to share something with the world—it’s this first verse that stands out to me, today. It’s this verse that I chose to have printed on a card: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

Last week a colleague sent me a set of slides from a church event, which contained an alarming projection. You probably know that the Episcopal Church, like most other churches in America, is experiencing a long-term decline in attendance. Decade after decade, year after year, the total number of people attending an Episcopal church on a Sunday morning has simply continued to decline, in a more-or-less linear trend. It’s a linear-enough trend, in fact, that you can do a linear regression, if you are so inclined. You can extend the line down and calculate the year in which that attendance number would hit 0. In early 2020 you could see that if trends continued, by 2046 there wouldn’t be anyone in church. But trends did not continue. Instead, the pandemic came, and the bottom fell out, and now that number is more like 2039: Just 15 more years, and statistically, on average, if the trends continue, the pews of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts will be empty.

Of course, averages obscure variety. There are plenty of churches like ours, where attendance is growing, not shrinking. But all that means is that for every church that can hold off decline another decade until 2049, there’s one where attendance will be at zero in the next five years. And yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics, and yes, it’s probably an asymptotic curve, which basically means—if you haven’t taken a math class in a few years—there is probably some number of us who are crazy enough to be here no matter what. But still, it’s a drastic enough trend that we have to reckon with it.

When Bishop Alan visited us in December, he gave me a slightly-overdue certificate that institutes me as your Rector, and gives me a certain charge: “Do not forget the trust of those who have chosen you,” it says. “Care alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. By your words and in your life, proclaim the Gospel. Love and serve Christ’s people. Nourish them, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.”

And this isn’t just for me, as a priest. It’s a beautiful description of any Christian life. These words are full of the spirit of love. Care for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. Proclaim the good news by your words and in your life. “Love and serve Christ’s people,” the letter says to me, and to you.

But what do we do when that line hits zero? What do we do when Christ’s people are all gone?

It’s a trick question, of course. It’s a question that comes from fear and anxiety about the future of the church, and that fear and anxiety come from how much we love the present of the church. But “what do we do when church attendance reaches zero?” is a very different question from “what do we do when all Christ’s people are gone?” If we take the vision laid out in this First Letter of John seriously, then our understanding of who God’s people are cannot be limited to our measurements of who shows up on Sundays: for “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” and I don’t believe for a minute that the decline of the Church has meant a decline in people’s ability to love. The Church doesn’t have a monopoly on love—in fact, to our discredit, sometimes it’s the other way around.

And that’s why I love these words. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is a challenge to the Church’s traditional claim to know who’s in and who’s out. To say that “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is to say that no pastor or priest can ever tell you that you don’t belong in the Church, or that you’re not the beloved child of God, so long as your life is shaped by love.

But these words are not just a challenge to the Church. They’re a reminder and an invitation. They’re a reminder that there are more people who know God in the world than those you’ll find at prayer on a Sunday, and that God’s work is not confined to what we do together as part of the church. And they’re an invitation to go and be a part of that work, to “love one another, because love is from God.”

The Church may be shrinking, but the need for love is not, and the capacity to love is not. As 1 John reminded us last week, love is not about feeling something, or about saying something; in the Christian understanding, love is seeing your neighbor in need of help and doing something. And maybe that is the work of the Church in this new era, as our traditional structures and our traditional ways continue to fall apart. Maybe our work is to look for the people in our communities who are already acting out their love in the world. To recognize, whether they are Christian or not, that in our eyes, they are born of God and know God in that love. To find where Jesus is moving out there, in the world, and to follow him. To join our siblings, carrying out that work. Because we know that “if [we] do not love the brothers and sisters whom we have seen, [we] cannot love God whom we have not seen.” (1 John 4:20)

So, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8) Amen.

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Sermon — April 21, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

There’s a beautiful piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this morning, with the title, “The Poems That Taught Me How to Love,” in which Nicholas Casey writes of the summer term he spent in Chile at the age of 19, a summer when he discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s immediately had him hooked: his imagery and emotion captured everything it was to be a freshman full of romantic longing, living in a foreign land. Also, it was the only Spanish poetry he could actually read. “Ah vastness of pines,” he read on the train down to Patagonia, “murmur of waves breaking, / Twilight falling in your eyes.” And yet there was no “you,” for him; no muse to whom to recite all these poems.

Until the last day, at least, when he met a girl. A German girl, visiting from Berlin. They spent the next day together, and the eleven-hour bus ride back into town. He read her Neruda’s poetry after dinner before they went back to their separate rooms.

The next day, as the bus left and they waved goodbye, his heart was breaking. He ran out to the curb—Stop the bus! Please! I forgot something. The driver stopped, and he stepped on, and gave his love a kiss. And in the perfect version of their lives, that would only be the beginning. But this is not the perfect version of life, and there was a boyfriend back in Germany named Jan, and it’s possible she wasn’t quite as into him as his Neruda-addled brain may have thought; in any case, that one day was the story’s beginning, middle, and end.

It’s a great little story—if you don’t get the magazine, you can find the piece online.

It’s a well-timed story, too, because this Sunday is, for us, is all about love. Not romantic love, of course. But it’s tempting to sentimentalize nonetheless, to sing lovely hymns and hear lovely words, to be as intoxicated by “The King of Love my shepherd is” as our young scholar was by the poetry of Neruda, and to think that feeling was love, and to think that expressing that feeling in beautiful poetry was love. But if we go a little deeper into what 1 John has to say about love this morning, it turns out that love cannot be captured in poetry or in hymns, because love is not a feeling or a word: it’s an action.

Of course, the kind of love that Pablo Neruda’s writing about is not the same as the Christian kind of love. You may have heard before, or maybe not, that ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament is written, uses several different words for love. Eros is passion, romantic love; the yearning and pining that we might call a “crush.” in its most refined form, it’s an appreciation of the beauty within another person that leads us to appreciate Beauty itself. This is Pablo Neruda love. The second kind of love is filia, friendship, the kind of mutual affection and loyalty that binds together two good friends. When you like somebody, when you enjoy their company, when you want to hang out and chat after church: that’s filia. But the word for “love,” when the New Testament talks about love, is neither of these. It’s agape, and that means something else. Agape is a hard word to pin down, but it means something like “unconditional love.” It means, as Thomas Aquinas would say, “to will the good for someone else.” It’s a love that’s modeled in God’s own love for us, and in this kind of love there’s more duty than sentiment. As 1 John says, we should “love one another, just as he had commanded us.” (1 John 3:23) And that’s a sentence that makes no sense for the other kinds of love. Eros and filia can’t be commandments. You can’t be ordered to fall in love with someone. You can’t be obliged to like them. But you can be, and you are, commanded to love.

And that’s possible because if we’re talking about agape love, you can love someone without being in love with them. You can love someone without being related to them. You can love someone without even liking them, without having any feelings about them at all. And if that’s the case, then love cannot be about what you feel. Love is about what you do. And this is exactly what 1 John says.

“Little children, let us love,” the Elder writes, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And he asks: “How does God’s love—How does the agape of God—abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help?” (3:17) When you see someone who needs your help, he says, what matters isn’t what you feel: it’s what you do. That’s what love is.

Most of us live in Boston, or Cambridge, or Somerville. I don’t need to tell you that this is a region of great inequality, a place where people with all the world’s goods and people in deep material need live side by side. And it’s also a place where people respond in love. Our only grocery store may be a Whole Foods, but Harvest on Vine distributes 12,000 pounds of food a month. The Clothes Closet was hopping here yesterday, with dozens of people shopping from clothes that dozens of other people had donated. We can always use more filia, more friendship and loyalty and solidarity across our communities, more connections and compassion between people from different backgrounds, but when it comes down to it, what matters from a Christian point of view is not word or speech or feelings of warmth, but action.

And there is more than one kind of need in the world. Every one of us, however wealthy or privileged or not, needs help, in one way or another. And every one of us, however little we may have in the eyes of the world, can love and care for and help someone else. We should yearn for and work for a more just world, in which there is no poverty or hunger, and yet on this side of the kingdom of God, we will always still need help. And when we see someone else who needs help, whether that’s material or emotional or spiritual, we should help, even if it means we have to make some sacrifice: because that is what Christian love is.

I loved the Times magazine piece because it’s the purest comparison I could possibly find. On one end of the spectrum, you have agape, Christian love, the self-giving, servant kind of love that’s not about words, but about action. And all the way over here on the other end, you have a shy college freshman’s Neruda-infused yearnings, hour after hour of poetry and speech, a depth and richness of feeling but no action at all—except that single, perfect kiss.

And yet as different as these two kinds of love are, the story points to something true, right there in the title: “The Poems that Taught Me How to Love.” We need to learn how to love. We need a poet to give voice to our inarticulate yearning. We need someone to model for us what it is to love.

And in the very different world of Christian love, that’s exactly what Jesus does. “We know love by this,” the Elder writes, “that he laid down his life for us.” (3:16) We know love by this. As Christians, we look at Jesus, and we listen to these stories about his teachings, his life, and his death, and we say: “This is what it means to love.”

And what we see, when we turn to these stories, wanting to know what it means to love, is a humble, patient, gentle, caring man, a good shepherd who lays down his own life for the sheep. To love is not to be like the hired hand, who hangs out with the sheep when times are easy, and then runs away and leaves them behind when the wolf comes and things get hard. To love is to be like the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, who’s willing to do anything to love and serve us when we are in need. And he doesn’t just do this to teach us how to love, but by doing all this, he does teach us to love.

And so we are invited—we are commanded—to love. Not to try to stir up inauthentic emotions for one another, not to try to warm our hearts with love, “for God is greater than our hearts,” and God knows already knows whether we like one another or not, and we don’t need to pretend. But to love one another, to give up some small part of our goods, to lay down some small part of our lives, to help one another when we are in need, so that just as we abide in God, God’s love abides in us.

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Sermon — April 14, 2024Michael FennLectionary Readings

One of the things I love the most about summer camp, particularly Christian summer camp, is that when you cross the line into camp–almost everything about who you are outside of camp does not matter anymore. Your varsity letter, your GPA, your parents divorce, your above-average reading level, your below-average reading level, the name of the school you go to, even your cat allergies don’t really matter once you cross from the outside world into the world of camp.

For many people, campers and counselors, this is a very freeing experience. Many sports people steer clear of the basketball courts at camp, many artists will never go in the arts and crafts shed, and the high achievers realize that there is actually nobody around to give them a grade for rock-wall climbing.

Of course, I will admit, there are some exceptions to this relatively utopian picture I have painted. A basketball star will continue to be a basketball star at camp, and they might gain a lot of notoriety for that. A skilled painter will still have people ooh and aah over their work. Musicians will get roped into being in the camp band. However, any of these things only go so far in the community. Your basketball skill, your paintings, your musical prowess are reduced to no more than what they are. To really parse it out, there are no grades given, no medals awarded, and nobody to put you on varsity. Any particular skill becomes less than what it actually is, and more what it does to foster joy, connection, or help your cabin win something (which is a form of joy and connection, actually).

I know this to be true because I have, honest-to-God, hand on heart, one of the most highly valued skills in the camp world. More than dunking a basketball. More than passing any swim test. More than fire building. I am not overstating this. I can start boondoggles. If you don’t know what that is I have brought one. For those you can’t really see it, it is one of those plastic lanyard things you or your kids likely made at school or a summer camp at any point in the last half century. Not only can I start them, I can start almost forty in just one minute. In the outside world, this matters unfortunately very little. However, in a world where collective joy is highly valued, such a skill is of critical importance.

I fear I may have digressed to deeply into the skills and talents that may give you notoriety at summer camp. But the point I have been trying to make is this: the beauty of camp is that when you cross the line from the outside world, the evaluations of the outside world fall away. Instead, you are judged differently, through a lens of connection, love, and joy. By your ability to start boondoggles.

In the letter of first John today–which is a lovely letter, and for those of who who may have missed the memo, it is the subject of our Easter-tide sermon series. One phrase in particular caught my attention. In his letter, John makes the extremely bold statement that “we are God’s children”. This designation–God’s child–at the time of this letters composition, was strictly reserved for emperors, heroes, and Jesus himself. It did not have the more acceptable, perhaps even jovial usage that we have today.

To make the statement that we are God’s children is a bold one–so bold in fact, that in the Eucharist prayer, before we pray the “Our Father” (a prayer where we reference God as a parental figure) the minister says “we boldly pray..” Listen for it if you haven’t noticed it before. Suffice to say it would be unthinkable, blasphemous, and even treasonous to call yourself a child of God in the way the author of 1 John uses it.

Even aside from the boldness of the statement, what does it actually mean? For the ancient world, it would seem to proclaim that–to quote a different epistle–that there is no more slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek. In the ancient context, whereever you were born, and to whom you were born, pretty much determined how your life would look. For most people, this meant that their hard life, and low social status, were inherent to their very existence. Only now, the labels that get put on them by their society, by the empire they live under, are no longer their true identifiers. Instead, they are adopted by God, they are not lowly peasants, fishermen, or carpenters, they are beloved children of a God who cares deeply for them.

For us today, it is no different. We may have more democracy, more social mobility, and different occupations. But to be a child of God means that, just like when we enter camp, we leave all kinds of allegiances and memberships behind. It is a fundamental new identifier, one that exists deeper in us than any report card, evaluation, collegiate affiliation, or social club.

Maybe this new state of being is not obvious to the outside world. The letter says as much, the people who aren’t children of God don’t necessarily get what it is that is different–there are no physical changes and no huge jump upward into the higher social strata. However, it is something of an internal characteristic, a metaphysical change, that we understand about ourselves, and about the people we share community with–our fellow Cbristians.

But then, the letter gives us a more ambiguous message. After this really bold statement about what we are now–children of God. The author kind of says “we don’t really know what happens next–what we are going to be later, or what will necessarily happen to us. We get the general idea that it will continue to be something good, based in our new identity as children of God. However, we get what it is not in the next section–it is not lawlessness and chaos. The author of the John letters seems to think it is important to stress that just as much as we are beloved by God, that does not give us license to cause chaos and strife.

Interestingly, in the gospel today, Jesus makes his big first appearance to the expanded group of followers. And I am going to take this as a cue into the ambiguity of what we will be according to John. The very first thing Jesus says is “Peace be with you all”. The second thing he does, after calming down the disciples, is ask them if they have any food. Resurrecting is hungry work. They give him broiled fish, which I take to be the “ordering Dominos” of ancient Galillee. Then, Jesus sits and explains all the weird scary stuff that happened. Finally, he tells them that they are witnesses to all of this.

Here is where we have something of a touchstone in the ambiguity of what we will be. Just as we are children of God, we are witnesses to all that has been done. Maybe what we will be is witnesses to this wonderful thing and this good news in Christ. For now, maybe that means in the joyful wake of a bright Easter…we take some time….order dominos…and reflect on what this good news–that we are children of God, worldly titles be darned–means for us. Maybe in our lives as Christians, pulled in many directions as we stumble along, this ambiguity of not knowing what we will be invites us into knowing that as much as we try to do good in the world, we don’t really know what we will be.

And to return to the question we are exploring in the sermon series– maybe this is what it means to be a community of Christians in the light of the ressurection. To honor that fact that as Christians, we are given a fundamental new identity that usurps all of our other ones– children of God. To figure out how this fits into how we live our lives with one another. Of course, this is much easier at camp in a place away from typical pressures of modern life–no building job portfolios, no report cards, no quarterly reviews; where there is no rent to pay, and all your meals are cooked for you (for better or worse). But maybe we can look to that as an example for how to begin to think about it. To think about how we can uplift ourselves and others in ways that recognize that we are children of God–be it starting for starting boondoggles or something else. And also, to remember that in all of this trying and thinking, we still do not know what we will be or where God will lead us. We remain works in progress even as we are children of God. In the name of the one who loved us first.

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Sermon — April 7, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father
and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love.”
(2 John 3)

(A greeting from the Second Letter of John. More on that in a moment.)

I love this Second Sunday of Easter. Not just because of Doubting Thomas, whose faith I admire. But because it’s “Low Sunday,” when all the detailed preparations of Holy Week are over and the bells of Easter have stopped ringing in our ears; when the crowds of Easter Day have come and gone, and now a smaller group of us are left asking: “Alleluia, Christ is risen—Now what?”

On these Sundays after Easter, our readings begin to explore what it means to be an “Easter people,” what it means to live as a community in light of the Resurrection. Our first reading each week is drawn from the early chapters of the Book of Acts, following along with the community of the disciples in the days immediately following Easter. Our second readings come from 1 John, written a little less than a hundred years later, from an early church leader to a community of Christian believers. And since we only get 1 John once every three years, and because it’s one of my favorite books, and because this is after all, Saint John’s, this Easter, I’m going to preach my way through 1 John, asking every week, “What does it mean to be people of the Resurrection according to the First Letter of John?”

Although — It’s not really a letter, and it might not be by John.

We read the beginning today; there’s no greeting, and no signature. It’s more of a sermon than a letter. And 1 John doesn’t claim to be by a person named John, nor do 2nd or 3rd John. Nor does the Gospel of John, for that matter. 2 and 3 John are addressed from “The Elder” to “The Elect Lady” and “To Gaius” respectively. The Gospel of John talks about a “Beloved Disciple,” but it doesn’t say he’s the author and he’s not named John. So Scholars sometimes distinguish between John the Apostle, the brother of James and son of Zebedee; the Beloved Disciple (who may or may not be John); “John” the Evangelist (author of the Gospel); “John” the Elder (author of the letters); and John of Patmos (who wrote the Book of Revelation, and who does call himself John). Ancient church traditions say the Evangelist and the Elder are both the Apostle, who’s the Beloved Disciple, and even then they argued about whether Revelation was written by the same John—and we haven’t stopped arguing about it since, such that you can make a Biblical case for the existence of one, two, three, four, or five different Johns.

By the way, this is why, when people occasionally ask me who this church is named after, I either sound really pedantic or woefully uninformed. “Oh, which Saint John?” Uhhh…I don’t know.

So it’s not clear who wrote 1 John; I’ll just say “the Elder.” But it’s very clear that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John come from the same tradition or the same community as the Gospel of John. The letters and the Gospel share themes, and imagery, and even sentence structure, and you can hear it from the very first words of the letter we heard today: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life… God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” If you know the Gospel of John well enough, you hear echoes of it constantly in the letter. And this shared tradition is sometimes called the “Johannine tradition” or “Johannine community.” We can only speculate, but you can easily imagine for example that 2 and 3 John are cover letters, addressed to the leaders of Johannine churches in two different cities along with a copy of the First Letter of John, warning against wandering prophets who’re preaching in a way the Elder doesn’t like, and reminding them of the ideas and the faith that they share, and which we have received in the form of the Gospel of John.

So to shift gears a little and with my apologies for the extended preface, here—What are those ideas? What is the Johannine answer to the question, “What does it mean for a community to live in the light of the Resurrection?”

I can’t help but notice that the first thing John wants to do, after his introduction, is to ask people to take a real, hard look at their lives. “If we say that we have no sin,” the Elder writes, “we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:8-9) It’s a little ironic that we read this during Easter, when we traditionally omit the confession of sin on Sunday mornings.

But for the Elder, an honest reckoning with sin is inextricably linked to the hope of the Resurrection. He wants to hold these two sides together. By our Lenten human nature, we are imperfect. By God’s Easter action, we are forgiven. If we say we have no sin, we’re only deceiving ourselves; but if we confess our sins, he will forgive us our sin. The Elder is writing these things to us so that we may not sin; but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with God in Jesus Christ. (2:1) (Advocate—Paraclete—there’s another good Johannine word.)

The Elder closes the letter: “I write these things to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (5:13) Not so that you repent and change your ways. Not so that you come to believe. But so that you know that you have eternal life. To talk about sin, in other words, is not to condemn ourselves, or condemn someone else; it’s to acknowledge that we might actually need forgiveness, so that we can remember that God has already forgive us. And that’s just the beginning of the path into the abundant and eternal life that God is already inviting us to live, in this world.

The Elder will go on to offer some of the most beautiful words that the Bible has about the gifts of love that we’ve received from God and the spiritual journey of transformation that we all share. But if we as human beings are going to aspire to love, we have to be honest about the ways in which we’ve failed to love, so that we can make amends with one another and grow together toward God.

It’s easy to think that this is an individual or a moralistic thing. But it’s not. It’s a letter about the life of a community, written to a community. And we read it today as part of a community that’s starting to do some real reckoning with its own sins in the past, and how they’ve shaped our life in the present, and that’s where I want to close, today.

Last month, our diocese published a historical study of the ways in which our parishes and the Diocese as a whole profited financially from the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa, entitled “‘And You Will Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Make You Free’”—another quote from John, by the way—“A Historical Framework (1620-1840) for Understanding How the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts Benefits Today from Chattel Slavery and Its Legacy.” The level of historical detail is astounding. The founding of every one of our colonial-era parishes was in some way funded by practices of enslavement. Dozens of clergy and founding members of parishes enslaved Africans, or made their livings through human trafficking. The booming Massachusetts economy that funded the Episcopal resurgence in the early 19th century was fueled by processing cotton grown by slaves in our mills, selling food and supplies to slaveholding plantations, and building the ships that made the Triangle Trade work. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which existed to strengthen the Church in North America, actually owned plantations, extracting revenue from unpaid enslaved Africans in Barbados and using it to fund preachers in Boston and around New England. Without a doubt, some fraction of the endowment of our Diocese of Massachusetts, and of many of our parishes, ultimately derives from the profits of the system of chattel slavery, one of the greatest sins human beings have ever committed.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…”

This is one part of what it means for us, as Episcopalians, to be an Easter people today. To accept and acknowledge the sins of our past, and to ask how we can turn them into love in the present. The promise of the Resurrection is that our sin can be transformed, and that God is inviting us together into a new life of love. The promise of the Resurrection is not only eternal life in the future; it’s a new kind of community in the present.

After all: “If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie… but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.” (1 John 6-7)

In the name of the God who is faithful and just: Amen.

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Sermon — Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

“Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed”—Or is he?

If you were Mary or Mary or Salome on that first Easter morning, you might not be so sure. These women, the most faithful of the disciples, come to the tomb in shock. Jesus’ death on Good Friday was the last thing they’d expected. They had stayed with Jesus to the end. They were the only ones to see where he was laid to rest, but there had been no time to bury him. So they wait in grief and mourning through the long Sabbath day of rest, and as soon as it ends they rush out to buy spices so they can go and prepare his body in the tomb. Their minds are numb, and all they can do is to ask one another, again and again: Who will roll away the stone that’s covering the entrance to the tomb? They weren’t expecting to see Jesus die, but they’re certainly expecting to find him dead.

But the stone has been rolled away. And Jesus’ body is gone. After a cryptic message from a mysterious young man, the women flee in fear. And their Easter morning culminates, not in Alleluias and candy-filled eggs, not with the sight of flowers beginning to bloom or the taste of a festive Easter brunch, but with terror and amazement and speechless, wordless fear.

Now, it is unlikely that you will flee from church this morning. But in other ways, you may find yourself very much in the position of those women at the tomb. In fact, all of us are. Whether you’ve been dragged here this morning by your family against your will, or you’ve been a faithful Christian all your life, the situation is the same: When you hear the message of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday in 2024, you are put in the position of Mary and Mary and Salome. You’ve been told the good news of the Resurrection, but you don’t get to see the Risen Lord. The tomb is empty, the body is gone, and some “young man, dressed in a white robe” (gesture at self) says that “he is risen!”—but there’s no proof. Not the kind that counts. Paul enumerates to the Corinthians a half-dozen times that Jesus appeared after rising from the dead, but we just get the words: “He is not here. He has been raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.”

Of all these things, I think it’s easiest to believe that “he is not here,” at least in his expected human form. (Let me double check… No. Unless he got a haircut.) But even then, on Easter Day, it was true. Jesus had been raised from the dead. But this was a Resurrection, not a resuscitation. He wasn’t there with the women in the same form, as if he’d woken up from a nap. He was alive, but his life had changed. He hadn’t come back to finish the work the disciples thought he was there to do, to establish the kingdom of God on earth and usher in an age of justice, love, and peace. “He is not here,” the young man says, the human Jesus that you knew is gone. That part of his life is staying in the past. He is not setting up his kingdom here.

And whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, surely you agree that the world we are living in is not the community of peace and love that Jesus had proclaimed. Surely this is not what Isaiah meant when he said that God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. Our whole world is ripped apart by war. Our own lives might not be going as smoothly as we’d imagined. We get sick and suffer and it’s easy to believe that Jesus is not here among us.

It’s harder to believe that “he has been raised.” And yet on Easter, that is the hope that we proclaim, in the face of all the rest. To say that Jesus has been raised is to say that suffering and death are never the end of the story. To say that Jesus has been raised is to say that the forces of violence and injustice do not win out in the end. To that say Jesus has been raised is to say that God loves you so much that long ago, God became human like you, and laid down God’s own life for you, so that one day you, too, would rise again. It’s this promise that’s the hard one to accept, and yet this one offers us our final greatest hope: that after all our heartbreak, and after all our joy; after all our loss and all our love we will one day live again in a world in which, finally, God will wipe away the tears from our eyes.

But the message of Easter is more than a hopeful promise about the future. The message of Easter is not just that if you suffer along meekly in this life “you’ll get pie in the sky when you die,” as Joe Hill wrote. What that young man tells the women at the tomb is not just that Jesus is not here, and it’s not just that he has been raised—It’s that he is going ahead of you. To Galilee, in fact. Back home, where they’d just come from. Jesus is not setting up the kingdom of God in the holy city, ruling over perfect people in perfect peace. Jesus is out there in the world. Back there at home. With us, however perfect or imperfect we may be. And if we’re looking for Jesus, that’s where we should look. That’s where God’s work is being done. Not in the place where they expect to mourn him, in the darkness of the tomb. But in the thousand places we will meet him, alive, transformed, and working in this world.

And maybe that’s the hardest thing. Maybe that’s the terrifying part, the final word that causes them to flee. Jesus is not here any more, not in the way we expect. But neither has he disappeared. He is out there, all around you, and every day the kingdom of God is being revealed. In every bud that survives the frost to bloom, God’s beauty is revealed. In every moment of unnecessary kindness from a neighbor or a friend, God’s love overflows. Every time you forgive someone for something they’ve done to hurt you, every time you are forgiven, our world is draws one step closer the dream of God. And with every step you take down the road of your life, Jesus is going ahead of you, reminding you, by whatever means he can, that God loves you exactly as you are, and inviting you walk in love without fear or regret, because when all the powers of evil and death have done their worst, he will raise you up nevertheless. And we have nothing to lose in this life but the chance to love one another, as he has loved us.

You know, there’s a funny thing about that last verse of the Gospel of Mark. “They said nothing to anyone,” Mark writes, “for they were afraid.” And yet here we are, two thousand years later, because they were afraid, but they also had a choice. They could choose to believe that Jesus had failed to live up to their hopes, that his body had been stolen, that the young man’s words were a hoax. They could sneak out of the city in fear, and go back to Galilee, and live the rest of their lives in the shadow of those days. But they chose instead to believe that it was true: that he was risen, and he was going ahead of them to Galilee. They chose to hope, instead, to live the rest of their lives looking for one more glimpse of the one who loved them, and taught them to love; and who was with them still along the way.

So: Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

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Sermon — Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow
and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”
(Job 14:1–2)

The Book of Job is an arcane, almost archaic poetic text. Its Hebrew vocabulary and terminology are so obscure at times, its meaning so unclear, that Biblical scholars will plumb the depths of their knowledge of ancient languages trying to determine the meaning of some of its phrases. They pull out the latest work in comparative North-West Semitic linguistics and Old Babylonian philology, trying to determine what a particular word means and come up short. Ironically, though, the book as a whole is simple in its meaning. And of all the books in the Bible, you might say that it’s among the most modern in its concerns. The Book of Job opens with a short fable about Job’s misfortune and suffering, and closes with a tidy little chapter in which he lives happily ever after. But in between, we just get readings like this: chapter after chapter and verse after verse in which Job cries out to God, begging for an explanation—and listening to the less-than-helpful speeches of his friends.

“There’s hope for a tree!” Job says. “If it’s cut down, it can sprout again.” And Job is right. If you walk down to the back side of the Doherty Playground over Bunker Hill right now you can see the proof. There’s a gnarled old stump there that Murray has decided is a troll. It’s four feet wide, grizzled, and mossy, but out of it is growing, this spring, a sprout.

“There’s hope for a tree,” Job says, “But mortals die and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?” We have all seen perennials come up, year after year, to bloom. We have all seen shoots growing out of the stump of a tree. But we do not see human beings rising from the dead.

On Holy Saturday we read these words of Job at a service that serves as Jesus’ funeral. This service has none of the pomp and parades of Palm Sunday. It has none of the agony and suffering of Good Friday. We don’t get the candlelight and chanting of the Easter Vigil, or the bells and fancy hats of Easter Sunday. Instead, we lay Jesus to rest. We hear the Gospel story of his burial in the tomb, and we offer prayers taken from our burial service: the same prayers that could be said at a funeral service for you or I, we’ll say today for Jesus.

On Holy Saturday, Jesus rests in the tomb. And we rest, too, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for God to answer Job out of the whirlwind. Waiting for God to answer us: Because Job’s questions really are modern questions. So often, in human life, these are questions we share. Why, God, are things not the way they ought to be? Why do the people we love become sick and die, long before they reach old age? Why are bombs still falling, all around the world? Mortal human beings like us suffer in a thousand ways, large and small, and then we die.

In medieval times, we would have wondered where to place the blame. We would’ve assumed that God must be punishing us, and people do still sometimes think this way. But by and large the question modern people ask is more like Job’s: Do you fix your eyes on such a one, God? In other words: Is there anyone out there watching? Is there a God who cares? Or is the universe, after all, nothing but atoms and void?

And the almost-unbelievable good news of the Christian faith is that God’s answer to Job’s question—“Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”—is “Yes.” And so much more. God is keeping an eye on us, God does care for us, so much that God became one of us, and suffered like one of us, and died for all of us—so that God might make us like those trees, from which new life can grow, long after they are reduced to stumps. And when we read these words of mourning and despair from Job on Holy Saturday, there’s a kind of dramatic irony. We know something that Job doesn’t know, and it’s that despite all the suffering and disappointment of this world, he should not give in to despair. God is not in an far-off, uncaring world. God is here, suffering too; dying, too. And God is transforming that suffering and death into something new, and just as Jesus rose from the dead, we will rise again, too.

On Holy Saturday, we aren’t quite there yet. Holy Saturday is still a day of stumps. But even now, the hidden work begins. On the one hand, Christ is resting in the grave. On the other, as Peter tells us, Christ is proclaiming the gospel even to the dead. Tradition calls this “the harrowing of hell,” the moment on Saturday when it seems to us that Jesus is at rest, but in reality, he’s down among the souls of the departed, preaching good news to them, too.

In our eyes, in this Holy Saturday world, sometimes it looks like God’s work has stopped. Even now, the hidden work of Easter has begun—Christ is bring forth new life from the deepest, darkest places. Even now, something is going on in your life’s deepest, darkest places, something that you cannot yet imagine and yet which will make everything new.

You cannot see it yet. None of us can. But somewhere, in the place you’d last expect it—maybe even in the sealed-off tomb, in the place from which you thought nothing could come—something new is becoming real.

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Sermon — September 12, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “So you, mortal,” God says to Ezekiel, “I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel;whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning … Continue reading →

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Sermon — September 3, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

In a 2012 book, the writer Anne Lamott described what she calls “The Three Essential Prayers”: “Help,” “Thanks,” and “Wow.” I’ve always loved that. It captures the essence of prayer. Most of our prayers, from the incoherent ones we say while lying awake in the middle of the night to the highly-polished ones we say in church on Sunday mornings, fall into one of those three categories: asking for God’s help when we need it, or someone else does; giving thanks for the good things in our lives; or simply expressing the awe and wonder of existence in this universe.

But I can’t help but think that Anne Lamott missed a fourth, one-word prayer, one that’s often left out, a kind of prayer that many people aren’t even sure they’re really allowed to pray: “Why?” As in, “Why God, why? Why is this happening? Why is it happening to me? Why now?” Just “why?”

Listen to some of Jeremiah’s words in this morning’s reading, taken from a couple different translations. Listen, and think for a minute: Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever prayed this kind of prayer?

“Lord, you know how I suffer. Take thought of me and care for me…” (Jer. 15:15 NET) “Why am I always in pain? Why is my wound incurable, so far beyond healing?” (15:18a CEB) “Will you let me down when I need you like a brook one goes to for water, but that cannot be relied on?” (15:18b NET)

Have you ever prayed this kind of prayer? Have you ever asked God, “Why?” Have you ever been angry at God for letting you down? Have you ever felt like saying, “God, you know I’m suffering,” do something?

Sometimes this form of prayer, this “why, God, why?” is the only one that feels authentic. But people often feel like it’s not a prayer they can say. For some, it’s because they’ve been taught that they’re not allowed to. They’re not supposed to question God’s plans. Their attitude has to be “thy will be done,” no back-talk allowed. They’re supposed to “take up their cross” and bear it without complaint. For others, the kinds of situations that lead to this question drive them away from God. Surely no loving God would allow such situations to occur, and so it’s not worth bringing them to God in prayer. Either they’re too angry with God to be on speaking terms, or they just don’t believe that there’s anyone listening. Still others, I think, have trouble with this kind of prayer because they can’t find the right thing to say. There are no words to express the depth of confusion, or pain, or sorrow. And so they can’t.

But this is the kind of prayer that we find, again and again, throughout the Bible. The Psalms are full of cries to God, demands that God finally act to make things right. The Book of Jonah turns the question into a short story, with Jonah shaking his fist at God’s unfairness; the Book of Job sets it in poetic verse, as Job demands repeatedly and at length that God explain how any of this is okay. And here, we see the prophet Jeremiah’s prayer, the prayer of a man called by God to prophesy unpleasant things to his people, and to bear the brunt of their anger in response. Jeremiah blames God: You did this to me! “Your words were found, and I ate them, and they were my joy…” (Jer. 15:16) But look what’s happened now. Jeremiah looks at his life, in which he’s done everything God has asked, and he asks in response, “Why, God? Why? How is this fair?”

When we ask these questions of one another, we human beings tend to reach for answers that make the senseless make sense. “Everything happens for a reason,” we might say. “God never gives us more than we can handle.” These words can sometimes be comforting—although often not. But in a sense they always minimize. In the face of the many tragic situations in life, the things that simply don’t make sense, they try to make them make sense; and usually fail.

God’s answer to these prayers is different. God doesn’t offer a rationalization. God doesn’t try to make it make sense. God reveals compassion; and God offers hope.

“Compassion” is at the heart of what the life of Jesus reveals about God; com–passion, in its original sense: con- meaning “with,” and passion meaning “suffering,” as in “the Passion of the Christ.” God is a God of compassion, because God has suffered with us. When we cry out to God asking why, God isn’t angry that we’re asking the question. God just answers, “I know it hurts.” I’ve been there too. This is why Jesus tells the disciples that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering.” It’s not an accident. It’s part of the plan. And it’s part of the plan because Jesus is God incarnate, the God who hears our prayers walking on the face of the earth, and to say that Jesus suffers is to say that one of the Trinity suffers, that God suffers; that God knows what it is to be betrayed and to grieve, to suffer pain and to die, not just in the abstract sense that God “knows” everything but because God has experienced it all. Whatever you are going through, whatever you have gone through, whatever you will go through in this life, God knows. God has been there before, and God is with you now. And for what it’s worth, this is why the Christian belief in Jesus’ divinity is so important: if Jesus is not God, then God remains aloof from all our pain and all our suffering; the human experience remains, at best, an academic pursuit.

This is also why Jesus’ response to Peter’s rebuke is so harsh. This is the “stumbling block”: that Peter’s tempting Jesus to stay aloof, to avoid sharing in our pain. And Jesus could choose to do that. He’s a miracle worker, for goodness’ sake. He’s God. He can walk on water, walk through walls. He could simply walk away and live a pleasant life by the sea, multiplying loaves and fishes and turning water into wine. But instead he chooses to walk in the way of the cross, and to transform it into the way of life.

And he invites the disciples to do the same. If they want to follow him, he says, they should follow him; follow him in the way of the cross. They shouldn’t try to insulate themselves, or stay aloof from the suffering of the world; it’s going to come, one way or another. But the way of the cross is the way of life, because the way of love inevitably brings up closer to suffering. When he says that “those who want to save their life will lose it,” but “those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” (Matt. 16:25) the word he uses here for “life” is psyche. It’s a word we often translate as “soul.” If you want to do as Peter suggests—if you want protect yourself from pain and spare yourself from any kind of suffering—you can only do it by risking your own soul, by giving up on love, by shutting off the compassion you feel for the people around you or by pretending that no one else is worth thinking about. We ask “why is this happening?” and God almost never answers the question. God listens with compassion, and God invites us to treat one another with compassion.

But that’s never the end of the story. God isn’t just there to comfort us in the face of suffering. God promises something more. God promises salvation: new hope, new life, a better future world, an actual solution to the problems that face us. Jeremiah asks God why, and God doesn’t only answer, “I am with you,” but “I will deliver you,” “I will redeem you.” (Jer. 15:21) Likewise, after Jesus tells his disciples that if they’re going to follow him, they’re going to need to take up their crosses, he offers them hope: those who are willing to be vulnerable, those who are willing to risk compassion and love, will be redeemed. “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels,” Jesus says, “and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.” (Matt. 16:26) And it’s this same hope for God’s future that animates Paul’s exhortation to the Romans: they can be patient now, because God’s justice is coming.

Again and again in life, we ask God “why?” And I’m sorry to say, there is no easy answer. But an answer isn’t really what we need. We need compassion. We need comfort. And we need hope: the hope that the story doesn’t end here, that there is a future in which all the wounds of this world will be healed.

So “let love be genuine,” Paul says. “Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection… Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:9-10, 12, 21) “For I am with you,” God says to Jeremiah, “I am with you to save you and deliver you.” (Jeremiah 15:20)

Amen.

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Sermon — August 27, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “He asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they answered…He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’”(Matthew 16:13-15) … Continue reading →

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Sermon — August 20, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “She came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”(Matthew 15:22) Jesus’ words … Continue reading →

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Sermon — August 13, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings Now, I’m not usually one to jump to Saint Peter’s defense. Peter is the central disciple, the first leader of the Church after Jesus’ departure, the Rock on whom … Continue reading →

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Sermon — July 16, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings From time to time in my ministry, I’ve had a certain kind of conversation with a parent who’s concerned about their child’s spiritual life. It’s usually about how they … Continue reading →

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Sermon — July 9, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings There are certain phrases that evoke a whole story. One of my favorites is “I just couldn’t resist…” As in, “I’m trying to cut down on caffeine, but an … Continue reading →

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Sermon — July 2, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings I’ve just finished watching—you might say “binge-watching”—the Netflix cooking competition show The Final Table, in which twenty-four chefs from around the world faced off in a series of culinary competitions. Murray … Continue reading →

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Sermon — June 18, 2023 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings All across New England, it’s officially strawberry season. Towns across Connecticut are holding Strawberry Festivals. Last weekend, when we were down in Long Island, we had our first farm-stand … Continue reading →

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Sermon — Pentecost, May 28, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonThe last year or so has seen a huge explosion in the field of “large-language models,” artificial-intelligence technologies that can be trained to process text and produce things we never thought they could: art and music and entire conversations, all in response to a paragraph of text. These tools are a little frightening, raising questions about “deep fakes” and plagiarized papers, about the future for copywriters and graphic designers and software engineers in a world where AI is starting to do parts of their jobs. But last week MetaAI—the artificial-intelligence research branch of the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta—released something new, which I’m shocked to say may actually be good for the world.

It’s a service that uses AI to transcribe speech to text, and text to speech, in over 1,100 different languages from all around the world, ten times more than any other speech-recognition approach. These sorts of tools make life better for real people in some very specific ways. Text-to-speech software, for example, lets people who are blind read emails or search the web without the need to see. Speech-to-text software provides automatic closed-captioning, so that Deaf people, for example, can watch cooking recipe videos or church services and be able to read the text. (In fact, if you watch the video of this service on Facebook, you’ll see that it provides closed captioning for the whole service, free of charge!)

And multilingual translation software unlocks even more power. In the very near future a single app on your phone could handle a whole conversation between two people with no language in common at all. Imagine how much easier it would be to be a refugee, or an immigrant, or a tourist, if you could speak into your phone, and have it transcribed, translated, and spoken out loud again, back and forth, all by artificial intelligence.

There’s just one problem. Large-language models depend on having access to, well… a large amount of language. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just really good at recognizing patterns. So what the model needs to learn a language, is to digest and analyze a huge amount of language; and what the model needs to be able to translate between languages is to have access to texts that mean the same thing, in a lot of different languages.

And last week, Meta’s engineers unveiled a great discovery. They discovered a single text that has been translated into more languages than any other and is widely available in a digital form online. Even better, audio files of this text and closely-related bodies of literature are also available online. Their discovery was so big that they just had to put out a press release. “Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge,” they wrote in their announcement this week, “To overcome it…”—and maybe you’ve already guessed where this is going—“to overcome it, we turned to…the Bible.”

There is no institution in the entire world, after all, that believes more deeply in “translation” than the Christian Church. Meta’s machine-learning engineers were able to gather a language-learning dataset based on text and audio recordings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, with an average of 32 hours of audio data per language.

We heard our readings this morning in our familiar English. But thousands of translators have worked for thousands of years translating these same readings into thousands of languages, spoken all around the world. Not just the big ones like English and Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. And not just the languages that seem obscure to you or me—Gujarati or Burmese or Lingala—but are in fact spoken by tens of millions of people. The dataset from Meta includes languages like Muria, spoken by 15,000 people in south-central India, and Kilivila, spoken by 20,000 in Papua New Guinea, and Itelmen, which is down to 82 native speakers at the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Siberia. The New Testament has been translated into all of these languages from Greek, and this is no accident.

The story of Pentecost, after all, is a story of translation. The rushing wind is amazing. The tongues of fire are impressive. But the miracle of Pentecost is, above all else, the miracle of translation. It’s a common tradition in some churches to have this story read aloud in many languages at once, perhaps beginning in English and then having readers join in speaking Spanish and French, Creole and Dutch, German and Arabic and whatever other languages their members speak.

But Pentecost itself, as you may notice, happens the other way around. “Devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) are gathered in Jerusalem for the great Feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. And the apostles begin to speak. They’re used speaking the Galilean dialect of Aramaic; perhaps a bit of Hebrew, perhaps a bit of Greek. But when they open their mouths on this day, “the Spirit gave them ability” “to speak in other languages.” (Acts 2:4) The people gathered from across the world hear them speak and are amazed, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6) The disciples are recognized as Galileans by their dialect; yet the Parthians hear them in Parthian, the Cappadocians in Greek, the Phrygians in Phrygian, the Egyptians in Egyptian, the Arabs in Arabic, the Romans in Latin. (Acts 2:9-11) Each one hears the disciples speaking in a foreign language and thinks it’s drunken babbling. Then they hear themselves addressed in words they understand, and they’re amazed, saying, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12)

What it means is this: the Christian message is, and has always been, and will always be, a message in translation.

This is true, of course, on the literal and historical level, and it’s important to remember. Christianity is not native to our culture. It’s not an American religion, or an English one. The Christian tradition doesn’t belong to us, any more than it belongs to anyone else. With the exception of that small band of Galilean-Aramaic speaking Jews, Christianity comes to every culture as a translation, as a gift or an imposition brought by someone else. It’s important sometimes to remember that our own traditions and understandings are not the whole truth of our faith. And it’s important sometimes to remember that our religion is one of constant change and reinterpretation: that the traditions handed down by the generations before us might sound different from the ones being created by the next, and that’s okay. They’re speaking different languages, is all.

But it’s true on the individual level as well. The Christian message doesn’t only need to be translated from Greek into English, from ancient Mediterranean cultures into a modern American one. The Christian message needs to be translated for each and every one of us, so that what seems at first to be nothing more than random babbling becomes, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a “river of living water,” (John 7:38) an encounter with the living God who is pouring that same Spirit out on us.

We come to this place seeking some way to experience God. And we’re confronted with language. Paragraph after paragraph of language. Some of it comes from the Bible, written thousands of years ago in Hebrew and Greek. Some of it comes from pieces of our liturgy written in Latin a thousand years ago, or in English five hundred years or fifty or twenty years ago. Some of it is set to music, having been composed in verse. Some of it comes out of my mouth, and some of it you hear from one another. But none of it flows directly from God’s mouth to your ears. Most of it isn’t addressed directly to you. All of it needs to be translated from its original language and context and meaning into the circumstances of our lives, because every word that’s ever been spoken loses something as it passes between two minds. (Unless, of course, you’re talking to yourself, which I do, almost constantly.)

And the fact that it makes any sense at all, the fact that some verse or prayer or lyric in this service might touch you somehow, that it might move you, comfort you, maybe even change you, is the miracle of Pentecost happening again. If there is anything in this hour of your Sunday morning that makes sense to you at all, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing you to hear the babble of a thousand voices speaking to you in the words you understand and need to hear. “Would that all the Lord’s people are prophets!” Moses said, “and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them all!” (Numbers 11:29) And he does. God gives the Holy Spirit to us all, God pours out the Spirit on all flesh, (Acts 2:17) God does the work to translate the good news to each and every one of us, so that across the millennia we too, can understand God’s power—not just in the stories of the past, but in all the wonders of the present—and be amazed. (2:12)

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Sermon — May 21, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Of all the Sundays in the entire church calendar, today seems to me be the one in which the apostles’ lives actually seem something like our own. For the last six weeks, we’ve been in the season of Easter, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Pentecost, and the miraculous and overwhelming manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Most of the rest of the year, we follow Jesus around in his Galilean perambulations, as he heals people and casts out demons and teaches his disciples face to face. And then for a few weeks in December, we’ll eagerly await the Messiah’s birth.

But none of these are the way we spend our lives today. Jesus does not appear to us in his resurrected body and say, “Peace be with you.” (I want you to call me if he does!) We don’t sit at Jesus’ feet and engage in a Q&A about his parables, or see people cured of an illness just by touching the fringe of his garments. And while the Holy Spirit is active among us, it rarely shows up with tongues of fire and the miraculous ability to understand other languages.

Most of the year the “plot” of our church year follows Jesus himself, during a short period, the year or three in his life when he was really, tangibly present with his disciples. But today, this Sunday after the Ascension, finds the disciples in a very different place. And it’s one that’s much more like our world. The amazing story of Jesus’ time on earth, of his ministry and death, his resurrection and reappearances, is over. The miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit is yet to come. The one whom the apostles thought would transform the world and establish a new way of life for them and all their people has gone, and the apostles are left wondering, “What now?”

“What now?” is the great question of Ascensiontide, this strange little mini-season of the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. But “what now?” is also the great question of our lives. Something happens. Somehow, we encounter God. And we’re left asking: What next?

If you’re sitting in this church, after all, it’s not by accident. The overwhelming majority of people in this neighborhood, this morning, are not sitting in church at all. Something happened, for you, at some point, which brought you here. Maybe it was a spiritual experience or a life crisis, a moment of great beauty and inspiration or a parent or spouse telling you that you didn’t have a choice. But one way or another, you’ve found your way here, and the question that you face, whether it’s conscious or not, is, the same as those disciples. Here we are. What next?

Well, if you’re anything like me, your instinct is to plan; to worry, fret, imagine, dream about the things that could come next. Every two or three years of my adulthood, I’ve come up with a five or ten-year plan. And the fact that every single one of them has been almost completely wrong hasn’t been enough to stop me yet. Like the apostles, I crave certainty. They ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, you’ve risen from the dead; now are you going to take charge and set up that kingdom of God you’ve been talking about so much?” (Acts 1:6) I ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, we’ve made it through the pandemic, more or less; now is it time for a big new vision for the church? Okay, Lord, the child’s six months old. (Two years old, three, four, five, fifteen years old.) Now is this going to start getting easier? Okay, Lord, you’ve made your point; I’ve realized that this grudge is only hurting me, and it’s time for me to let go and forgive my father, mother, sister, friend, spouse. Now could you just get them to apologize, first?” And to this, and to every single one of our attempts to predict the future, to force God’s hand, to speed things up or slow them down, Jesus replies that “it is not for you to know the times or periods” that God has set (Acts 1:7).

(Of course, it’s good to have some kind of vision or strategic plan. I worry that the Church doesn’t do this enough, that we just veer from crisis to crisis. And then I remember that the five-year Mission Strategy we adopted in 2016 had nothing to say about pandemic preparedness, and the one we adopted in 2021 will probably miss the crises of 2025. Maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower who put it best, when he said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”)

Well then, maybe plans won’t work; so what’s the plan?

“I know!” the apostles say. If focusing on the future won’t work, then let’s turn our eyes to the past! We know where Jesus went, and we know he’s coming back. So let’s get out our telescopes and fix them on the heavens, and wait and watch for Jesus to return in that very same patch of clouds. And this is something that we, the Church, love to do. We tell and re-tell stories of the past. We cherish the art and the buildings and the memories we’ve been left. We hold onto our traditions and value them, simply because they’re traditions. And we don’t just do this as churches. We do it as individuals, too. You see it all the time when we, as parents or teachers or coaches or friends, try to recreate the best moments of our lives for someone else. Our lives are full of golden memories, beautiful experiences of life or worship or prayer, and we try to reenact them so someone else can experience that same transcendent feeling that we did. And it almost never works.

I don’t even mean this as a criticism. Sure, it can go too far. We don’t want the church to become a museum, a place where nothing can change or grow or be touched. We want it to be a home, and a community, and it is. But there’s nothing wrong with remembering traditions. If those apostles had just thrown out their memories of Jesus altogether, where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be reading the Gospels. But as the pastor and author Sam Rainer says, it becomes a problem when nostalgia trumps devotion, when “memories of the past bring more emotion than the mission of the present.”[1] And it’s not a problem because there’s something wrong with what worked in the past. It’s a problem for the very reason the angels suggest when they appear and ask the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s where Jesus went, and Jesus really was there. But it’s not where he’s going next.

So if we want to follow Jesus in these in-between days, the question remains: What next? We can’t make a fool-proof ten-year plan. We don’t want to become stuck in the past. What’s left?

Well, what’s left is the present. And that’s what the apostles do: they live in the present. Not in the peculiarly-modern YOLO sense—they don’t fly to Bali and drink smoothies and do yoga on the beach, and post it all on their Instagram accounts. It’s something else. They go to a holy place, to the city of Jerusalem, and they go to a room, and they spend their time in prayer.

(Do you like to go to a holy place, and to go into a room, and to spend your time in prayer? Because if not, I have bad news for you, about what you’re doing right now.)

The disciples don’t seek self-indulgent pleasure or isolated enlightenment. They live in community; not just the abstract idea of community, but an actual community of actual people. Annoying people. Difficult people. Not“Beloved Community” in theory, but Peter, John, and James, Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Jameson; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s just fantastic; and all his brothers, who… hmm.

In those remarkable early days, between losing Jesus, the leader of their community, and receiving the Holy Spirit that would lead them to transform the world, the disciples do what we do now. We come, and we pray, and we wait for the Spirit to lead us where it will. And in the meantime, we live together as a community of prayer; as imperfect people made holier by one another and by God.

We can’t predict when the Spirit will come, or what it will say. We know it probably won’t be in the exact same place it appeared in the past. We might suffer along the way, as Peter is always eager to remind us. But God will not leave us comfortless. And even if we don’t know the way, and even if we can’t plan ahead, God is guiding us into even greater things. For “the spirit of glory,” as Peter says, “which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you…” and “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:14, 5:11).

[1] Sam Rainer, The Church Revitalization Checklist (Church Answers: 2021), 59.

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Sermon — May 14, 2023Lectionary Readings

In a 2006 study, a psychologist at Leeds University asked 92 volunteers to sit down and write out the common English word “door” on a piece of paper 30 times in 60 seconds. You might be able to imagine what happened next. You may even have experienced the phenomenon yourself. If I stand here and start doing it (“Door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door…” I won’t go for thirty) I suddenly start to feel very strange. “Door” feels odd in my mouth. Is ”door” really a word? Is it really spelled that way? What a strange combination of sounds! Have you ever felt this way, maybe while writing out identical thank-you notes or invitations? You’re writing and writing and suddenly, ordinary English words start to seem strange?

If you have, you’re experiencing what the psychologist who ran this study came to call jamais vu, in French, “never seen,” the cleverly-named opposite of déja vu, French for “already seen.” It’s an example of what researchers call “semantic satiation,” in which your brain becomes so oversaturated with the meaning of a word that it suddenly seems to become meaningless.

It’s a paradox of familiarity. As the word becomes more and more and more familiar, it suddenly flips to being completely strange. Your mind no longer needs to think about the meaning of the wor,d and instead you start thinking about the very strange process occurring beneath the surface, about the fact that my tongue, and lips, and lungs, and vocal chords are all flapping wildly in an incredible display of choreography simply to produce these very sounds.

It’s a good metaphor, I think, for spiritual life.

God is, after all, both deeply familiar to us, and profoundly strange. God is the one, as Paul the Apostle says this morning, who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things,” the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 2:23, 2:28) God is, as the theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “the Ground of Being Itself.” With every breath we take, God flows through us. With every move we make, God moves with us. Every step you take, every single day, God is watching you. (Okay, no. That’s Sting.)

Jesus tells his disciples, “You know [the Spirit], because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” He tells them that this Spirit, this divine Breath, this Advocate and Comforter, abides with them, literally lives within them; that God’s Holy Spirit is united with their spirits. When they, when we, feel hope or joy, peace or love, it’s a sign of God’s presence; it’s the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts, helping us to grow in love.

So the Holy Spirit of God is deeply familiar to all of us. It lives in us and breathes in us, and we live and move and have our being in it. God knows us better than we know ourselves.

And yet, like that word you repeat over and over and over again, God is so familiar to us that God becomes completely strange.

If it’s true that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, then we’re like the proverbial fish, who can’t tell you what water is until you take them out of it. And I think that’s probably true for most of us in this room. It certainly is for me. Even as a priest, I don’t spend most of the day prayerfully reflecting on the presence of God all around me. I spend most of the day trying to figure out what to cook for dinner that a five year old will actually eat, and wondering why the printer isn’t working, and trying to find someone new to work in the nursery after Miss Laurel graduates. I’m like a fish swimming in water, only occasionally noticing it’s wet.

And I think that’s why Paul so emphasizes the words those Athenians had carved onto one of their altars, dedicating it “To an unknown god.” (Acts 2:23) They had built altars to Zeus and Athena and Hera and then they built a spare, and marked it as such, to make sure none of the gods were offended when it turned out that they’d been left out. Paul sees this and says, “Aha! You’re waiting for an unknown God? Well, let me tell you about the God I know!”

But I think there’s a deeper spiritual truth in this dedication “to an unknown god.” Because God is always, and will always be, both known and unknown; both familiar and strange. In fact, the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition have always taught that the best way to come to know God is actually to un-know God, to strip away all the things we think we know and understand about the one whom we call God, to become so familiar with God that we realize how strange God really is; to slowly realize that none of what we think of God is true, because nothing we small human beings say in our small human way could ever capture God’s full reality, and yet God has given us life and breath and all things “so that,” as one translation says, “we would seek God, and perhaps feel our way toward him and find him.” (Acts 17:27) And we spend our whole lives, whether we know we’re doing it or not, slowly feeling our ways toward this unknown and unknowable God who knows us and abides with us and loves us.

Sometimes we have help. In other words, sometimes there are things in this world that help us feel our way toward God. Sometimes this help comes from art or music, which draw us deeper into the presence of God through their beauty. Sometimes our help comes from nature, which reminds us of God’s presence with us through the changing seasons of our lives, and strikes us with its own sublime strangeness. We very often have help from one another, from what we call the communion of saints, living and departed: the community of people who love us and care for us and inspire us to be the best versions of ourselves, and who forgive us and comfort us when we fall short.

And sometimes our help comes from all three of these at the same time. Many of you are here this morning to celebrate the installation of our newly-restored stained-glass window, and the dedication of the newly-created Beech Tree Medallion, which was given by Marie Hubbard’s daughters Sue and Judy in her memory. The medallion is based on the beloved Beech Tree that stands in our Garden, which Marie in turn had presented to the church in honor of her own parents, Marie and Kelso Isom. The beautiful restoration of the rest of the window was funded in part by funeral and memorial donations made in honors of many members of their extended family tree over decades, as well as by donations made by the whole church during the recent capital campaign.

All of which is to say that that window is more than just a pretty piece of glass. Through the beauty of its artwork, through the way it evokes nature, and perhaps most importantly of all, through its connection with the communion of ordinary saints, of blessed and beloved people who’ve gone before us, that window will guide each one of us and generations yet to come as we continue to feel our way toward God. It’s an incredible blessing for me to get to see it, from where I stand, right here, every Sunday, a living testament to a person and to the people who’ve made this church the amazing place it is. We look at a window, or we look at a tree, or we think of a person, and we know them all so well; but then suddenly we think, “Oh, my God; what an incredible thing.” And suddenly the grace of God shines through the people or places or pictures we know so well. And we are struck by their beauty and inspired by their love.

In a few minutes, I’ll say a formal prayer of blessing and dedication for the new window. But I want to add an informal dedication, as well, a subscript that we put on every beautiful thing in this place, a dedication “to an unknown God”; that in its beauty and in the memories it holds, we might be led every day, one step closer to the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Amen.

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Sermon — May 7, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9)

If there’s one thing that human beings are really good at, it’s immediately picking up on the small signs that identify whether someone else is a member of a particular social group. In every decade, teenagers have been able to identify who’s young and who’s old by their ability to understand the meaning of simple words like “slay” or “lit,” “groovy” or “the cat’s pajamas,” depending on your generation. But adults can do this too. Most of us can tell you exactly what it means for someone to be carrying around a large regular iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts when it’s 45 degrees in May—namely, that you’re a New Englander, and probably not a tourist. Just the other week I turned and asked a colleague if she was a New Yorker when I heard her say the word “water,” and I’ll never forget the moment I heard Steve Spinetto say about three words the first time we met, and then asked him where exactly in Cambridge he’d grown up.

For one evolutionary reason or another, human beings are very good at distinguishing those who are in a particular group from those who are out. In fact, sometimes we’re too good at it. You might even say that this is the source of some of our biggest problems: our seeming inability to treat other people like human beings across some of these very visible dividing lines.

And at times, it seems the Bible doesn’t help. Our Gospel reading this morning includes a verse that’s often used to condemn the followers of other religions, when Jesus says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) As Bishop Alan said in his homily at our Clergy Conference this week, this verse is the kind of thing that makes us cringe when we read it at funerals, as we often do, wondering who is sitting out there in the pews feeling as though we’re declaring that they’ve been cut off from God.

Likewise our epistle can often be read in an unfortunate way. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that Peter’s words have been twisted to disastrous effect during the history of the Church. Imagine the sermons that have been preached to white churches in apartheid South Africa or to slave-owners in the antebellum South or by nationalist priests in Russia right now, that have begun from the verse, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9) We all hear these words as if they were addressing us. And because the common Civil-Rights-era saying that “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” remains as true now as it was seventy years ago, we have to reckon with the fact that right now, in hundreds and thousands of churches across this Commonwealth and across this country, all following the same lectionary, white preachers or readers are looking out over all-white or nearly-all-white congregations and saying to them, “You are a chosen race.”

But there’s a catch. And it’s an important catch. Because we are just not members of an American church, or an Episcopal church, or a mostly-white church. We are members of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the Church with a capital-C, the global, universal Church. And just as there are white preachers looking out over their congregations today all across America and saying, “You are a chosen race,” there are Black preachers looking out over their congregations, saying, “You are a chosen race.” Just as there are American preachers telling their congregations, “You are a holy nation,” there are priests across Latin America telling their people, “ustedes son una nación santa,” and clergy of many denominations around the world are the same thing to the people in their own countries. This very morning, in our one Episcopal diocese alone, there are people hearing these words who’ve been in Boston for ten generations and people hearing them who came here as refugees or immigrants just months or years ago, and they’re being read in English, Spanish, and Chinese; Swahili, and Dinka, and Luganda; and there are probably some I’m missing.

When Peter talks about a “chosen race,” it’s not “the white race” or “the Black race.” When he talks about a “holy nation,” it’s not the United States of America or the Russian Federation. As King Charles III knows better than anyone else, when Peter talks about “royal priesthood” he doesn’t mean the fact that the King of the United Kingdom doubles as Supreme Governor of the Church of England; he means that in Christ, a congregation of ordinary people who have been neither ordained nor crowned have been made into a royal priesthood, the holy people of God, and there is no one who has the authority to lord it over them and there is nobody who stands between them and God.

Peter doesn’t write this letter, like Paul writes his letters, to a particular congregation in a particular place. He begins it, “Peter, an apostle of Christ, to the exiles of the Diaspora in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” (1 Peter 1:1) He writes, in other words, to people who are not his people, not his tribe or nation or race, people who don’t even speak his native tongue; people who are not one people, but many, and who—and this is important—are not a majority gathered in their community, but tiny minorities, scattered and dispersed throughout the world. “Once you were not a people,” he writes, “but now you are God’s people,” (1 Peter 2:10) and it’s true. Through their shared faith in Christ, these tiny scattered groups, minorities within their communities, have been transformed into a new nation, a new people, whose identity is formed not so much by their language, or their location, or their nationality, but by their allegiance to Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God, by their decision to follow what the Letter of James calls the “royal law”: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (James 2:8)

This isn’t something you can see in someone’s face. It isn’t something you can hear in their accent or their choice of words. Even the apostles can hardly recognize the presence of God, after all. It strikes me that in this very passage that can sometimes feel exclusive—“no one comes to the Father except through me”—Thomas says to Jesus, “Lord we do not know where you are going,” (John 14:5) and Philip makes a request that’s so completely missing the point (“Lord, show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied”) that Jesus responds with dismay: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me?” (John 14:8-9) Are you among my closest followers and you still have no idea at all what’s going on? How much more true is that for us, two millennia later, when we look at another person’s religion and claim that we can judge whether that’s of God or not. If even Thomas and Philip don’t know where Jesus is going or where God has been revealed, maybe we ought to just be humble, and not pretend that we know what God is doing in someone else’s life, even if they don’t seem to believe the same things we do.

What’s “chosen” about the “chosen race” is not that it’s one race that’s chosen; it’s that people are chosen from among all the races of the world. What’s holy about the “holy nation” is not that one nation is more holy than the rest, it’s that citizens from all the nations of the world, which all have their ups and downs, good and bad, have been formed into a new nation whose values are at odds with the values of the lands in which they dwell, whose way of self-sacrificing love of neighbor and of God sometimes overlaps with, but is ultimately incompatible with, the way of the world.

We are, and always have been, and always will be, a tiny fraction of the world. Jesus would say we’re like yeast, or like seeds, or like a few fish in the sea. And that’s our gift and our calling: not to separate ourselves from the world, as if the world were evil and we are good, but to love the world, because we hold dual citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven and the many kingdoms of the earth.

Every one of you is a “royal priest,” a holy leader who has the power to set an example for the world, and the power to share God’s love with the world and to share the world’s needs with God. You have the power to love the people around you, whoever they are and whatever that means. You have the power to pray for them, to care for them, to simply hold them in the light of God, and sometimes even to share with them a little bit of the story of how you ended up right here today. For “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9-10)

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Sermon — April 23, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)

I don’t know whether it’s because the weather’s been so nice or because the T has been so slow, but recently I’ve found myself mostly traveling on foot. Now, because I live and work in Charlestown, this is pretty easy. But in just the last few weeks, I’ve walked over to meetings at the Cathedral and City Hall and Old North Church, all reasonable walks from here. And just this Tuesday I had a lovely walk across the city to South Station, thinking that rather than walking to Community College, taking the Orange line at a snail’s pace to Downtown Crossing, and then probably walking some more anyway rather than waiting for a second train to go one stop on the Red Line, it would be faster and much more pleasant just to walk. And it was great.

But on the way home, something really awful happened. After my meeting, as I was headed back to church, I pulled out my wireless headphones and realized that the batteries were dead. And so I was left, to my horror, to walk the several beautiful miles back to Charlestown alone with my thoughts. And I couldn’t help but notice how long it really takes to travel somewhere on foot. In terms of minutes, it wasn’t much slower than it would have been to take the T these days. But when there are no distractions, no headphones in the ears or staring down at the phone—I’m much too clumsy to do that and not trip—the time really stretches out. You hear the traffic and the birds. You see the architecture and the limping runners seeing the sights on the day after the Marathon. If you’re like me, maybe you say a little prayer for all the twenty-somethings who look like they’re gearing up for a day in the mines as they rush toward their Financial-District jobs. When you travel somewhere by foot, at a leisurely pace, you start to notice things.

Unless you’re Cleopas or the other, unnamed disciple, who walked most of seven miles with Jesus and didn’t seem to realize it was him.

Maybe they’re caught up, the two of them, discussing the incredible things that have come to pass, the trial and death and supposed resurrection of their Lord. And a man joins them on the road, and starts talking with them, as they all walk along. And they speak at great length. Luke doesn’t tell us when exactly on the seven-mile walk Jesus joins them, but their conversation clearly lasts a while. They think that he’s a traveler from abroad, and they fill Jesus in on the events of the last few days, and he replies, beginning with Moses and all the prophets and explaining to them how all of this makes sense, re-telling the whole story of the Bible until they understand that when they heard that the Messiah had come, this was exactly what they should’ve expected.

But looking at him, they don’t see that it’s Jesus walking with them. Hearing him, they don’t hear that it’s Jesus talking to them. They don’t recognize that this is a classic sermon from the man they’d been following around now for months.

And after a long walk, seven miles down the road, they reach Emmaus, and the disciples invite him in. “Come, stay with us. Have something to eat.” And he sits with them, and he takes bread, and blesses it, and breaks it, and gives it to them. And then they recognize him, and he vanishes from their sight.

And it’s only then, in retrospect, that they begin to understand. It’s only then, when Jesus has appeared to them and disappeared again, that they recognize that he was there with them along the way. It’s only then that they look back on the experience of spiritual fulfillment that they’d had, at this sense that their hearts had been strangely warmed, that they recognize it as a sign that Jesus was walking with them.

Their inability to recognize Jesus is not because they were looking down at their phones, or had their headphones in. It’s because Jesus has been transformed. The Jesus who appears to us now, on this side of the Resurrection, doesn’t look or sound quite the same. Jesus appears to us in many different ways, and we don’t always recognize him. These disciples don’t recognize him in the man who’s walking with them along the road. They don’t recognize him in the stories Scripture tells, or in the sermons that Jesus gives. They don’t recognize him when they invite this stranger to come in and eat. Jesus is present in all of those things, for those ancient disciples and for us. And sometimes we meet him there. But in this story, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread, in that first true Eucharistic meal, when he is suddenly revealed before their eyes, and then he disappears, vanishing from their sight. And they’re left to reflect on that long walk, and to realize that he was with them all the way.

Now, some of you heard me say this on Maundy Thursday, and I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I’ve been noticing more and more, recently, that huge parts of my life only make sense in retrospect, especially in my spiritual life. Does that ring true for any of you? It’s hard to know, in the moment, that God is close at hand. Most of us are, most of the time, head down in our phones, literal or metaphorical; we’re distracted by the regrets of the past and the worries of the future. And even when we’re not, even when we’re undistracted for miles along the road, Jesus doesn’t necessarily choose to be revealed. Even when we’re fully present, we don’t always recognize that God is present with us as we walk along the road on the long, slow journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

But then there may come a time, when God’s grace and mercy are revealed—when, even if it’s just for an instant, Jesus is revealed, and a whole long section of the journey suddenly makes sense.

“Ohhhhh,” we think to ourselves. “Okay.” That random guy on the road did seem to know a lot about Messianic prophecies in the Bible. I guess it makes sense, if he was really Jesus after all. Ohhhh. That burning in my heart? That wasn’t just that second helpful of extra spicy baba ghanoush. That was the presence of the risen Lord. That makes more sense.

I’m being facetious, but not really. I was walking down to South Station to talk with someone about the ordination process, and I love having conversations like this, because they give me a chance to reflect back on the last decade of my own life while I’m talking with someone about their own journey into ministry.

And like I said, over the last few months I’ve started looking back over the last few years, and everything’s started to make more sense. It turns out, strangely enough, that moving from full-time ministry out in Lincoln to part-time ministry here actually turned out to be the best possible decision for my family, before I knew I would need it to be. It turns out that, ten years ago, when I was feeling torn between two very different callings to ordained priesthood and software engineering, and I decided to answer the call to ordination—that I was really saying yes to both. (I don’t know how many of you know that in the other part of my time I maintain daily prayer applications for Episcopalians and Anglicans in the US, Canada, and Singapore, with three or four thousand users a day.)

More and more often, during this particular season, I’ve been looking back over the last seven miles of my life, as it were, and realizing that it’s almost as if Jesus had been walking with me along the way. Imagine that. It’s almost as if the Holy Spirit is actually real, as if God does in fact lead us and guide us without our knowing it, as we stumble and trip our way through life; as if, maybe, just maybe, I can give up some of my over-anxious need to be in control and trust that, come what may, God will be there with me.

And that’s a very scary thought, for someone like me. I’ll be honest with you. It’s very scary for an anxious know-it-all like me to admit that I might not be able to control it all, or even understand or recognize what’s happening in the moment. But it’s such good news, too. Because God is here, with you, whatever road you’re walking right now.

And so I close with the prayer with which this service began: “O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

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Sermon — April 16, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Reading

“Although you have not seen God, you love God; and even though you do not see God now, you believe and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:8-9)

There’s a popular cliché that’s infuriating because it is, on the one hand, an insulting affront to everything our culture likes to believe about itself and, on the other, probably true. “It’s not what you know,” the saying goes, “it’s who you know.” In other words, what matters the most in getting a job or making a sale or closing a deal isn’t your skill or knowledge or qualifications, but your social network. And in a way this seems to go against our meritocratic culture, with all its ideas about hard work and raw talent winning out in the end. But time and again, anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s true.

And in fact it works out well, in a slightly different sense, for most of the disciples. Mary went early on Easter morning and saw the empty tomb. And she went and called Simon Peter and John the Beloved Disciple, and they came, and saw the empty tomb. So they all know the truth of the Resurrection for themselves. But the other disciples have no idea. They don’t get anything out of “what they know” about the Resurrection. But they’re very lucky in “who they know.” Because they spend the evening of that Easter Day together, Jesus appears and shows them his wounds.

But for Thomas, it’s different. This story is not about what he knows, and it’s not about who he knows. It’s about the idea that each half of the proverb can be inverted or reversed: In this story, “it’s not what you don’t know, it’s who knows you.”

We often talk about the story of “Doubting Thomas” as a parable of faith and doubt, of the difference between trusting what you’ve been told and needing it to be proved, and as a story in which all of us—who have not witnessed the Resurrection first hand, but merely been told about it—find ourselves in Thomas’s blessed shoes. And all of this is true. But I can’t help but pick apart the plot today, and wonder how exactly it is that Jesus knows that Thomas has his doubts.

Think about the story as it’s written. On Easter Evening, Jesus appears to the disciples in his resurrected body, one which still bears his wounds—which is itself a compelling image, for another sermon. He greets them with a sign of peace, he gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he disappears. Later, the disciples who were there tell Thomas that they had seen the Lord. And he says that unless he sees Jesus for himself, he will not believe.

A week later, they’re all together again. And again, Jesus appears, and immediately he says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” (20:27) And I find myself asking the question— How on earth did Jesus know? He wasn’t there to hear Thomas express his doubts last Sunday. If he’d been there when Thomas had arrived, Thomas wouldn’t have had the doubts to begin with. Do we think he was eavesdropping nearby? Do we think that Simon Peter called him on the phone? Is this just another instance of the Son of God knowing all things?

Or could it be something else? Is it less that Jesus knows what Thomas has said, and more that Jesus simply knows Thomas? Does he show up, and see him, and instantly know what he needs, and offer it freely, without Thomas even having to ask? Is this story really, in other words, less about what Thomas doesn’t know, and more about the one by whom he’s known?

I think part of the appeal of the story of “Doubting Thomas” is that we all wrestle with doubt, from time to time. We all find ourselves, maybe more often than not, in the position of that disciple who is not sure that he believes—who is not convinced that he can accept all the claims that other Christians make to him—who struggles with doubt and faith, but who shows up nevertheless to be with them in community on the Lord’s Day, and who finds himself meeting Jesus there.

And it’s easy to take up Jesus’ words and pat ourselves on the back: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” he says to Thomas. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29) Good for all of us two thousand years later who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.

But the good news Jesus has is even better than that. Because as John says somewhere else, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) We love God because God first loved us. We seek God because God first sought us. We know God because God first knew us. It’s not our responsibility to know everything, to know who we are or who God is or where in the world this is all going to end up.

God knows what each one of us needs, and God seeks us out, and the God who loves us gives us what we need. And this story is not a story about how good we are because we believe in God, even though we haven’t seen the proof. It’s a story about how good the God is who God believes in us. It’s a story that’s not about what we know, or who we know or what we don’t know, but about the One who’s known us since before we were born, and guided us all the days of our lives.

And it’s this God—the one who seeks us, and knows us, and loves us—who has promised to save us. It’s this resurrected God, who has seen the worst humanity can do, who’s offered to rescue us. It’s this wounded God, who shows up among us still bearing the marks in his hands and in his side, who has promised to heal us. Whoever or whatever we believe or don’t believe, know or don’t know, God knows us as deeply as he knew Thomas.

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Sermon — Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Now, on any other day I would start with a cute story or an illuminating anecdote that perfectly fits the theme of the sermon. But it’s Easter Sunday. And some of our younger members, in particular, may be very wired or a little tired, and if I recall correctly I actually put a couple of them to sleep with my Easter homily last year.

So let me get straight to the point, just like Jesus would: The angel of the Lord who appears to Mary and Mary at the tomb is a liar. Or at least he fibs. In any case, the angel certainly doesn’t tell the whole truth. “Go and tell the disciples,” the angel says, “‘Jesus has been raised from the dead. He’s going on ahead of you to Galilee, and you will see him there.’” (Matthew 28:7)

Now you can imagine the women’s confusion and delight, as they hurry off to find the other disciples. It’s a three-day journey on foot from Jerusalem back to Galilee, but they can’t wait. And you can imagine the two Marys composing their thoughts as they go together to find the other disciples. You might sometimes find yourself rehearsing for a big conversation like this, too: “Now, I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but while you were sleeping in, we went down to the tomb, and Jesus’ body wasn’t there. And there was an angel, and the angel told us that we should all head back to Galilee, and Jesus would appear to us there. So pack your bags, and let’s go see him!”

And while Mary and Mary are on their way, while these two apostles to the apostles are rushing along the road to share the good news of the Resurrection with Peter, James, and John, to tell them that the sooner we get to Galilee, the sooner we’ll see Jesus again, a man appears along the road, and says, “Hello!” and I like to picture one of the Marys recognizing him first, and doing a double take: “Jesus Christ!” And I did not just take the Lord’s name in vain, because there he is, the Risen Lord himself. And she stops and walks toward the one she had been running to try to find.

“Jesus is risen,” the angel says. “Go to Galilee, and you’ll see him there.” And as they hurry on along the road—before they’ve arrived at their destination or even packed their bags—he appears. Not in the tomb where they expected to find him, not in Galilee where they were told he would appear, but here instead, exactly where they are, along the side of the road.

Most of us spend most of our lives thinking about points on a map. We spend years thinking about the next step, and then the next one, and then the next one; about an education, a career, maybe a family; about our personal growth or spiritual journey or physical fitness. And at a certain point, perhaps, we begin to fear the next step: the next joint to be replaced, the next sense to start to go, the next partner or friend who starts to fail. And perhaps, in moments of reflection or of hope, we think about our final destination, about the end of the road, the place where we will finally see God face to face, and be reunited with the people we’ve loved who have gone before us.

But God appears to us along the way. Not in the places we’ve been told to look. Not at the highest holy days or in the greatest milestones or at the most abrupt turning points of our lives. But halfway down the road, while we’re on the way to pack our bags, expecting to go and meet God somewhere else.

God shows up in quiet moments along the way. God shows up in small encounters that we sometimes miss. Again and again, God shows up in our lives, and says, “Hello!” And most of the time, we miss the signs, and don’t stop and turn aside, and then God shows up again a little further down the road.

This is the true power of the story of the Resurrection: Not that Jesus came back to life, two thousand years ago, simply to impress us or to prove a point. But that Jesus lives. That God still walks among us. That the Holy Spirit is, even now, moving among us, in small and sometimes very quiet ways, surprising us with moments of love and comfort and grace. And if we want to meet God face to face, we don’t need to make it all the way to wherever we’re hurrying off to be. We simply have to stop. And look. And see the one who stands along the road.

Because God is not waiting for you up in heaven. God is not stuck somewhere in a story of the past. God is not even trapped in this church, thank God. The God who died for you and rose again is all around you, everywhere, walking beside you and inviting you into a new and better life, not just in the world to come, but in this world, here and now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

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Sermon — April 2, 2023 — Palm SundayThe Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two,
from top to bottom.” (Matthew 27:50-51)

There’s no symbolic barrier or divide in our world that’s more pointless than the curtain you find on some airplanes that exists only to separate first class from coach. It’s not a locked door that can prevent passengers from going to one side or the other. It doesn’t humidify the air on the first-class side while your skin dries out in coach. The same enticing odor of mingled airplane foods wafts throughout the whole cabin. It’s not even substantial enough to block the sound of a baby crying a few rows back in coach. There are real differences in comfort and treatment between the two sections of seating on the plane, and that’s fine—people paid for those perks—but the curtain itself doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way. It simply hangs there as a symbol of the distinction, as a border crossing between that part of the plane, where people are packed like sardines into a tin can hurtling through the sky at several hundred miles an hour, and this part of the plane, where we recline in relative luxury.

There’s something deep in the human psyche that loves a good symbolic barrier. You can see it as far back as our history goes. When God gave instructions to Moses on how to build the Tabernacle, the shrine that the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness, God carefully warned him to hang a curtain before the Holy of Holies, so that the inner sanctum, the most holy place in the world, would be separated from the rest. (Exod. 26:31, Lev. 16:2, et al.) And when the Temple was built, the same process was applied: at the center of the Temple building, in the inmost sanctuary, an elaborately-woven curtain, sixty feet high and 30 feet wide, divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, and only the High Priest himself ever crossed through that curtain, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur. The curtain stood there, every other day and for every other person, separating an imperfect and unholy world from the perfect holiness of God.

You see the same kind of thing when the crowds welcome Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. You’ll notice we’ve adapted this one slightly. We waved palm branches like they did, in celebration and joy, but you’ll notice nobody asked you to take your coat off and put it on the sidewalk. But that’s what they did. They removed their cloaks, and laid them on the ground, so that the dust and dirt of the road wouldn’t touch the royal feet; not only Jesus’ feet, but even the hooves of the donkey he rode on, were too holy and good to come into contact with the ground. They let their own coats be trampled into the dust just so they could enact a barrier between the Son of David and the dirt, between the Holy One of God and the messy realities of life—a mobile curtain between the Holy of Holies and the world.

But when Jesus dies, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two.

Now, there are several ways to understand this event. Some point to it as a foreshadowing of the destruction of the Temple, which had probably already come to pass by the time Matthew wrote these words. Others say that they reflect the fact that Jesus himself is the Temple, the place on earth in which God fully dwells, and that the ripping of the curtain parallels the tearing apart of his own body. But to me, the fact that it’s the curtain tearing and not a stone falling or some decorations crumbling is the key. When Jesus dies, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world is torn in half; the dividing barrier between creation and the glory and the holiness of God is removed. When Jesus dies, the last thing that separates us human beings from God goes away. God’s very immortality seems to have come to an end; yet we know that Easter Day is coming, and that what comes to an end this week is not God’s immortality, but our mortality.

This is some heady, theological stuff. So let me put it to you in a different way.

The story of Palm Sunday, from the Procession to the Passion, is a story in which God plays the role of an airline CEO—better yet, for anyone who’s going to be pedantic with me, he’s the owner, the sole proprietor of the airline. And God, who’s accustomed to flying on private jets, comes down among the common folk, and flies commercial—but first class, of course. He’s treated like a king. He gets to board when he wants. They come to him first with a warm blanket and complimentary drinks. The flight attendants lay down their jackets in the aisle so his shoes don’t pick up anything nasty off the carpet.

And halfway through the flight, he takes a walk down the aisle. He stands outside the bathroom in coach, waiting on line. He offers to trade seats with someone trapped between a man-spreader on one side and a nap-leaner on the other. And some of the passengers realize that hey, this is the guy who’s responsible for all this! This man is the reason we’re eating this nasty food, and sitting in these cramped seats. Let’s throw him off the plane! And as they shuffle him toward the front, he tears the curtain down. And they think that they’ve gotten rid of him once and for all, but he reappears. And he makes an incredible announcement. He doesn’t just offer a first-class seat on the next flight to anyone who believes in him. He actually starts inviting people up into the empty seats up front, people who hadn’t paid for first-class tickets at all. “There’s plenty of room up here: Enjoy.”

The curtain has already been torn down. We can already walk into first class. Jesus promised us eternal life, that we would see God face to face, and this was not a promise for the future, for heaven, for life after death. It’s a promise that’s being fulfilled even now.

“God’s desire,” writes Brother David Vryhof of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery over in Cambridge, “God’s desire is to bring us into larger life, to join us to that eternal life that the Father shares with the Spirit and the Son – not only in heaven, but now and here, in our daily lived experience… This larger life is available to us all. God has not hidden it or made it hard. The secret lies in self-surrender, in handing ourselves over to God and in trusting God completely to do in us and through us what we cannot do for ourselves.”[1]

We all seek the peace, and the contentment, and the joy of eternal life. But try as we might, we can’t seem to achieve them for ourselves. We comfort ourselves, maybe, with the hope that we’ll find them in heaven. But the curtain has been torn in two, and the kingdom of heaven is already among us. God is already here, working in us. And the God who knows the depth of human pain, the God who knows the power of death itself, is inviting us into eternal life.

“Hosanna!” we cry on Palm Sunday, every year. In Aramaic, if you don’t know this, that’s “Save us, please!” And that’s what Jesus does. He tears down the curtain that divides us from God, and God’s holiness spills out into the world and draws us back in love towards God’s very in self.

So “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mathew 21:9)

[1] https://www.ssje.org/2011/05/29/the-secret-to-self-surrender-br-david-vryhof/#more-2721

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Sermon — March 26, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

There’s a phrase in our liturgy that has a special place in my heart, and appropriately enough, it’s the one I say the most often during our service on any given Sunday morning. Think about the words that come out of my mouth during this hour of my week. What do you think I say the most? Is it “Amen”? “The Lord be with you”? Maybe “Let us pray”? No, it’s something else, and interestingly enough it’s the only thing I say to each one of you, as individuals, not to you as a collective and not to God. Can anyone guess what it is?

“The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

Now, much ink and much blood have been spilled over the phrase “the Body of Christ” in the history of the Church, with philosophers and theologians debating and sometimes armies even fighting over what exactly Jesus meant when he said those words. But it’s actually that second half that means the most to me, week after week. This is the Body of Christ, yes—and it is “the bread of heaven.”

To me, this is more than just a poetic phrase or a symbolic idea. It’s a way of expressing the alternate reality we enter in this room. It means the same thing that it means when I say, week after week, that “joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we forever sing this hymn.” These are not just pretty words. They are a statement of faith that in this Eucharistic meal, in this Holy Communion, we are united with the whole communion of saints. We gather around the altar with the whole choir of heaven. When I say “the bread of heaven,” it means that this is the bread they are eating in heaven; that there is just one eternal banquet happening with God across all of time and space, and we dip into it for a while, week after week, and we take another bite of heavenly food. And when we eat that bread, we are sharing in a holy meal with people from generations before us and generations yet to come, and even though we can’t see them or hear them, they are somehow, mysteriously, present with us here.

This is what makes these words mean so much to me. There are some people I think about every week as I give you this bread, people some of you have loved and lost, people with whom you wish you could share another meal, and as I say the words “the bread of heaven” I pray that you may feel them present with you here, sharing this bread with you across eternity. There are many more of you whose grief I do not know. But all of us, above a certain age, come to this altar bearing pain and loss, bearing the memories of people who have died or who won’t talk to us any more or who talk to us all the time, but can’t remember our names any more. And so I pray for every one of you, every week: may this bread unite you with them again, wherever they are, as we will all be reunited again in heaven.

In Christian life, we hold two things in constant tension: we proclaim our faith in a God who is good and who loves us and cares for each one of us, and we live in a world in which tragic things happen. Philosophers can debate the question of why; John the evangelist just tells a story. And it’s a story that has a few things to say about how God responds and how we can respond to all this grief and pain.

First: Mary and Martha’s story tells us that sometimes God doesn’t do the things we wish that God would do, and when that happens, it’s okay to point it out, to blame God for God’s visible absence from our world, for God’s failures to heal and cure and save us from harm. When he’s told that Lazarus is ill, Jesus inexplicably, unbelievably, delays for two days. He waits until Lazarus has died, and then he goes. And Martha and Mary blame him, as they should: “Lord, if you had been here,” Martha says, “my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) And she piously adds something to soften the blow: “But even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22) But when Mary comes, she doesn’t add all that. “Lord, if you had been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” (11:32) And Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for her lack of faith.

He does something else. He weeps. And this is the second thing the story tells us: God is a God of compassion, empathy, and love. When all our questions fail to produce any answers, when all our prayers fail to produce a result, God is not far off, distracted or unmoved. God comes to us, and loves us, and God’s heart breaks for us. Jesus loves us like he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he sees our pain, and he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And perhaps this is a part of God’s answer to our pain. Where is God in our grief and pain and loss, where is God in the midst of all our tears? God is right there, weeping with us; and in fact, God is right there, dying with us. Thomas reminds the other disciples that the powers that be have it out for Jesus, and they do. This journey to Jerusalem, in fact, is the beginning of the end: Thomas is right. Jesus is traveling toward his death. The only person who’s dead at the end of this story is God. Lazarus’s tomb is empty, and Jesus’ tomb is full.

But that’s not all that God does. Jesus does not absorb our anger as we vent it, like an infuriatingly-calm therapist. Jesus doesn’t just weep with us or comfort us, like a loving, compassionate friend. Jesus doesn’t just die with us and for us. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn’t just do it at the end of time, in the general resurrection on the last day, as Martha says. (11:24) No, Jesus says, it’s better than that. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) And he actually raises Lazarus from the dead. (11:43) And a couple chapters later, on the night before Palm Sunday, on the night before Holy Week begins, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, and they share a meal—Jesus and Martha, Mary and Lazarus—and it’s as if Lazarus and Jesus have traded places, Lazarus coming forth from his tomb, and Jesus turns toward his own. In Jesus, the two sisters and their brother who has died break bread together again, and that’s the good news: that the power of death that separates us from the people whom we love will never win in the end; that though we die, we live, and we will rise again.

We don’t get the same certainty that Mary and Martha had. We aren’t given the miracle meal. “We walk by faith,” as the old hymn goes, “and not by sight.” “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says to Martha, “even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (11:25-26) And then the question he asks her becomes the question he asks each one of us: “Do you believe this?” (11:26)

We live in the world as it is. Most of us carry with us, through our lives, a hundred small losses and a couple big ones. And there’s nothing I can say or do to soften the blow. There’s no prayer I can teach you to pray that will bring about a miraculous change. But God has promised that the story doesn’t end here. And there’s an invitation, amid it all: When your “bones are dried up,” when “hope is lost,” when you are “cut off completely” from the joy of the Lord, you are invited to share a meal, by the one who tells you he is the resurrection and the life, by the one who offers you the bread of heaven, who invites you to come and eat, and be in the presence of those who are long gone. To know that, as my favorite prayer from our funeral service goes, “to [God’s] faithful people… life is changed, not ended”; that although we cannot see them, they live, and they are here, and we will one day see them again.

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Sermon — March 19, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Page

Last week, a thirty-five-year-old man was released from the prison where he had spent the last eighteen years after being convicted for a murder he did not commit. In 2004, Sheldon Thomas was arrested after a witness recognized Sheldon Thomas’s picture in a photo array provided by police officers, and identified him as one of the men who’d been in the car at a drive-by shooting. But there was one problem. The Sheldon Thomas in the photo wasn’t the Sheldon Thomas who was arrested. In fact, there were two different Black men named Sheldon Thomas living in the precinct at different addresses, and the one in the photo was not the one the police picked up. What’s worse, as the district attorney’s office reported this year, the detectives, prosecutors, and judge in the original trial knew that the Sheldon in the photo array was the wrong Sheldon Thomas. The one who was arrested had been involved in a confrontation with the police earlier that year, and when the shooting occurred, they leapt into action, prompting a witness to identify the photo of one Sheldon Thomas and arresting the other.

The defense commissioned a study in which 85% of law students of color who examined the photo array accurately reported that the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested wasn’t in it. The lead detective admitted on cross-examination that he had provided false testimony about the photo array. But the witness who’d identified one Sheldon Thomas in a photo array then identified the other in three in-person line-ups, and despite his claims of innocence, the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested—who does not look very much like the Sheldon Thomas whose photo had been used, apart from his age and the color of his skin—was sentenced to 25 to life, and the years that I spent, aged 14 to 32, going to high school and college and getting married and going to seminary, he spent aged 17 to 35, in jail.[1]

Now, it’s possible the witness was entirely unaware of what was happening. The FBI itself recognizes that even law enforcement officers’ unintentional actions can actually distort eyewitnesses’ memories. For example, if an officer says, “I know that was hard for you, but you did a good job” at the end of the session, the witness actually becomes more likely to identify the same person again in the future.[2] Human eyes, it turns out, are not cameras, objectively capturing a scene: our vision is shaped as much by what we expect to see as it is by what’s actually in front of us. The stories we tell about someone shape our memories of the past and even our perception of reality in the present.

Just ask the man born blind.

The characters in this story think they see the blind man for who he is. Both the disciples and the crowd treat the man as though his blindness is a judgment from God, a punishment for sin. The disciples ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) But Jesus says, “Neither.” The underlying premise of their question is completely false. The man’s impaired vision is not a punishment for sin. No disability or impairment or illness, in fact, is a punishment from God. Later, the crowd repeat the same idea, in less polite tones. After the man points out that surely, Jesus must come from God, or he couldn’t have done this miraculous healing, they dismiss him. “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34) They think they know the man’s story. They take their own prejudices for granted, and use them to tune him out. “You were born blind, and therefore you must be a sinner”–what? he was sinning in the womb?—“and therefore we don’t have to listen to a word you say.” The story is settled. The case is closed. Ironically, the people who’ve been able to see their whole lives fail to see what’s happening right in front of them. If the man’s blindness was a judgment from God, then surely his healing must be a blessing. But the people refuse to consider the evidence of their own eyes. The ones who can see become, metaphorically, the ones who are blind.

In fact, some of them become almost literally blind. After the man washes his eyes and is healed, John writes, “the neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” And some of them said, “Yeah, it’s him!” But others said, “No, it’s just someone who looks like him.” And he kept saying, “I am.” “I am.” “It’s me!” (John John 9:8-9) But some of them just won’t believe him. They are so convinced that this man’s story is already set in stone that they literally can’t see that it’s the same man. It’s the neighbors who’ve always been able to see who have never seen him for who he is, who literally can’t recognize his face or his body because they only recognize him as “that blind beggar.”

Their vision is so warped by their preconceptions that they can’t even see their own blindness. Jesus says that he’s come into the world “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39)Some of the Pharisees hear Jesus’ say this and ask, “We’re not blind, are we?” (9:40) Look at this man, Jesus says, and look how you’re treating him. If you admitted you were blind, it would be okay. But if you tell me that you’re seeing him as you dismiss him as one was born in sin, it’s clear that your sin remains: you are still deceiving yourself. (9:41)

The stories we tell are powerful. They shape how we see one another. They shape how we see ourselves. They can put a man in jail for half his life. They can convince us that a man we’ve seen every day in the street asking for change must be a different man from the one we see now, healed of his impairment. They can convince us that people can’t ever change, that we can’t ever change, that we are trapped in our circumstances or our situations and there’s nothing that we can do about them. We look at one another through eyes of judgment, or distrust, or fear, and our minds warp our vision.

But as God says to Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) And this goes deeper than “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “don’t treat people different even if they look different.” Those are the negative commands, the things that the disciples and the crowd do that we should not do. But there’s a positive command, an invitation, something that we really ought to do. And that’s what modeled for us by the man who was born blind himself: a humble recognition of our own ignorance, and the integrity to admit it. The Pharisees call the man back to testify before them that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, and they ask him—actually they tell him—“We know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.” (9:24) And the man simply says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner.” Maybe he is, maybe he’s not. “One thing I do know: that though I once was blind, now I see.” (9:25)

So what are the stories you tell that shape the way you see things? What are the stories you tell about people from __________—from this side of the neighborhood or that one, from Texas or Nebraska or San Francisco or DC or wherever, that stop you from seeing them as your siblings in Christ? What are you the stories you tell about someone who wronged you ten years ago that stop you from seeing how they’ve changed? What are the stories you tell about yourself that stop you from being able to change? What are the things you know for certain that simply aren’t true? What are the places in your life, in your own mind, where God is inviting you into the humility of the man born blind, to say aloud in public, “I do not know.”

These are hard, hard questions to ask and to answer. Almost by definition, we can’t answer them for ourselves. We don’t know the things we don’t know. We can’t see the things we can’t see. We need somebody to spit in the mud and rub it in our eyes, and tell us to go and wash it off. And if that seems gross—that’s about as uncomfortable as it can be, to have to break apart those preconceptions that we have. It’s an unpleasant thing. But it’s an incredibly important thing.

So may God rub the mud in all our eyes, so that we may see things as they truly are; may God give us the wisdom to recognize the places where our own assumptions divide us from the truth; and may God give us the courage to admit our own ignorance, and trust in God’s guidance, all our lives. Amen.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/nyregion/brooklyn-exoneration-sheldon-thomas.html

[2] https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/perspective/perspective-the-photo-lineup-an-important-investigatory-tool

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Sermon — March 12, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

This year I’m serving as a chaplain to the Episcopal Service Corps program in Boston. Every two weeks, I drive down to St Mark’s in Dorchester and spend the morning with a community of six young adults who live in a house there together, who’ve given a year of their lives to work in churches and non-profit organizations around greater Boston. And they’re wonderful people, and they’re very hospitable people, but they’re not always all on time for our 9:00 am meetings in their living room, and I’m usually there a little early, so I often arrive when people are still shuffling around, and making breakfast, and so on, and they kind of trickle in. And so it’s very common for me to have the experience I had on Friday—three separate times over the course of ten minutes or so, one of the six walked into the room, and said, “Hi, Greg! Do you want anything? Some tea? Coffee? Water?” And I said, each time, “No, no thanks, I’m all set.”

These offers of hospitality are common for us. You probably have the same interaction pretty often. And they’re easy offers to make or accept. If I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d love a glass of water,” someone would go to the sink and fill one up. But imagine how different it would be if you went to visit someone, and they said, “Can I get you a glass of water?” And you said, “Yes.” And they said, “Great. Let’s go down to the well. It’s only a couple blocks away.”

This has been the way life works for most people, for most of history. Maybe you wouldn’t literally have to walk down to the well together to get a drink, but to offer someone a drink isn’t a matter of turning a faucet. It’s to offer something you hauled out of the earth and carried home. This is the world in which Jesus finds himself today. This Gospel is a strange story. It’s a long story. In fact, it’s the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels. But it’s not just the length that’s strange, and it’s not just this unfamiliar scene of a woman drawing water at a well. What makes it surprising to me is the sheer number of things about which Jesus seems simply not to care.

Some of them are things we also aspire not to care about, and so we applaud Jesus for them. Jesus doesn’t care, for example, who you are, your ethnicity or nationality or ancestry. “‘How is it that you, a Jew,’” the woman asks, “‘ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9) Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He deflects. But even simply ignoring the question is remarkable. Samaritans and Jews really were unhappy neighbors. There really was ethnic tension. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality or race; he reaches out across those divides, and we can and we should applaud him for it.

It may be more surprising that Jesus doesn’t care what your religion is, or where you worship. This is, after all, the primary thing that distinguishes Samaritans from Jews, and I say in this in the present tense because a small community of Samaritans does still exist: Samaritans and Jews live in neighboring regions, worship the same God, read the same Torah, but while Jews believe that the Temple in which God needed to be worshiped was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe this was incorrect and that the Temple God had chosen was actually the one on Mount Gerizim, just to the north. So the Samaritan woman tries to draw him out: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain”—until the armies of the Jewish high priest destroyed it, a century or two before—“but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:20) Now, Jesus is a good Jew. He acknowledges that his people, not hers, are right. But then he says that it’s irrelevant: “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (4:21, 23) It’s not where you worship that matters, Jesus says. (And the Vestries and the welcoming committees of a thousand parishes recoil in horror.) It’s in what Spirit you worship.

But what may be the most surprising is that Jesus doesn’t care what you have done. He says to the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” And she answers him, “I have no husband.” “You’re right,” Jesus says, “for you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband at all!” (4:17-18) But Jesus simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t condemn her serial monogamy, he doesn’t wag his finger at her extramarital cohabitation. Even though this is Lent, there’s no call to repentance or offer of forgiveness. Jesus offers no moral judgment at all, simply an observation, and the only role this seems to play in the story is that it convinces the woman that Jesus is a prophet, and sends her back to the city to tell other people what he’s said. This is not like the stories of the repentant tax collectors in the Gospels who promise to amend their ways. it’s simply a surprising and most-likely not-so-public fact, which Jesus seems miraculously to know. But Jesus doesn’t respond in a moralizing tone. What’s surprising is not just that Jesus doesn’t care about her nationality or her religiosity; he doesn’t even seem to care about her personal morality.

He’s there for something else. Not to avoid her because she’s a Samaritan, not to warn her that she’d better start worshiping at the right Temple, not to condemn her for having a man who is not her husband hanging around the house. No, he’s there to ask for a drink from the well, and to offer her something in return: a “gift of God,” something better than any water she could draw, “living water,” a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” so refreshing that those who drink from it “will never be thirty.” (4:10, 14) That’s the only reason Jesus is there: to offer something that can quench her thirst.

And the woman responds in the only way you could imagine, if you had to draw your own water out of the well and carry it back home with you: “Sir, give me this water.” (4:15) She goes back to the city, and tells her neighbors and her friends, and many of them believe her, and they go out to Jesus too, and ask him to come for a visit; and he stays with them for two days. (4:39-40) And when they encounter Jesus face to face, they say to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you worship, or what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t even matter that much what you do. And it certainly doesn’t matter what anyone else has told you about God. It matters whether your thirst has been quenched, whether you yourself drunk from the living water that gushes up to eternal life; whether you have invited Jesus to come, and stay with you for a while.

And this can be good news, or bad news, or sometimes both.

It can be especially good news if you sometimes feel like the Samaritan woman. “I don’t have right background.” “I didn’t grow up in the church.” “I’m fumbling with the prayer book.” “I don’t like these hymns.” “I’m not sure I believe.” “I’m not sure I’m really that good.” If you ever feel this way, then I’m happy to say that Jesus doesn’t care. Not about you—God cares about you very much—but God doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t bother him a bit. And that is pure good news.

But for some of us on the other end of it, it can be tempting to lean on the very things that Jesus doesn’t seem to be so worried about. “I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life,” or “my family have lived here for eighty years.” “I go to church twice a month,” or maybe twice a year. I’m a good, upstanding, respectable person. I’ve put in hard work. I’ve given back to the world. And I’ve held onto the faith my family taught me, and I’ve passed it on. I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake! (I’m on the Vestry! I’m in the choir!) Isn’t that enough?

And all of this is good. Don’t get me wrong.

But there’s something more at stake—or maybe something less, or simply something else.

We come before Jesus without any of the labels and stories that define us, as thirsty people in a dry place. We come before Jesus, as the Psalmist says, “athirst for the living God,” (Psalm 42:2) and he offers us a drink. We come with souls that are heavy-laden, bearing great burdens, and he offers us rest. We come before him, feelings like there’s also more work to be done, and he sends us out to “reap that for which we did not labor.” (John 4:38) When we come before God we don’t do it as cradle Episcopalians or half-traumatized Catholics, as skilled musicians or as silent hymn-mumblers, as perfect people or notorious sinners. We come as people who are too worn down to imagine drawing that bucket full of water up from the well and carrying it all the way home, and he gives us something to drink.

So “Come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms…
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” (Psalm 95:1-2)

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Sermon — Sunday, March 5, 2023The Rev. Greg Johnston“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)

There are many hard jobs in the world, but without any doubt “rescue diver” is in a category of its own. You may remember the story from about five years ago of a group of young Thai men—a soccer team and their coach, in fact—who were found alive and rescued nine days after intense rains had cut them off fresh air. They were found by a team of volunteer divers, a mix of international expats and Thai Navy special forces, one of whom lost his life in the process. To reach the stranded team, the rescuers had to traverse nearly a mile of the cave, much of it underwater, too narrow in some places to wear a scuba tank. And then they had to do the same thing, in reverse, while pulling another person behind them.

It must have taken an incredible amount of courage to be the rescuers: to jump into that water, knowing that you were already safe and dry on this side. But it took courage to be rescued, as well: to go from being trapped in a place that was dark and scary but at least warm and dry into the danger and darkness of the water, and to try to make it through to freedom and safety on the other side. One is the courage of self-sacrifice, of risking danger to yourself solely for the benefit of another person. And one is the courage of taking a leap of faith, of seeing some British guy in a wetsuit emerge out of a hole in the ground, grabbing the rope he gives you, and hanging on for dear life.

If you were here last Sunday at Coffee Hour, you may remember that we gave some of our younger members “Saint John’s Bingo” cards, to ask questions from some of our adults. One of the questions one of the kids asked me was, “What’s your favorite Bible verse???” And as my life flashed before me, and I desperately willed myself to remember even a single verse of the Bible, the words “John 3:16” flashed into my mind. And how could they not? If you’ve watched a football game, seen a bumper sticker, been handed a tract in the street, you’ve probably seen this verse cited, even without its text as an almost self-contained description of the gospel. “John 3:16,” somebody’s poster says in the stands, urging you to go and look it up. And if you do, you find the words: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) I’ve even seen it flown across the sky on a banner by one of those planes.

I didn’t say “John 3:16,” by the way. I said “1 John 4:7,” a little different. Feel free to look it up. But you can understand why John 3:16has become the go-to citation when some people want to point you to a single verse to read. Standing on its own, it sums up one very common understanding of the gospel, one typical idea of what’s “good news” about Christianity. You might hear variations on this idea referred to by slightly different names; one version is called the “ransom theory,” another is “penal substitutionary atonement.” It’s the almost-transactional idea that human sin had left us in debt, and God paid the price; or that we were liable to some punishment for our misdeeds, and Jesus took the punishment in our place. God would have been entitled to destroy the world, to foreclose on our account or to punish us as we deserved; but “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son; so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” You can almost hear the economic language in the words. It’s as if God gave Jesus as the payment to purchase something—from the Devil? from himself?—so that we would have eternal life. And this is actually the root of the word “redemption.” As any of our Latin scholars in the congregation could tell you, redemption means “buying back.”

And that is one way to understand this verse, John 3:16. But it does very little to help us understand what on earth Jesus is talking about in the other sixteen verses we just heard. And so I want to suggest a slightly different understanding of where Jesus is coming from here. Not the “ransom theory” or the “penal substitutionary theory” but the “rescue diver theory of the atonement.”

Jesus tries three times to convey to Nicodemus the sense that Jesus’ own life is a kind of process, a journey from a place far off to a place that is near and back. “You must be born from above,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus misunderstands. He misinterprets Jesus’ “from above” as meaning “again,” which is the same word in Greek. And he asks, “Can anyone enter a second time into the womb?” But Jesus is talking about a different kind of birth, from a different watery place: the new birth, perhaps, of baptism, by water and the Spirit. (John 3:3-5) And his emphasis is on the “for above,” the sense that this new birth must be from heaven.

And so Jesus says again, using a different image, “The wind blows where it chooses… but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.” (3:8) The wind, the Spirit—again, the same word in Greek—travels an enormous journey, across the face of the earth, and blows where it will. And Nicodemus is baffled. “How can these things be?” (3:9)

So Jesus says to him, again talking about a journey through space but in slightly-more-concrete terms, “No one’s ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” (That’s Jesus.) “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”—perhaps a story for another time—“so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world…” and so on. (3:13-16)

Each of these is a different way of describing what is happening in Jesus’ own life on this earth. It’s Jesus who was born above, Jesus who came down from heaven. It’s Jesus who’s like the wind, and you, Nicodemus, don’t understand where he came from or where he’s going. He descended from heaven, and he will ascend into heaven again, and as he says in another verse, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32)

Again and again, Jesus emphasizes the motion: from above to below, from here to there, descending and ascending and being lifted up. For John, and for us when we hear the words of the Gospel of John, the phrase “lifted up” always means three things. It means when Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross on Good Friday, and dies. It means when he is “lifted up” from the grave on Easter Sunday, and rises again. And it means when he is “lifted up” from the earth on Ascension Day, when he returns from earth to heaven. I came down to earth from heaven, Jesus tells Nicodemus, and I am going back up there soon. “And when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself”; I will bring you up there with me.

And that’s the most remarkable thing. Because when you read it in this context, Jesus’ life and death look less like a transaction, and more like a rescue mission. Jesus comes down from heaven, not (at least not, not only) to pay the price for our redemption or bear the punishment for our wrongdoing, but to save us, actually save us from the dark, damp cave in which we’re trapped. He dives down into the dark waters of this world, and swims toward us, and brings a rope to try to drag us with him back to heaven.

And he gives us a choice. Not the choice of whether to “believe” or not, in an intellectual sense. But the choice to trust. To trust, as Abraham had to trust, to leave behind “[his] country and [his] father’s house,” to leave a place where he was comfortable and follow God toward the promise of something better. (Gen. 12:1) To trust, as those Thai soccer players had to trust, to hold onto the rope and follow, to make the leap of faith out of the dark cave and into the darker waters, so that we might emerge into the fresh air on the other side.

Jesus is somewhere on a journey from heaven to earth and back again, on a mission to save you, to heal you, to rescue you from whatever is afflicting you, to bring you out of whatever darkness surrounds you and return you to the light. Where are you? Are you hiding somewhere in the cave, convinced things aren’t so bad in there? Are you somewhere in the water, cold and wet and afraid you’ll never get out? Are you clinging to the rope, trusting God to bring you through it all? Or are you somewhere on the other side, finally breathing fresh air?

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Sermon — February 26, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

If you want a master class in the self-justifying half-truth, you don’t need to look any further than the Congressional testimony of one William Campbell, then President & CEO of Philip Morris, USA. In April 1994, Campbell and six other tobacco-industry leaders were called before the House to provide testimony regarding their companies’ role in covering up research indicating the danger of smoking. And in the midst of his lengthy testimony, Campbell delivered the most subtle half-truth I’ve ever heard: “Phillip Morris research,” he said, “does not establish that smoking is addictive.”

Consider how carefully worded that is. First: to say that “Phillip Morris research does not establish that smoking is addictive” is quite different from saying that “Phillip Morris research establishes that smoking is not addictive.” Second: he only says that “Phillip Morris research doesn’t establish that smoking is addictive,” even if a hundred scientific studies do. And third, the word “establish” is just a brilliant choice: well, Phillip Morris research might “suggest” that smoking is addictive; it might “indicate” or it might “demonstrate” it, but surely a few studies can’t be said to “establish” that smoking is addictive. That’s not how science works. Campbell works himself up into a self-righteous rage, responding to the allegations against the cigarette companies with the indignant claim: “Our consumers are being misled.” It’s more than a little ironic.

Bill Campbell’s subtlety was impressive, but unconvincing: just two years later, all seven of the executives who’d testified that day had lost their jobs amid a perjury inquiry and a settlement costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But I want to suggest to you today that while most of us won’t go down in history as stalwart defenders of Big Tobacco, all of us are prone to that same pattern of self-justification, rationalization, and half-truth—that this is, in fact, a central part of the human condition—and that there’s no better time than Lent to take a look at how this all-too-human pattern ends up working in your own life.

The story of half-truths begins with Adam and Eve. Actually, really it begins with Adam—after all, Eve wasn’t even around yet when God tells Adam not to eat the fruit. If you look at the citation for the reading in your bulletin, you’ll see that it skips from Genesis 2:17 to Genesis 3:1. And what happens at Genesis 2:18? Well, God creates Eve.

So anyway, God creates Adam. God tells Adam not to eat the fruit. Then God creates Eve, who apparently gets the commandment not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil second-hand. And immediately after Eve is created, in comes the serpent, more crafty than other animal—the character whom our children’s Bible calls “The Sneaky Snake.” The Sneaky Snake comes, and it speaks with all the hair-splitting logic of a tobacco-company exec: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1) the serpent asks Eve. And Eve says, Well, no; “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden…” just not “the fruit of the tree that’s in the middle of the garden,” or we will die. (3:2) And the snake says, “You will not die.” (3:3) And this is half-true. God told Adam that “on the day that you eat of it, you shall die.” But they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they do not die, yet. And yet they die. And maybe you can understand God’s words best as a kind of metaphor: “on that day, you will become subject to death; on that day, you will become mortal, so that one day you will die.” But the serpent’s words are simultaneously true and false: “You will not die (at the moment that you eat the fruit)” is true. “You will not die (period)” is not.

Nevertheless the serpent’s words provide Eve with all the truth she needs, and she begins to rationalize things what she’s about to do: This tree is good for food, and it’s a delight to the eyes, and eating it will make me wise. Why not? And so the serpent’s half-truth wins: Eve and Adam eat the fruit.

For his part, Paul doesn’t blame Eve, by the way. His point is all about Adam, because he watns to set up all these parallels between the old Adam and Jesus as the New Adam, the one through whose obedience Adam’s disobedience is undone. God gave humankind the Law in Adam, and Adam disobeyed, and brought sin and death into the world. God gave humankind Jesus as a gfree ift, and Jesus’ goodness gave us new life. And Paul doesn’t specifically name this story of the temptation of Christ, but you can hear it in the background. Just as the serpent comes to Eve in the Garden, the devil comes to Jesus in the wilderness. Just as the serpent speaks in half-truths, so too does Satan, saying to Jesus, “Surely if you’re the Son of God, the one through whom all things were made, you can just make these stones into bread.” And he could. But Jesus says there’s more to life than bread. (Matthew 4:3-4) The devil quotes Psalm 91: you can throw yourself off the top of the Temple, because “they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone,” and it’s an accurate quote. But Jesus says he’d rather not put God to the test. (4:5-7) He takes him to a high-up mountain and says he’ll give him all the kingdoms of the world, if only he falls down and worships him, and Jesus doesn’t deny that this is something the tempter could do—Jesus doesn’t say that only God can give a person worldly power—he simply says that it would be wrong to worship him. (4:8-10) Everything the devil says to Jesus in this scene is true, at least half-true; and yet where Eve and Adam are fooled by the deception, Jesus sees right through it. And the devil goes away.

Which brings it back to you. There are many different ways to observe Lent. I’ve heard from people this year giving up alcohol, and social media, and novels, people taking on a daily devotional reading or ten minutes of silent prayer, or simply setting an intention to slow down or do one thing at a time. I even know someone whose publicly-stated Lenten discipline is to get through an interstate move and leaving his church and searching for a new job with all family relationships intact.

And here’s the thing: it genuinely doesn’t matter what you do this Lent. In fact, that’s part of the point. Because in most cases, with every one of these things there will come a moment when you start to rationalize ignoring your choice. I do this every year. “Well, yes, I’ve given up alcohol for Lent—but not on Sundays, which are always a feast day, when Lenten disciples never apply. And today is a Friday, but it’s also St. Patrick’s Day, so surely the same rule applies and I can have a beer.” (And indeed, if you’re curious, so far 80 Catholic dioceses have announced that it’s okay to eat corned beef this St. Patrick’s Day this, even though meat wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed on a Friday in Lent.)

At some point, you may say to yourself, “I know I’m fasting from gossip this year, but… I only talk to this friend once a month and she’ll never believe what Sue just said.” “I know I was giving up social media, but I’m sitting here waiting for the dentist to come in… What harm could a little scrolling do?” “I know I was supposed to journal in the morning, but I’m tired today. Why don’t I take a little break?” And that’s fine, in a way. You’re all right. It’s not the end of the world. But it is a rationalization, a justification, a half-truth, and it’s the kind of thing our brains are really good at: coming up with reasons after the fact for things we’ve already decided to do.

And if you find yourself telling yourself half-truth this Lent, take it as an opportunity to reflect. When is it that that little, rationalizing voice starts up? When is it that I begin to justify things to myself? Is it when I’m tired, or hungry, or frustrated, or bored? Is it early in the morning or late at night or in the middle of the day? What is the moment when the sneaky snake comes to me, and how do I respond? Because the point of Lent is not only to give up the things we give up or to take on the things we take on, but to learn something about ourselves, in and through our imperfect attempts to give them up or take them on; so that by learning how we respond to small temptations, we might be better equipped for the big ones. It doesn’t matter whether you successfully abstain from chocolate or manage to journal every day. What matters is that you try, and fail, and learn something about how hard it is to try to grow closer to one another and to God, knowing throughout it all that God already knows our weaknesses, and loves us all the same; and that God is drawing nearer to us than we could ever know.

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Sermon — February 19, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

The writer Dave Zahl tells the story of a visit he paid to a friend of his, a priest who’d burned out terribly during his first call at a small, underfunded Episcopal church in New York City. (Don’t worry— This story is not meant to be autobiographical.) “There had been moments of joy,” Dave writes of his friend’s ministry, “but when he finally left the city, it was more of a tail-between-the-legs situation than a choice.” He wasn’t even sure he’d stay in ministry for much longer. So when Dave went out to visit his friend in his new hometown, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. Things had been hard for a long time, and a sudden change to a new environment isn’t always the solution to your problems. Sometimes it just accelerates the downward spiral.

But when they met up, Dave “noticed right off the bat how rejuvenated he seemed.” He was full of energy and excitement. He was spiritually engaged in his work. It was clear that the last few years since he’d left New York had been a kind of “mountain-top experience.” And Dave wondered about the source. Was it the growing congregation or the new building project? Was it the warmer weather? Had he discovered some kind of prayer practice that had brought him closer to God? So Dave asked him what accounted for the change. And it turned out Dave was right. His friend had had one of those mountain-top experiences with God. But not the kind Dave was expecting. “He laughed,” Dave writes, “and, without skipping a beat, [he] told me, ‘Dave, the honest truth is, I’ve gained a lot more compassion and patience for people since I realized that everyone is pretty much insane, myself included.’”[1]

There are, after all, two kinds of “mountain-top experience.”

You may have had the first kind of mountain-top experience, one like Moses had, like the one that Dave wondered if his friend had had, the kind of intense spiritual experience that probably only happens once in a lifetime, if that: that moment when you find yourself wrapped in the overwhelming presence of the living God. Perhaps God reaches out to you, with an inviting word: “Come up to me on the mountain.” (Exod. 24:12) Or perhaps you set out to go there on your own, seeking after God. But you go up on that metaphorical mountain—in worship or meditation, a group retreat or private prayer—and suddenly, the cloud wraps itself around you, and you are in the presence of the Lord, and the appearance of God’s glory is like a devouring fire, and you dwell there in rapture for forty days, or forty minutes, or forty seconds; the time really makes no difference. But you come down from that mountain and like Moses, your face is shining: you have been transformed, and your life will never be the same.

Or perhaps you may have had the second kind of mountain-top experience, an experience more like Peter’s: the sudden realization that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s long past time for you to shut your mouth. Peter’s up there on the mountain with his friends and spiritual companions, with Jesus and James and John, and Jesus has been transfigured before him, his face shining like the sun, his clothes dazzling white, and ancient prophets have appeared in their midst, and Peter finds himself completely fumbling the response: “Oh, Jesus, thank God we’re here! Okay, I’ll build three houses if you want: you can be here and Moses can be here and Elijah could be over here, and…” and God essentially just says, “You know what, Peter, I’m gonna stop you right there. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Matthew 17:5) Peter has completely missed the point. In his desire to get everything right, to try to manage this whole experience and maybe even preserve it, he’s missed what’s going on. He’s taken so much time to speak that he hasn’t realized that he’s supposed to be listening. And this is one of a handful of stories that the Gospels tell to show us Peter, once again, missing the point: this most central leader of the disciples failing to understand what God is doing right in front of him, failing to understand who Jesus really is.

Moses’ time on the mountain-top is an experience of the glory and the sweetness of the presence of God. It’s an inspiration, an invitation, as the Psalmist says, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8) In Peter’s mountain-top experience, the only thing you’re tasting is humble pie. If Moses’ experience is an ascent to the heights of spiritual experience, Peter’s is a descent into the depths of humility. He literally throws himself onto the ground and tastes the dust. And yet Peter doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. In just a few weeks, the same Peter who’s all too ready to praise Jesus with unnecessary words on the mountain-top will find himself at a loss for words on Good Friday as he warms himself by the fire; the very one who proclaimed Jesus as Lord at his transfiguration will deny even knowing the man as he journeys toward his crucifixion. Peter is no superhero. He’s been humbled once by the realization of his own limitations, and he will be humbled again and again.

And it was this kind of mountain-top experience that had turned Dave’s friend’s life around. It wasn’t an extraordinary spiritual experience or a profound moment of prayer that had loosened the grip of his despair or healed his burned-out soul. It was the realization that he was like Peter—just a human being trying to do his best, but “pretty much insane,” lacking the words or the courage or the wisdom to know how what to do—and so was everyone else around him. And as soon as he stopped expecting perfection from himself or anyone else, he was no longer consumed by frustration with himself and everyone else.

I don’t know which mountain-top you’re on right now, or what mountain-top experience of the past casts its shadow over the valleys through which you walk. I hope that at some point in your life you taste the sweetness of the experience of the presence of God in your life. And I hope that at some point, you learn that you are a human being, fragile and limited in scope. But I do know that Lent can be a good time to get a taste of either of these things.

In Lent, we can set aside a little extra time for prayer or for worship, for reading the Bible or taking up a new practice of meditation, for spending an extra hour a month serving the community or spending an extra day a month with family or friends. And every one of these things can lead us deeper into the cloud that’s wrapped around the presence of God. In Lent, we can take on practices that set us up to experience the goodness and the glory of God.

And in Lent we can be humbled. We can fail in our fasts. We can find ourselves just going through the motions of prayer. We can discover that forty days is a long time to do anything, let alone to spend with God on the mountain-top or being tempted in the desert. And even if you don’t do anything differently for Lent, you may find that a forty-day season of rain and mud will simply grind you down.

But there is as much wisdom to be found in our failures as there is our most joyful experiences. These two mountain-tops are part of the same range, part of the same process, part of the same journey deeper into the heart of God. And whichever experience we have—however glorious or however humbling it may be—God is there. Jesus is there, and when Jesus comes to us, he speaks to us in the same words he spoke to Peter: not with judgment or with anger or even with congratulations, but simply with the courage we need to face another day: “Get up,” he says, “and do not be afraid.” (Matt. 17:7)

[1] Dave Zahl, Low Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 71.

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Sermon — February 12, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

There’s a traffic phenomenon I’ve discovered in my years driving around the Northeast. I call it “the New-England Green.” Now, a driver’s ed instructor will tell you that there are three states a traffic light can be in. Red means “Stop.” Yellow means, “Stop if safe.” Green means—not “Go,” but “Proceed with caution,” right? In New England, these work a little differently from the driver’s-ed textbook. Red means “Stop if safe and you’re not running late.” Yellow means, “Hit the gas to make it through.” Green means “Go, go, go!” (and/or “Start honking at the guy in front of you to go.”)

But in New England, there’s actually a fourth state the traffic light can be in, and it’s what I call “New England Green”: the three or four seconds when your light is red, but the other light has not yet turned to green. Now, your car is supposed to be stopped. But this time can be used for all sorts of things: a cautious right turn at 15 mph if there are no pedestrians; completing a left turn that you’d rolled out into the middle of the intersection to make; or just continuing on straight through the light because the guy in front of you was driving too slow down Main Street, and you’ve earned it.

Now: traffic engineers are the second-most-second-guessed profession in the world, after meteorologists. Who among us has not sat in traffic at an off-ramp and thought, “What kind of clown designed this intersection? But traffic engineers are actually pretty smart. And while you may sometimes doubt their skill in designing roadways, you have to admire their grasp of psychology. Because they know that people are going to take advantage of that “New England Green”—people are going to run those red lights, over and over and over again, every day—and so they build in a few seconds’ grace, between the moment that your light turns red, and the moment their light turns green, and in so doing they save what must be thousands of lives a year.

And I say all this because, believe it or not, this is one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “‘You shall not murder’… But I say to you that if you are angry…you will be liable to judgment.” (Matthew 5:21-22) “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that if you even look at someone with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.” (5:27-28) “You have heard it said, ‘Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows’… But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all.’ Let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no.’ Anything more than this comes from the evil one.” (5:33-37)

Again and again, Jesus takes well-known and common-sense laws and makes them an order of magnitude stricter. He takes a law against murder and makes it a law against anger. He takes a law against adultery and makes it a law against wandering eyes. He takes a law against breaking the oaths you’ve sworn, and making it a law against swearing oaths in the first place. And he does it all in extravagant, even gruesome language: the hell of fire and the evil one, eyes ripped out and hands chopped off. He really wants to make his point: Jesus’ law is a very strict law.

This was a traditional technique. The ancient sages called “building a fence around the Torah.” The basic principle is the psychological insight discovered by New England traffic engineers: Whatever boundary you set, people will wander up to the edge of it, and often cross it. So if there’s something that’s very important at the center of a law—a murder, for example, or a collision—you need to build in some extra space. You don’t just make the law: you build a fence around it, so that even if someone crosses the boundary you’ve set, their behavior isn’t catastrophic.

The most famous example of this principle in action in Judaism is probably the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. Three times, the Torah repeats the cryptic commandment, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” (Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21) And I can understand why. Cooking a young animal by boiling it in its own mother’s milk seems gross. But God seems unusually disturbed, and the rabbis take note. It’s unusual for the law to contain the same commandment three times. It must be an especially important one, the ancient rabbis thought. So they built a fence around it.

You can’t really know the source of any given milk; so it’s probably best not to boil a kid in any milk. And it’s hard to judge what counts as a “kid,” as opposed to a young goat or a calf, so just don’t cook meat in milk. And if it’s so important to God that meat not be cooked in milk, then surely we surely it’s splitting hairs to say that a beef in cream sauce or a cheeseburger is all right because the milk is just on it, rather than the meat being cooked in it. In fact in a kosher household, you keep separate sets of plates and cooking utensils for meat and dairy; you don’t eat them at the same meal. And this sets the fence at the right distance from the law: you might mix up your plates, you might have some milk chocolate too close in time to a hamburger, but there’s no way you could possibly end up boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

And this is very similar to what Jesus is doing. It’s incredibly important that you not murder someone. So it’s better that you not even be violent toward them. And if you shouldn’t be violent toward them, you ought not even to be angry at them.

It’s basic traffic engineering: Jesus knows you’ll try to follow the law, that you’ll try to do what’s right. And he knows you’ll fail. So he builds in that grace period, that extra space. If you get angry with someone, okay, you’ve violated the Sermon on the Mount—but you’re nowhere close to murder. Even if your eye occasionally strays toward an attractive person who is not your spouse, you’re still far from infidelity. The further out Jesus pushes the boundaries of the law, the more likely it is you’ll break them—but the less of a life-and-death matter it is when you do.

I said this was one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing here. Because the strictness of Jesus’ new law doesn’t just build a fence around the old one. It does something else, too. To the extent that we can imagine a boundary, a thin line separating the righteous from the unrighteous, us good people from those bad people, sinners from saints, Jesus has moved the boundary so that we’re all on the same side of it. And this was a theme of Jesus’ ministry. He became infamous among the respectable and righteous people of his society for hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners.” The Pharisees criticized him for it all the time. And the point is not that actually, tax collectors were good and the Pharisees are bad. It’s that there is no dividing line. There is no division into tax collectors and Pharisees, into sinners and saints, into sheriffs and outlaws; in the eyes of the Sermon on the Mount, we are all outlaws. We have all been angry. We have all made promises we can’t keep. We have all occasionally run that red light. We have all needed to forgive, and we have all needed to be forgiven. And you can tell that in a sense, what bothers Jesus more than anything else in the world is the self-righteous self-deception of people trying to convince themselves and the world that they are perfect, when instead we should be compassionate with one another, because we have all been imperfect.

In just a few more verses, the disciples will ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. And he’ll respond with a prayer that contains the famous words: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Jesus doesn’t divide the world into sinners and saints. He reminds us that we are all both sinners and saints, all the time; that the people of God are always both holy and imperfect.

I don’t need to remind you that Lent is coming again. (Actually, in a few minutes I do need to remind you that Lent is coming, because we’re planning our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper.) But Lent is coming, as it always does. And the Ash Wednesday service will include, as it always does, what’s called an “Invitation to a Holy Lent.” But this morning I also want to invite you to prepare for a compassionate Lent: to take a season in which to remember that you are imperfect. When someone around you goes astray, remember that you are imperfect. When you yourself make a mistake, remember that you are imperfect. Let Jesus’ unbelievably-strict interpretation of the law teach you that you can never be perfect, however hard you try; and let Jesus’ unbelievably-generous grace remind you that will be always be loved, even if and when you fail.

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Sermon — February 5, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Last week, Alice Krapf sent me a copy of the Rev. Philo Sprague’s sermon on the 50th anniversary of St. John’s: the Sunday fifty years to the day after the first service this church celebrated on January 5, 1840. On that first Sunday, that first congregation was made up of about 75 people, and the church’s first year of ministry was supported financially twenty-four “subscribers,” what we would now call 24 “pledging units,” who were able to employ a part-time priest. This would suggest to me the old saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” with the caveat that the operating budget those subscribers set for that first year—in addition to the money raised to build this church building—was $345.00. It was, I guess, a less expensive time.

Now of course, St. John’s has had multiple Golden Ages since then and multiple periods of struggle and decline. Already by 1890 we’d had our ups and downs. Like many churches, our history has been a rollercoaster—or, if you like math, a sine wave—a story of alternating highs and lows, of times when the church had multiple mortgages on the building without realizing it and times when the Sunday School was full; years when the place wasn’t watertight, let alone warm, and decades when you couldn’t walk down the street without meeting one of the Rev. Mr. Cutler’s devoted disciples.

But throughout it all, there has been one constant fact: No matter how full or empty St. John’s has been, this church has only ever been a tiny fraction of our community, and I can guarantee you that people asked themselves, in 1840 and in 1890, and in 1940 and in 1990, the same question that some of you may have asked yourselves, in moments of reflection: “What can little St. John’s ever do?”

To which Jesus has an answer that is, for once, refreshingly straightforward: “So let your light shine before others,” he tells his disciples, “that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

When Jesus says this, and when he tells them that he hasn’t come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them, he’s thinking of the great Biblical passages he’d grown up reading, like the words of the prophet Isaiah in our first reading today:

“If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,” Isaiah prophesies, “then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will says, Here I am.” (Isaiah 58:9) “If you offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:9-10) “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, and you shall raise up the foundations of many generations.” (58:12)

“If you remove the yoke from among you… then your light shall rise in the darkness.” Isaiah says. “In this way,” Jesus adds, “let your light shine,” not hidden under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and let it give light to all the people of the world.

Now there’s a way of reading these words from Isaiah that’s about big, societal systems. And it’s not wrong. Isaiah is writing to the people of Israel, to a nation and a society, and he’s talking about their national economic life, not about their personal morals. No, he tells them that God’s own divine favor depends on the quality of their national life. If they “let the oppressed go free,” if they “break every yoke,” if they share their bread with the hungry and let the homeless poor into their homes, then their light shall break forth like the dawn. But if not… A people newly-returned from decades in exile don’t need to hear the “but if not” part of the sentence. They know what it means to walk in darkness. God is addressing the Israelites as a nation, God is demanding social justice and the end of oppression, and all of that is true.

And it is also true, at the same time, that this kind of a reading can be discouraging once you’ve been around as a church for 183 years. Because we, the people of St. John’s, are too small and too few to set much of an agenda for the life of our neighborhood, let alone our commonwealth or our nation. The prophet Isaiah is speaking to the whole people of Israel; but even if you add up all the churches in our neighborhood, all the people who might hear Isaiah speaks these words to us, we are just a few of the people of Charlestown or of Cambridge or of Somerville. And it can be frustrating, or maybe overwhelming, to hear all these demands. We would love to feed every hungry person in our community. We would love to house every unhoused person we see. But we cannot. Even if we pooled all our resources, we could not.

And yet neither Jesus nor Isaiah lays the burden of responsibility for the entire world on us. If you remove the yoke “from among you,” Isaiah says, and those three words make all the difference in the world. It would be nice, I’ll admit, if we could “break every yoke,” as Isaiah says. But we can at least remove the yoke “from among us.” It would be nice if we could feed every hungry person in the world. But we can at least help feed a hungry person who is in our midst. While we always need to keep our sight on the ultimate goal, on the ultimate justice and righteousness of the kingdom of heaven, we cannot let ourselves be immobilized by a sense of being powerless, because there is always something we can do: in our neighborhood or in our church, in our families, or simply within our own selves, to live a little more justly, to share a little more generously, to “let our light shine,” a little more brightly.

And it’s that image, most of all, that I love. Because Jesus doesn’t tell us to become light, when we are something else. And Jesus doesn’t tell us to shine more brightly, or to spread our light throughout the world. He simply tells us to let our light shine. To remove the things that obscure our light. Not to hide it under a basket, but to put it on the lampstand, and to give light to everyone in the house.

Our light is, for the most part, pretty bright. There are always yokes that can be removed from among us, hungry people who can be fed, fingers that are pointed that maybe should not be, but for the most part, our light is bright. Jesus doesn’t tell us that our church is broken. Jesus doesn’t tell us that we’re doing it all wrong. Jesus tells us to let our light shine, to let the world see what a good and a beautiful community this is. And this is the only way that we can change the world: by becoming a community of justice and of peace and of love, by removing the yoke from among us and letting God’s light rise upon us, and letting that light shine into the world.

So, dear people of Saint John’s: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one lights a lamp and hides it under a basket, but puts it up on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

Amen.

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Sermon — January 29, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
(1 Cor. 1:18-31)

There’s nothing in the world that’s more holy than a good waste of time.

Now to be clear, before you all pull out your phones and start scrolling through the social media of your choice, I said a good waste of time. Not every waste of time is good. Perhaps it’s actually better to put it the other way around, so I’ll say this instead: the most holy moments in this life almost always look, when judged my modern standards of efficiency and success, like a total waste of time.

These seemingly-wasted hours take a variety of forms. Sometimes they mean canceling a meeting or so you can attend a mediocre school play, watch a bunch of small children somehow strike out repeatedly even though they’re playing T-ball. Sometimes it means spending forty-five minutes on the phone listening to an old friend, when you have ten other things on your mind that you need to get done that day. Sometimes it means sitting by the bedside of a parent or a grandparent or a spouse, who’s too deep in their dementia or too close to the end to have any idea you’re there, for hours and hour at a time. Sometimes it means sitting in silence, in meditation or in prayer, simply doing nothing in the presence of God as the seconds tick by.

The most holy moments in life, if you try to measure them in terms of productivity or efficiency, their contribution to the national economy or to your own job performance or physical fitness, almost always seem like a waste of time. And yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. They are the most holy things in life.

I want to step back for a moment and set the scene for our Gospel reading today. You may know that our readings are assigned by a three-year cycle called the “Revised Common Lectionary,” which is shared by Catholics and Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists and many other denominations, not only here but around the world. And each year we read through one of the gospels: this year it’s Matthew.

I said last week that last week’s story, in which Jesus calls his first disciples to leave their fishing nets and follow him, marks the end of the stories of Jesus’ birth and adolescence and the beginning of his adult ministry. And today’s Gospel reading marks the beginning of Jesus’ most famous speech, the “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus had been traveling throughout Galilee, teaching and preaching and healing people from every disease and sickness he could find, and a huge crowd from all over the place had started to gather around him.

And when Jesus saw the crowd, “he went up to the mountain… [and] his disciples came to him.” (Matthew 5:1) And, in words that will set the tone for the entire Gospel—in other words, in words that will be at the heart of everything we hear from Jesus this lectionary year, from now to next December—Jesus begins to lay out his vision of the kingdom of heaven whose arrival he is proclaiming.

Everything that Matthew’s told us so far suggests that Jesus is launching a political campaign. He is the Messiah, the successor to King David. He’s begun proclaiming a new kingdom. And he’s gathered a crowd of followers, from among all the people of his nation. This is the moment for his first great speech, the moment when he’ll lay out his vision for the future, his manifesto for what his kingdom will be, and that’s exactly what he does, in words that are now familiar to us but still haven’t lost their power to surprise:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad. (Matt. 5:3-11)

Jesus turns to his disciples, in other words, to his closest followers, and he points to the crowd, to the multitude of the sick and the tired and the hungry who’ve come looking for healing and for peace, and he says to his disciples, “You’re looking for the kingdom of heaven? Here it is.”

If what you want is a Messiah’s Messiah, a man’s man, a strong, tough leader, this ain’t it. If what you want is an army who’ll throw out the Roman invaders and make your nation great again, this ragtag crowd looks pitiful. If what you want is health, and wealth, and esteem, then Jesus has nothing to offer you in these words. You can already tell, up front, at the very beginning of his ministry, that by any reasonable measure of success, this guy is going to fail—and fail hard. The idea that a movement of the poor and the meek and the mourning, the merciful peacemakers who are pure in heart, is going to throw out the hardened veterans of the Roman legions, is ridiculous. You might even call it foolish.

And indeed it is foolish, and it’s always been foolish, and we’ve always known that it’s foolish, from the earliest days of the Church. “For the message about the cross,” as Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us… it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18) The ancient Greek culture in which these Corinthians lived and in which they’d all grown up valued “the one who is wise…the scribe…the debater of this age.” (1 Cor. 1:20) But Paul’s proclamation was a foolish one: that the Messiah had come, and he had not thrown out the Romans, he had failed and had been executed on the cross, and that this failure had been the moment of his victory. Paul’s message is a foolish one, an incredible one, but “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,” (1 Cor. 1:25) and in you, my beloved parishioners—Paul writes, in the ultimate back-handed compliment—in you, who are not, on average, wise, who are not powerful, who are not of noble birth, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27)

God has taken a good hard look at the things we human being strive for—wealth and prestige and the eternal appearance of youth—and God has chosen instead to bless the things we fear, our poverty and persecution and pain. God has considered the ways we spend our time—the ones that are productive and valuable in the eyes of the world, and the ones that are unproductive in the eyes of the world—and God has chosen to rank them in a different way. God has chosen the sick and the tired and the poor, the weak and the meek and the mourning, the persecuted and the peaceful and the pure in heart, the children and all those who can’t “contribute” to society. God has chosen to bless us in all our suffering, to be alongside us in our suffering, and to bless us in our presence with those who are suffering.

God has chosen to bless the time we waste on holy things, and declared it to be the most important time of all. God has chosen to bless us, not when we achieve and succeed and excel, but when we sit, and watch, and wait, and most especially when we sit with the old, and the young, and the sick among us, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs, and the kingdom of God is there.

I suspect that many of you feel, as I sometimes do, that you don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything you need. (Some of you may have too many hours in the day, and maybe that’s a problem for another sermon.) But if you ever find yourself wondering whether what you’re doing is a waste of time, I’d invite you to ask yourself whether that’s just the wisdom of the world talking, to wonder instead whether what you’re doing with that time is in line with the wild vision God lays out for the kingdom of heaven, a vision that values the meek and the humble and the hungry. For “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

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Sermon — January 22, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

When I was a kid we used to spend every Fourth of July down in New Jersey, at my grandparents’ house, in the town where my parents lived as teenagers. The town is built around a big lake with beaches and docks all around the perimeter, just a short walk from my grandparents’ house. And on the Fourth of July, after we’d had a big hot-dog cookout and eaten our traditional American-flag cake, my cousins and my grandparents and my family would all load ourselves into Granny and Grandpa’s boat, and head out onto the water to enjoy what I like to think was northern New Jersey’s finest fireworks display.

And then the next day, sometimes, we’d do something very special. We’d take Grandpa’s fishing rods, and go down to the dock, and we’d take the leftover hot dogs that we’d cut up into bait-sized chunks, and we’d cast our lines into the lake, trying to see what little fish we could catch and release.

This is pure Americana: fishing off the dock with Grandpa on the Fourth of July, with leftover hot dogs for bait. And this is what a lot of people love about fishing: standing together by the water, hanging out, passing the time in leisure and reflection in the great outdoors while you wait for something to bite, immersed in that ancient dance between fish and man, as the fish wonders whether this time, the hot dog might really be a worm. (Fish are really not that smart.)

This is not what life was like for Peter and Andrew and James and John, these soon-to-be-famous “fishers of men.” Commercial fishing is a very different beast, even in the ancient world. It’s “they cast their nets in Galilee,” not “they cast their lines.” When Jesus calls James and John, they aren’t cutting up bait or comparing lures; they’re mending their nets. In this kind of fishing all the romance is gone. They sail out into the Sea of Galilee and cast their nets into the lake, and then they drag up whatever they can drag up and haul it on board. It’s hard, sweaty work. And it’s smelly work; you’re not just hoping to catch a couple fish, you’re surrounded by fish, all day long, in the sun.

It’s to this kind of work that Jesus is calling the apostles when he tells them that soon, they will be “fishers of men.”

Now, to be clear, I don’t think this is so much about the sweat and the smell of things. While anyone could tell you that church leadership, lay or ordained, can sometimes get a little messy, you’d hope that nothing too fishy is going on, especially as we approve our budgets and prepare our Annual Reports. No, I think what’s more interesting is the distinction between the line and the net. In our spiritual lives, are we like the fish I used to catch, engaged in a back and forth dance with God, intrigued by the shimmering lure or the nice fat chunk of hot-dog on the hook but cautious about getting too close? Or are we like the fish that John or Peter caught, trapped in a net with a few dozen others and dragged onto the boat, with no say in the matter at all?

Our gospel reading this morning is strange. It seems to combine two very different images. In the first section, there’s this motif of darkness and light, which Matthew draws from the same passage of Isaiah that we just heard. In the second half, we shift from light and darkness to fish and nets, and it’s such a change that some scholars have actually identified the middle of this passage as one of the great transition points in the gospel, suggesting a gap in time and a transition in the scene with the words, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim,” (Matthew 4:17) such that everything before those words—from Jesus’ birth to his move as an adult from Nazareth to Capernaum—forms the beginning of the story, and everything after it the middle, as Jesus’ ministry really begins.

But I think there’s more to it than that. These two, very different halves of the story are in fact united by the theme of sudden and radical change. Jesus travels from the inland town of Nazareth where he was raised in the Jewish heartland of Galilee, to Capernaum by the sea, a lakeside town on the border of Jewish society, with the Gentiles just on the other side of the lake. He comes to these two pairs of brothers, who’ve spent their lives preparing to take on the trade of their fathers and their fathers before them, to pass their days hauling nets in the sun, and he calls them to a very different life, “and immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” (Matt. 4:19) These young fishermen would become the bishops and martyrs and visionaries of the church, and their lives would never be the same: “Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless, in Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.” Jesus comes to these disciples-to-be and suddenly drags them out of their ordinary lives, and it is as though they are the fish whom they’re accustomed to catch, suddenly transferred from the murky depths of ordinary life into the brilliant presence of the God who is walking among them.

Now, there’s always been a certain tension between the abruptness of these conversion stories and the ordinary rhythms of life in a parish church. Not many of us have had such radical moments of transformation in our lives, and many of us never will. In fact, there’s a pretty profound irony: the more faithful a member of any given church community you are, the less your faith seems like a sudden and transformative change in your life. If you’ve been a pillar of the church for decades, as some of you have, you’re probably not exactly the leaving-your-nets-and-immediately-walking-away type. And even if you’ve only been in one place for a few years the abruptness of these transitions, from darkness into light, from fishing for fish to fishing for men, from ordinary life into radical discipleship, probably seems strange, even irresponsible. I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who can or should drop everything and go off somewhere else to follow Jesus, without leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind.

But I wonder whether that’s really just a matter of your perspective on time. Because these sudden changes aren’t really so sudden after all. When you are sitting in darkness, as Isaiah says, and day breaks, it isn’t really such a sudden thing; there’s a long, slow change before that sudden light. When you are a fish, and you are dragged out of the sea, it isn’t by teleportation; it’s by the slow-but-steady hauling of a rope. And with God, as Peter himself would later write, “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” (2 Pet. 3:8) and we are all being transformed, in God’s own time. We are all being brought out of darkness into light. We are all slowly being reeled in toward God.

The metaphor isn’t perfect, and that’s very good news. In fact, in some ways, it’s reversed. God has no plans to salt or cook you, that I know of. Quite the contrary: life is better up there on the boat. You do not have gills, you have lungs, and it turns out you’ve been holding your breath all this time. We are not like fish, we like scuba divers caught in a net, slowly but surely being drawn up out of the depths into a way of life that’s even better for us than the one we leave. You can spend your whole life treading water, convinced that nothing is happening, as God slowly reels you in. Or you can turn and start to swim toward the light.

So what is it, I wonder, that God is dragging you out of this year? Or what is it that God is dragging out of you? What are the murky depths you’re swimming in, from which you need to be removed? Or what are the dark corners of your own soul, that need the benefit of a little light?

Whatever they are, God with you. Jesus has left his hometown to come down by the sea. He has come to you and called you by name. He has cast his net into the waters of your life, and he is drawing you toward himself, however slow and steady that may be. And you may find, when you are hauled up on that boat, whenever it is, that finally, you can breathe.

For “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them, light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

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

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Sermon — January 15, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)

If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d be willing to wager about three dollars that 95% of you, when you hear this verse from the Gospel of John, have one of the three following gut responses:

1. “What on earth is he talking about?” In other words: John the Baptist declares Jesus twice to be “the Lamb of God,” with no further explanation at all. And to many of us, who live an ocean and a half away and speak a completely different language and are unfamiliar with the religious practices of first-century Judaism, which were quite different from the practices of twenty-first century Judaism, it just makes no sense. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?” What on earth is he talking about?
2. “I’m not sure I like that very much.” As in: I have these half-remembered verses bouncing around in my head about lambs and slaughter and blood and sacrifice and sin, and I feel vaguely or even very uncomfortable about them. Maybe you’re familiar with the use of this image in the Book of Revelation; maybe you’re as big a fan of The West Wing as I am, and you recognize the name of a fictional cult, “The Lambs of God,” who gruesomely harass President Bartlett’s daughter. Whatever it is, I suspect some of you might have this instinctive queasiness about the image of “the Lamb of God” and so your first response is: I don’t like that.
3. Or maybe you have the third and maybe most common response to this verse: (singing) “‘Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.’ I’ve sung that.”

You may have a different response and I apologize if I’ve left you out, but I think these three capture the paradox of John’s words in the gospel today. The mysterious title “lamb of God” appears only twice in the entire Bible, and they’re both right here in this morning’s reading from John. John the Baptist doesn’t explain it. Nobody else seems to use it. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul know nothing about it. And yet there it is, right in the heart of our liturgy, so central a part of the mass that even secular students of classical music know its Latin name, Agnus Dei, “Lamb of God,” because there have been—what—probably thousands of musical settings composed to sing these words over the last two thousand years.

So this morning, I’m going to preach on Isaiah. (Just kidding.) No, I want to talk a little bit about that question: What does it mean to say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God”?

First, I think we have to start with the fact that for John’s audience—and this is true both for “John the Baptist” speaking to his disciples and for the later and different “John the Evangelist,” writing this gospel for his community—for either John’s audience, the primary symbolic connection would have been with Passover, with the ritual slaughter of lambs as part of the preparation for the Passover meal. The Passover sacrifice commemorated the people’s flight from Egypt in the Book of Exodus, when the blood of a lamb painted on their door-posts turned away the angel of Death from their doors, and it was one of the major feasts for which most of the population traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem.

John the Evangelist, writing the gospel, clearly sees this as one of the primary roles of Jesus: he is not just a teacher, not just a healer, not just a leader or a religious reformer; he is the Lamb, with a capital L, the ultimate Passover sacrifice who will, by his own death, drive away death, not just on one night but for all eternity. And this symbolic connection is so important to John that John, alone of all the gospels, places Jesus’ death on Good Friday not on the day of the Passover, but on the day before, the day of preparation for the Passover, so that at the very moment when the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple, Jesus is dying on the cross. Jesus is “the Lamb of God,” the ultimate Passover sacrifice.

But the words of John the Baptist evoke a second kind of sacrificial lamb, because Jesus is not just “the Lamb of God,” he is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” This is not what the Passover lamb does. In the story of the Exodus, the Passover lamb drives away death. The Passover feast is a time to celebrate this deliverance. But the Passover sacrifice is not what the Bible calls a “sin-offering.” The practice of animal sacrifice is very foreign to our experience of worship, but it was the main part of religious ritual in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Bible lays out a whole system of sacrifices that could be offered in the case of various sins, and sacrificing a lamb was a perfectly reasonable way to make amends with God. Especially if you had inadvertently sinned, the sprinkling of the animal’s blood around the altar of the Temple would purify the Land itself, ensuring that God wouldn’t be driven out by the accumulated impurity of all the people’s sins. And, again, if this doesn’t sound very familiar to you, it’s because animal sacrifice hasn’t been practiced in either Christianity or Judaism in nearly two thousand years, since the destruction of the Temple few decades after Jesus’ death made it impossible; but it would have made perfect sense at the time.

And so what John is saying is interesting: Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is not just yet another lamb, clearing away the effects of yet another sin. He is the Lamb, singular, taking away the sin—singular—of the world. As the Book of Hebrews would point out, he is not a priest who offers sacrificial victims again and again, year after year. In Christ, we no longer offer continual sacrifices to make amends with God. In Jesus, God sacrifices God’s own self, once and for all, to take away the sin of the world.

But finally, there’s a third meaning to the idea that Jesus is the “Lamb of God,” and that’s the idea of feasting in celebration and thanksgiving, and this is what connects the Passover sacrifice to what we do today. If you had come and offered a lamb as a sin-offering, by the way, parts would be offered to God, being burned on the altar, and parts would be given to the priests to cook and eat; but none of it came back to you. But if you came to celebrate the Passover, the lamb would be slaughtered by the priests in the prescribed way, but then you would take it home to cook it and eat it, just as the Bible prescribed, with your family and whole household, and you celebrate and rejoice for your deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and ultimately, from the power of Death itself. And it’s this literal feast of thanksgiving that our liturgy evokes in those other common words at the breaking of the bread: “Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia!”

Jesus is the Lamb of God, who not only offers himself as a sacrifice to drive away the power of death, who not only offers himself as a sacrifice of sin, but who gives us his own flesh and blood to feed us and nourish us. And this is kind of gross. And Jesus knows. And it’s no accident that it’s this very Gospel of John, where Jesus is the Passover Lamb of God, that reckons most practically with the vaguely-grotesque notion that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ, because a few chapters later, when Jesus teaches his disciples that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” they are scandalized, and many of them leave him behind, and never look back. (John 6:56, 66) And fair enough.

So what does all this mean for you and me, who do not offer animal sacrifices and do not celebrate Passover, at least not in that same way?

What it means is that in Jesus, God chooses to do the sacrificial work of reconciliation for us, and invites us to celebrate and give thanks in response. The burden is no longer on us—or on our lambs—to make things right with God, to offer sacrifices to drive away the power of death or to make amends for sin. The burden is not on us, in other words, to earn God’s forgiveness by giving money to the church or by doing good works or by saying the right prayers. God has freed us, at least in theory, from the shame of sin and from the fear of death, and to the extent that this freedom isn’t free, God has paid the price. And God is strengthening us in this life, while we still face this very real shame and fear, with the gift of God’s presence in the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Communion and in the holy Body of Christ in the church, sitting all around you.

And God has invited us to respond—to be fed and nourished by the riches of God’s grace, in this eucharistic feast and in our spiritual lives—to be strengthened by God’s presence in our lives, and to live lives of gratitude and celebration, so that we may truly “keep the Feast.”

So Alleluia! Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, Alleluia!

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Sermon — January 8, 2023 — The Baptism of JesusThe Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)

I sometimes wonder how different the world would be if we really, truly believed those words.

I don’t mean that I wonder what it would be like if everyone in the world were a believing Christian, if all eight billion of us believed the theological proposition Jesus were the beloved Son of God. I mean that I sometimes wonder how different our world would be if every one of us truly believed in a closely related but very different theological idea, not about Jesus’ baptism but about ours. In baptism, it’s often said, we have been made members of the Body in Christ, and this is not just a squishy metaphor. By virtue of our baptisms, we participate in the baptism of Christ. When you were baptized, the Church has always taught, you went down into the waters of the river Jordan with Christ, and you emerged, and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and alighted on each you, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased,” and you were invited into the eternal relationship of Love that we call the Trinity.

And so what I mean to say is that I sometimes wonder what the world could be if every human being truly knew, truly felt, that they were loved, not for anything they had or anything they’d done, but simply for who they were: the beloved child of God.

Maybe it’s idealistic, but I wonder, sometimes, how many wars could have been prevented if we truly knew that our nation’s standing in the world or our people’s greatness is not what makes us worthy of love. I wonder how many people would not have been enslaved, how many people would not have died in factory fires, how many millions of tons of carbon dioxide would not have been pumped into the air if we truly knew that the worth of a share in our company was not determined our value of our lives. I wonder how much agony we would be spared if we really understood that no college admissions process, or athletic tryout, no promotion or performance review, angry memo from our boss or angry comment on our Facebook page, had anything to do with whether we were good enough to love.

And maybe I’m just an optimist, but I kind of think the answer is: a lot. I really do think that the “good news” of God’s love for us is not just an abstract theological claim, it is the answer to the problem lying at the root of so many problems: we are not convinced, as individuals or as communities, that we are loved unconditionally.

“At the very heart of our experience of being human,” the psychologist John Welwood once wrote, “each of us has an intuitive sense of the value of unconditional love.” There are few things we crave more deeply than the sense that we are truly known and truly loved for who we are, not in the abstract but in practice; and there are few things that are harder to really feel. Nearly all of us have learned, consciously or subconsciously, that love is something to be earned; that to be loved, we must be worthy of love, that to be loved we must be good enough to be loved. And so we work very hard, in healthy and unhealthy ways, to make ourselves worthy of love. And yet there’s almost always a gap between the way that we want to be loved and the way that we feel we are loved, and that gap causes shame and anger and pain, and that pain has nowhere to go, and so we turn it inward, or we turn it outward. And for many of us, there’s always the lingering suspicion that if we are not loved, it must be our fault.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not the way God thinks about the world. It couldn’t be! “It’s my fault that I’m not loved” is not the way of the God whom Peter knew, of the God who became human in Jesus Christ, who “went about doing good and healing all,” as Peter says, but whom we “put to death by hanging him on a tree.” (Acts 10:38-39) God knows it’s not our fault if we’re mistreated or misunderstood, because God knows what it is to be mistreated and misunderstood.

At the worst moment of your life, when the world has let you down or when you have let the whole world down, God looks at you with the eyes of love, and in the words of Isaiah, “thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you.” And God looks at you, as God looks at Christ, and says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” (Isaiah 42:6, 1)

God looks at you on the worst day of your life, God sees you as you truly are, an imperfect and fragile human being who has nevertheless been baptized into the baptism of Christ, and marks with the sign of the Holy Spirit itself, and says, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased.”

It’s sometimes said that this kind of unconditional love will spoil us, as if, once we truly understood that God would love us no matter what, we’d simply stop trying to be good. But I suspect you know as well as I do that that isn’t really true. When you’re told that you are loved, exactly as you are, it doesn’t cause you to start behaving badly. If anything, it frees you to start behaving better. So many of our rough edges are there for our own defense, or for our own self-justification; so many of our most difficult tendencies are attempts to cope with our own fear and shame. And to be loved is to be freed to grow, unencumbered by all those burdens.

So what would it mean for you if your baptism were today? What would it mean for you to go down into that water and have all the muck and mud of a lifetime washed away? What would you be free to do, who would you be free to be, if you could stand up before God exactly as you are, and hear the words of God, addressed to you again: “This is my Beloved Child, in whom I am well pleased”?

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Sermon – The Feast of the Holy Name, January 1, 2023The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Do you know the story of your name? Many of us do. Maybe like my five-year-old Murray, you were named for a grandparent whose birthday was the day you were due. Maybe like me, you were given one of the few boys’ names with a nickname that you could keep forever, so that there would never be a day when, as every Timmy becomes a Tim and every Jimmy becomes a Jim, I would have to switch from Greggy to Greg. Maybe it was part of a trend—maybe you were a girl born in the year 1960 and so your name had to be Debbie, Deborah, or Deb; maybe you were a boy born in 2018, when Aiden, Caden, Jayden, and Braden all made the top 20.

Or maybe it was something more normal than that. Maybe an angel of the Lord appeared to each of your parents individually as they planned for their wedding day and told them that they were to name you Jesus, (Luke 1:31, Matthew 1:21) “for [you would] save [your] people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) And so you were “called Jesus, the name given by the angel before [you were] conceived in the womb.” (Luke 2:21) Or something like that.

Today we celebrate a holiday that falls on January 1 every year. Not New Year’s Day, although many of us may also be celebrating that, but a rather less popular one: the Feast of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the eighth day of Jesus’ life, we join the Holy Family for his bris, for the ritual of circumcision and naming that had been a part of the life of the people of God since the earliest days, since the times of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

A name is an important thing. Most people carry it with them their whole lives. And in our culture, the meaning of a name itself is often somewhat obscure; it’s the sort of thing you look up in a book. But that’s only because English is a pirate language, full of words stolen from other languages. And in those languages, names mean something. “Gregory” is Greek for “watchful.” “Dorothy” is Greek for “the Gift of God.” “Jane” is the Anglicization of Jeanne, which is the French form of Joanna, which is the medieval Latin feminine form of Johannes, which is the Greek form of Yochanan, which means, in Hebrew, “the Lord is gracious.”

And “Jesus” means, “the Lord is help.” And Jesus means, “Salvation.”

“Jesus,” like many of these names, has gone through a bit of a transformation. “Jesus” is that Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew and Aramaic name Yeshua, which is itself a contraction of the older Hebrew name Yehoshua. You can almost hear how “Yehoshua” would become “Joshua,” just like “Yehochanan” became “Yohanan” became “Johan” or “John,” and “Yehonatan” became “Yonatan” became “Jonathan.” “Yeho” in each of these names is the name of God: not the generic term “God” but the specific name of a specific God, the four-letter name YHWH, considered too holy by observant Jews to be spoken aloud. This is the name that you’ll see translated sometimes in the Old Testament with the words, “the LORD,” with LORD in those funny small-caps.

But Jesus’ name is a bit of a pun. Because while “Yehoshua” means “God is salvation,” “Yeshua”—its contraction—sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word meaning “salvation.” It’s literally the difference between יְשׁוּעָה and יֵשׁוּעַ, and if you can hear or understand that distinction then God just may be calling you to a deeper study of Proto-North-West-Semitic philology.

So “Jesus” means “God is salvation.” And Jesus also means “salvation.” Which means, in a sense, that Jesus, who is salvation, is God, who is salvation.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, the way logic works. But it is the way symbolism works. And it explains the enigmatic comment that the angel makes to Joseph: you will call him Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins.” You will call him “Salvation,” because he will save them. And it’s possible that even the word “save” isn’t quite right here; it’s probably something closer to “help.” The most respected Hebrew lexicon I have glosses the name “Yehoshua” as “The Lord is help.” Jesus is not just “salvation,” in an abstract or theological sense. Jesus is help. And maybe this connects with you more. Because while you may not always feel like you are in need of salvation, you probably sometimes feel like you need some help.

Believe it or not, there’s much more that I could say about the name “Jesus” or “Yehoshua”—about the great prophet Joshua, lieutenant of Moses, who finally led his people out of their wanderings in the wilderness and into the Promised Land; about the great high priest Joshua, the anointed one who rebuilt the Temple and whom the prophet Zechariah depicts as a semi-messianic figure being accused by Satan—but I regret to say that I’m going to leave it here, instead, with a simple questions.

Where in your life do you need help this year? And how can Jesus be a “help” to you? On January 1, many of us are making resolutions and setting goals in a new year. Does it help to know that there is a God who has sent the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide you as you struggle along the way? Many of us are trying to leave behind the patterns of the past, and start off fresh. Does it help you to know that there is a God who will forgive you more easily than you’ll forgive yourself for all your failings? Many of us are cold or tired or sick, trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more month. And God has been there; in the Jesus whose birth we still celebrate during these twelve days of Christmas, we know that God has been there, and is there, right alongside us; that the God whose name is “Help” has helped us and he helps us still, because he walked among us and he lives among us even now in the one who “was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

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Sermon — Christmas Day, 2022The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — Christmas Eve, 2022The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

When Prince George was born in July 2013, the news of a new heir to the United Kingdom scored two photos above the fold on the front page of the Washington Post. The LA Times ran the headline “The prince of wails has arrived.” (That’s “wails” as in a “wailing baby.”) Our own Boston Globe, faithful to our city’s history of revolution and Irishness, placed the story on page A3, with a small photo beneath the fold on the front page, news of the future King George having been trumped by the story of a BSO conductor’s concussion and one about salmon in the Penobscot River. But if you want to know what the British media thought, you can look up the cover of the British tabloid The Sun (S-U-N), which, on the day that Prince George was born, actually redesigned its logo so that the name of the magazine itself read: “The Son” (S-O-N).

This, of course, is all old news; the young king-to-be is now some nine and a half years old. But my point is this: when a long-expected royal heir is born, it’s big news. You need someone in charge of public relations, for sure: to keep the paparazzi at bay, to take some cute photos of the new baby, maybe to put some makeup on his dad so he looks presentable. What you don’t usually need is for your royal PR firm to go drum up a little publicity from the shepherds in the fields.

But Jesus was no ordinary king, and his birth was no ordinary royal birth. And if that angel of the Lord had not appeared to those shepherds, and if that choir of angels had not praised him with a song, no one but his parents would have known he existed at all.

The story of Christmas, after all, is a story of glad tidings in unexpected places.

The people are eager for a king, for a Messiah, for a Savior who will lead them out of the dark days they’re living through and into a brighter and more glorious age. They even know where to look: in Bethlehem, the city of David, the ancestral home of their most famous king. The prophets had long foretold that a new Messiah would arise from Bethlehem, and you have to imagine that every pregnant woman in that small town wondered from time to time: could this be the one?

Nobody was expecting a child born in Bethlehem to parents from out of town. And they certainly weren’t expecting the Messiah to be born in a barn. Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem by coincidence, and Jesus was born in obscurity, and they wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, and the story could well have ended there.

But God wanted somebody to know, and so an angel of the Lord appeared, again in an unexpected place. The angel didn’t appear in Herod’s palace, telling him that it’s time to retire because there’s a new king in town. The angel didn’t appear in the Temple, telling the people that their God ha come to save them at last. The angel didn’t appear in the sky over the city, announcing good news to the expectant crowds. No, the angel appeared to a handful of shepherds lying in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and they were terrified and amazed. And then the angel disappeared.

These are “good tidings of great joy that will be for all the people,” but only these shepherds have heard the tale.

God shows up in unexpected places. God shows up in the prayers we say when we’re not sure we believe there’s anyone listening. God shows up in the acts of human love that are around us every day, but will never make the front page of the news. God does show up in the moments of joy that fill the Christmas season, but God also shows up in the pain that’s sometimes present, too. God shows up in surprising places here, on earth, in the midst of our lives, however messy and imperfect they may be, reminding us again and again that God loves with an unconditional and unimaginable love.

God sometimes even shows up here in church.

So if God shows up in your life, sometime soon, where will you be in the story?

Will you be “keeping watch” with your flock by night? Will you be paying attention, in other words? Will you even notice that God is there? Will you be watching and listening for the signs of what God is doing in your life, or will you be, like I usually am, too caught up in your own preoccupations to hear the angels sing?

But if you do notice God’s sudden appearance, what will you do? Will you go with the shepherds “even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that has taken place?” Will you “treasure” these things like Mary, “pondering them in your heart?” Will you accept the invitation, in other words, and follow that feeling of God’s grace where it leads? Or will it become a half-remembered story of the past, an extraordinary moment that has no effect on ordinary life?

And what will you do when that angel of the Lord has disappeared? Will you “return” out into the world, “glorifying and praising God for all that [you have] heard and seen?” Will you share the good news of what God has done in your life with the people around you, or will God be the best-kept secret in your life, something known only to few cold shepherds in the field?

Whatever the answer is, there is good news. However attentive or distracted you are; however curious or careless you may be; however much you share that good news or pretend it never happened, God is always here, working. There were thirty years, after all, between Jesus’ birth and the next time anybody outside his family noticed him; but everywhere he went, God was among us, all the same.

God is among us, working in us, and through us, even now, in places we come looking for God and in places we’d never think to find him, comforting us and inspiring us and above all else, loving us and saving us, casting down all the power of evil and death in this world, and freeing us to live in love.

So may God bless you in this season of Christmas, and whatever Christmas brings, may it be a time of surprising moments of joy.

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Amen.

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Sermon — December 11, 2022The Rev. Greg JohnstonLectionary Readings

Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the spiritual wilderness?

I don’t mean the kind of wilderness people mean when they talk about finding God in nature, a wilderness of mountains to climb and pine trees to smell and babbling brooks in which to cool your feet. I mean the wilderness as Jesus knew it: the dry, rocky hills to the east of Jerusalem, a desert with barely enough in it to sustain life. By “spiritual wilderness” I don’t mean the kind of wilderness in which you feel God’s Spirit—no. I mean the place in which you thirst for a drop of life-giving water, and find none.

The wilderness goes by many other names—spiritual aridity or exile, burnout or the dark night of the soul—but whatever you call it, it is a kind of absence: the absence of the feelings of joy or peace or comfort you once found in prayer or work or life, the absence of a long-lost sense of meaning or of God’s love or presence. It’s very similar, in a way, to what (in a marriage) might be called the “after-the-honeymoon” period. It’s very similar to what happens in a friendship or a new job when the shine has worn off the apple. The wilderness is a time in your life where you feel, as Bilbo Baggins once said, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

And this is what I mean when I ask: Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the wilderness? You understand what I mean.

The startling message of our reading from Isaiah today is that God has promised to transform this wilderness—this most unenjoyable place—into a place of unimaginable joy.

Now, Isaiah doesn’t come up with the image of the wilderness. The people of God have known the wilderness for as long as there’s been a people of God. Their ancestors were nomads who spent their lives wandering through the wilderness. Generations later, after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And a millennium later, when Isaiah wrote these words, they were in exile again. Their city and its Temple had been destroyed. Many of them had been separated from their homeland by a literal wilderness, living as hostages and refugees with five hundred miles of desert between them and the world they once knew. They are in desperate need of consolation, and Isaiah consoles them with the promise of a future in which the wilderness, literal and metaphorical, will be transformed.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he writes, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” (Isaiah 35:1) God will transform the dry place into a flowering field, and “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] heads; [you] shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (35:10) In the very midst of the desert you will see “the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” (35:2) “Here is your God; he will come,” Isaiah tells the people. “He will come and save you.” (35:4)

Just… not quite yet.

This is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things about Christian life. God promises us incredible things—peace and joy and life everlasting—but in this life, we only get a glimpse. Isaiah promises that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away,” (Isaiah 35:10) but still we sorrow and sigh. It’s comforting that God makes these promises to us… it’s better than having no hope for the future. But it’s undeniably frustrating having to wait around for them. “Be patient,” the apostle James wrote two thousand years ago, and we are, and we have been, waiting quite patiently for quite some time now for “the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7-8)

Think how John the Baptist must have felt. I think of him sitting in prison, hearing the stories of what his cousin Jesus was doing, wondering whether he was just another prophet or whether he was The One about whom John himself had prophesied. And Jesus tells John’s messengers to go back and quote these exact words from Isaiah to John the Baptist, to tell him that the moment had arrived: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.” (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5) The day has come when the desert will blossom, and the wilderness will be transformed from a place of desolation into a place of joy.

And yet John remains in jail. And he will not make it out alive. But neither, of course, will Jesus.

So we’re left with this conundrum: God has promised us, on the one hand, abundant joy, a world in which sorrow and sighing are transformed into joy and singing. And God has left us, on the other hand, in the wilderness, where we continue to roam. And there’s a sense in which we will always be in the wilderness in this life, a sense in which—however much joy and peace we may have—there will also always be suffering and pain, until our wandering is over and we reach that promised land of eternal life with God.

But at the same time, the wilderness is not the desert it once was. It is already being transformed. Water is already breaking forth in the desert, streams of water are already flowing in our world. God has not left us comfortless, but is working now in and among us, even if that work is still incomplete.

There’s an image that James uses that I find to be a helpful one, at least for me. “Be patient,” he says, but that’s not all he says. Be patient, he says, like a farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” (James 5:7)

James talks about our lives like plants, growing over time. And eagerness and abundance can spoil a plant’s growth as easily as caution and patience. You can flood it with too much water, scorch it with too much sunlight, pick it before it’s fully grown. God waits instead, James said, until we have grown in the ways we need, until we’ve received “the early and the late rains,” but God is present all the time with us, like that careful gardener. And one day, we will finally be ready to bloom.

God is with us, even and maybe especially in the wilderness. God is with us in rainstorms and in droughts, in the driest desert and the greenest valleys. God is with us, whether we wait impatiently or patiently, whether we are singing or sighing. Whether we realize it or not, God is with us—in this short season of waiting in Advent before the joy of Christmas, and in our longest seasons of waiting and wandering in the wilderness, before the desert finally rejoices and blossoms. God is with us, and God is watering us, and God is waiting for us finally to bloom.

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Every year, on the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with a stark message: “Repent!” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2)

John is the cousin of Jesus, sometimes called the “forerunner.” He’s often depicted in art literally pointing the way to Christ. His prophetic ministry comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and it’s clear that many of John the Baptist’s followers soon became followers of Jesus as well. But John’s message in our gospel this morning, is hardly about Christ at all. He doesn’t mention Jesus by name, or say that he is the Messiah. He makes this vague reference to the “one who is more powerful than I” simply to increase the urgency of his message: if you don’t repent now, you’re going to be chaff, not wheat, when the Messiah comes. Like everything else he says, his messianic prophecy is another variation on a single, simple, theme: “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (3:2)

Except that simple theme of “repentance” is not that simple, because this is the Bible, and when we read the Bible, two thousand years later, things are almost never quite as simple as they seem.

In the modern American Christian tradition, when we hear this message of repentance, we often assume that John is addressing us as individuals. In our culture, we tend to think that “sin” means an individual moral failing. So it sounds like John’s message is that you and you and you should repent. John says to the crowds, I baptize you and you and you with water for repentance, so that you will be saved from your sin.

Depending on your exact spiritual orientation and your own beliefs, you may either love this or hate it. Some people find an emphasis on individual sin, repentance, and forgiveness to be incredibly life-giving. Other people can’t stand it. So if you love this idea that you as an individual need to repent, and if it draws you into a time of reflection and self-examination during Advent, then that’s wonderful; and I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it. And if you hate the idea that you, as an individual, need to repent, if it makes you shut down and write John off as yet another crazed street preacher, yet another Puritan consumed with “the haunting fear,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “that someone, somewhere may be happy” … then I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it.

Because when John the Baptist calls the people to “repent,” there’s a sense in which he’s addressing each individual. But there’s another, very real sense in which the call for repentance is not addressed to “you” and “you” and “you,” but to “you,” to us, to all of us, humankind as a whole.

The whole story, after all, is told in collective terms. Matthew doesn’t say that “many people from Jerusalem” came to him, but that “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea” came, and were baptized, confessing their sins. (3:5) And he actually doesn’t say “confessing their sins.” He says “confessing their sin,” in the singular; and our translators translate it “sins,” plural. It’s easy for preachers to make too much out of this sort of thing, but I think in this moment it’s important, because it fits with the story. It maintains that same focus on the collective. It suggests that what John the Baptist is out there preaching about is not only individual sin. It’s a collective, social state of sin.

Jesus and John lived in a society continually wracked by violent revolution, by attempts to establish or reestablish the kingdom of God on earth through the force of arms, by rebellions whose leaders often turned against one another as much as they did the Romans. Jesus tried to teach another way to establish God’s kingdom, a way of peace and love. And John was trying to tell the people that the kingdom of heaven had come near—not through their attempts to create it by force, but through the coming of one who was more powerful than he was, but whose power would turn out to be a paradox: whose moment of greatest strength would look like weakness, and whose greatest success would look like failure. The kingdom of heaven was coming near, not with the sword but on the Cross, and that made all the difference.

We, too, live in a world that’s full of violence. We live in a world very unlike Isaiah’s vision, a world in which we do still “hurt” and “destroy,” in ways small and large. (Isaiah 11:9) We do not live “in harmony with one another,” as Paul writes to the Romans. (Romans 15:5) We—as a society, as a species—need to repent. We need to turn away from the path of hatred and violence and turn toward the way of reconciliation and love.

But that doesn’t mean the burden is all on you.

My favorite thing about this passage from Isaiah—and the one thing to remember from this sermon, if you remember nothing else—is that peace is not a compromise between predators and prey. Peace is a world of vegetarian wolves. It’s not the armed peace of mutually-assured destruction we have in this world. It’s not that the wolves eat the lambs on Mondays, and the sheep eat the wolf pups on Wednesdays. No. The wolf and the lamb live together. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling, dwell in peace. The bears graze, and the lion eats straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-8) It’s the predators who need to repent, not the prey.

So what are we to do, we little lambs in a world full of wolves? Is it safe yet to stick our hands into the adder’s den? Maybe not. But we can recognize and cherish the power of the lamb. We can build communities of peace. We can live with one another as if the kingdom of heaven had not simply come near, but had already come. We can “welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed us.” (Rom. 15:7)

And we can recognize, as well, that there is within each one of us a little bit of wolf, and a little bit of lamb; a little bit of cow and a little bit of bear. We are not either chaff or wheat, but each one of us is a grain, consisting of both. The threshing process that John the Baptist foretells doesn’t happen between us, as if “you” and “you” were chaff and “you” and “you” were wheat. It happens within us, not only as a whole society but within each one of us as well. We all have wolves and bears within us who need to give up meat. We all have chaff that needs to be burned away.

It sometimes feels like there is nothing I can do about the violence and anger of this world, nothing I can do to bring us closer to Isaiah’s vision of peace. But I know that there’s a little bit of the wolf in my heart, too, that would sometimes rather growl at the lamb than lie down with it in peace. I pray that the Holy Spirit may come and thresh us all, to burn away the chaff that is within my heart and your heart and our world, allowing us to live with ourselves and one another in something a little more like peace. So “may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant [us all] to live in harmony with one another,” and “may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen. (Rom. 15:5, 13)

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Sermon — November 27, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings What is it that keeps you up at night? Is it anxiety or fear about the state of the world, about mass shootings or car crashes or the small-but-real … Continue reading →

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Sermon — November 20, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings When I was a kid, we spent a fair amount of time in the car, for New Englanders: five-hour drives to visit my grandparents in New Jersey, sitting in … Continue reading →

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Sermon — November 13, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings When I walked here last Sunday morning for church, I saw a flatbed truck and a crane being operated by the Department of Public Works right over in Thompson … Continue reading →

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Sermon — All Saints’ Sunday, November 6, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “You were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit;this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption.” (Eph. 1:14) In the name of the … Continue reading →

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Sermon — October 30, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Page I have some good news for you and some bad news for you. Which one do you want first?          Well actually, it’s not up to you. The order has … Continue reading →

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Sermon — October 23, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings I don’t know if you realize this, but if you’re sitting here in church on a beautiful Sunday morning in October, you’re probably more like a Pharisee than a … Continue reading →

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Sermon — October 16, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings When I was in college, I spent a semester’s-worth of Saturday mornings learning how to use an old-school, hand-operated printing press. This is the sort of thing I love: … Continue reading →

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Sermon — October 9, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings For many people, life in a city neighborhood like ours can be transient, just one stop on a train that goes from the suburbs to a college dorm to … Continue reading →

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Sermon — October 2, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings There may come a time in your life when you find yourself living with someone who feels the need to announce, publicly, their completion of every basic household chore. … Continue reading →

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Sermon — September 25, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “[The rich man] called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I … Continue reading →

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Sermon — September 18, 2022 The Rev Greg. Johnston Lectionary Readings “The manager asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him,‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and … Continue reading →

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Sermon — September 11, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings I once heard an interview with a baseball umpire who’d been recruited to test out a new ”electronic umpire” system in the early days of its development. It used … Continue reading →

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Sermon — September 4, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:25, 33) … Continue reading →

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Sermon — August 28, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Page In every wedding planning process and at every wedding reception, there is a moment that has the power to distil and clarify decades-long relationships into a single decision: the … Continue reading →

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Sermon — August 21, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings Shame tends to sear things into your memory. I can tell you about the time I hugged the wrong dad’s hairy legs at a barbecue with family friends when … Continue reading →

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The Rev. Greg Johnston Sermon — August 7, 2022 Lectionary Readings When I was in elementary school, my parents finished the basement in my childhood home. Before, it had been a dark and dirty place; I was scared to go … Continue reading →

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Sermon — July 3, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “It was the middle of November when the strange man came to the village,” writes Dorothy Sayers in her short mystery, “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey.” “Thin, … Continue reading →

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Sermon — July 26, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “For freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal. 5:1) In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The 2013 PBS special … Continue reading →

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Sermon — June 19, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” … Continue reading →

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Sermon — June 12, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

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Sermon — The Day of Pentecost — June 5, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) Today is the Day of Pentecost, when we celebrate … Continue reading →

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Sermon — May 29, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30) The English bishop and New Testament scholar Tom Wright tells the story of an older English bishop and scholar, … Continue reading →

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Sermon — May 22, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Massachusetts has one of the world’s most boring flags: the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a white field. The seal itself is kind of interesting. It consists of … Continue reading →

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Sermon — May 15, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings It’s become commonplace to observe that life is like a journey, and religion is no exception to this trend. A quick Google Books search for “spiritual journey” shows that … Continue reading →

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Sermon — May 8, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving andhonor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.” Once upon a time, a group of friends … Continue reading →

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Sermon — May 1, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings This is one my favorite stories in the Bible, and it’s definitely one of the silliest. Easter has come and gone, Jesus has died and risen again, and the … Continue reading →

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Sermon — April 24, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

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The Rev. Greg Johnston April 17, 2022 This Christmas, I received a surprising gift. It arrived in a large cardboard box, about four feet tall, and after I cut through the tape and laid out all the parts, it took … Continue reading →

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The assembled “elders of the people,” the “chief priests and the scribes,” (Luke 22:66) are so close to being right about Jesus. “We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that … Continue reading →

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It’s hard to imagine the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” happening today.

For one thing, it’s one of the most powerful stories of repentance and forgiveness in the history of world literature; and we live in a society in which the only thing less popular than taking responsibility for something you’ve done wrong and apologizing is forgiving someone who’s done exactly that.

It’s the details of the story that make it so powerful. This young man asks for his share of the inheritance early, and his father is extraordinarily generous, splitting the family’s wealth between his two sons evenly rather than favoring the firstborn son. And this is no small thing. It’s not a matter of writing a check: the father has to sell half their land, half their livestock, half of everything they have to provide the younger son with his half of the family’s wealth in liquid form. The younger son has written himself out of the family’s economic future, and soon enough its social future. The older brother and the father will continue working the diminished family farm, but Junior’s going to make his fortune alone in a strange land.

Except instead of making his fortune, he squanders it, living so luxuriously that when famine strikes, it turns out his rainy-day fund has gone dry. He’s friendless and alone, a stranger in a strange land, and no one there will help him. Hitting rock bottom, he comes to himself and works up his courage to make his apology: “I will arise, and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.’” (Luke 15:18-19)

He comes home, ready to make his apology, but “while he was still far off,” his father sees him, and loves him, and forgives; and he comes running out toward him and throws himself around him, and kisses his dear son. And the son begins his apology, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” (15:21) But he never gets to finish. The father doesn’t need to hear it. Halfway through the apology, he’s already stopped listening and turned away to give instructions to the servants for the party, overwhelmed with what’s happened: “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (15:24)

And then along comes the older brother, whose unforgiveness is as bitter as the father’s forgiveness is sweet. Coming in from the fields, he hears the sounds of the celebration, and when he’s told what’s going on, he’s outraged. And why not? It’s not just, Dad, that you’re throwing the kind of party for this good-for-nothing “son of yours” that you’ve never thrown for me. (15;:30) He already took his half of our property, and spent it. So that’s my fatted calf they’re eating—without even inviting me! That’s my best robe he’s wearing, my wine he’s drinking. And the father begs him to understand: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours… But this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!” (15:31-32) And the story ends, and we’re left hanging: What would the older brother decide to do?

Many of us hear echoes of our own lives in this story. Perhaps you see yourself in the younger brother, desperately needing forgiveness for some offense, wishing that when you had gone astray, your own father (mother, sibling, friend, spouse) had run out into the fields to greet you when you returned, “when you were still far off.” Perhaps you see yourself in the father, wishing you’d had the grace to extend that unconditional, forgiving love to someone before it was too late. Or perhaps, as many of us do, you see yourself in the diligent older brother: hardworking, straitlaced, resentful after years of working hard and smiling nicely while other people reap the rewards.

We may be like the brother who needs forgiveness, or the father who needs to forgive, or the other brother who’s struggling with forgiveness. But God is like that overjoyed parent, forgiving us before he even heard us apologize, running towards us while we are still far off, loving and delighting in us however far we’ve fallen and however far away we’ve gone, striving to reconcile us with one another and celebrating our return whenever it comes, for ever and ever, Amen.

But there’s one problem with this picture. The story never says that the father forgives his younger son. There’s no reason to believe, in fact, that the father has any idea what’s been going on. There is no “Find my Friends” on his son’s iPhone that shows him spending all his time in the bars and clubs of a far-off land. There are no text-message updates to say he’s running low on funds. There are no collect calls home to ask for cash to buy a bus ticket. He can’t send a telegram. He can’t even send a letter, even if he had fifty-eight cents for a stamp, which he doesn’t, because in the ancient world, there was no postal service. To send a letter he’d have to hire a scribe to take dictation, then find a friend who was headed back in the direction of his hometown to carry it for him. This was how writing letters worked. And if you’re living in a foreign land, so poor and alone that you’re craving the slop out of the pigs’ own trough, there’s not much chance you’re going to find someone to carry a letter back home for you. (And by the way, nobody sends a letter home saying that they’ve squandered their inheritance in dissolute living. That’s what Instagram is for.)

The younger son has cashed out and moved away, cutting himself off from the family. The father is so bereft, regrets letting him go so much that he’s apparently watching the road rather than going about his business as usual, watching so intently that while his son was still far off, he spots him. He could just as easily be coming home in great triumph, having quadrupled his wealth. The father has no idea and still he runs to him. His son tries to tell him, “I have sinned against heaven and before you,” but it’s clear the father isn’t really listening. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. We know the story, but the father’s never heard it, and it’s not until the party’s begun and the servants have heard the tale that the older son understands. The father sees a son who had left his family behind returning, and he is overjoyed, and when asked to explain, he doesn’t say, “This son of mine had gone astray and has apologized,” or “he has sinned and been forgiven.” He says he “was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found.” If there’s a theme in this story, it’s this: not sin and forgiveness, but “lost and found.”

And it’s this sense of loss that shapes the father’s response, and the older brother’s, too.

It was the father’s decision, after all, whether he would give his son his portion of the inheritance or not. It was the father’s decision whether to split the family’s wealth fifty-fifty between his two sons, or to give the firstborn a double portion, as Biblical law suggests. (Deut. 21:17) You might think he should’ve known his children a bit better; he probably could’ve predicted what would happen, after all. If the younger son was lost, it’s because he lost him! And unfortunately, now he’s lost the older son as well; literally lost track of him, forgotten to invite him to the party he’s hosting in his brother’s honor, and lost him metaphorically as well.

It’s the father’s sense of losing his son and finding him again that drives the recklessness with which he ignores his failings and mistakes and celebrates his return, because there’s nothing more important than being reunited with him again. And it’s the older brother’s sense of losing his special relationship with his father, losing his sense of himself as the good one, the special one, the loved one, that drives his unforgiveness, too.

And this is very good news. If we stuck with the first idea—if we stopped with the story of forgiveness and love, without this added element of loss—it would be good news, to a certain extent. It would be comforting to hear that God forgives us even before we the apologies leave our mouths; that God runs towards us while we are still far off to embrace us. But when we find ourselves in the position of the resentful older brother, it isn’t much help. Just be like the father, the story seems to say. Just love, unconditionally, and forgive recklessly, and let someone else feast on your food unfairly in the name of love. But that’s very hard to do, and the story gives us almost no tools to do it.

But the second story reminds me of what I lose when I don’t forgive. The father loses a son, and finds him again. The brother loses a brother—but he, too, can find him again. He can choose to walk into that party. Or he can choose to keep himself out in the cold. But he’s the only one who’ll go hungry if he does. He’s the only one who’ll still be lost, when his brother has been found. And it’s up to him which future he will choose. It’s up to him whether to forgive a brother and a father who don’t deserve it, who’ve wronged him and are at this very moment, as they feast on his fatted calf, still wronging him; or whether to do exactly what his younger brother has done, and cut himself off from the family, as if he were lost and they were dead to him.

And it’s up to us, each one of us, when we find ourselves living in this story, to look for what we’ve lost along the way, what we’ll lose if we can’t bring ourselves to forgive; and what we just might find if we go running toward it, however far off it may be.

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Sermon — March 20, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

Jesus’ words in our Gospel this morning crack open a debate about what’s sometimes called “karmic retribution.” You’re probably familiar with the idea: if you do a good deed now, you’ll “have some good karma” and the universe will owe you good things in the future. If you do evil now, you may escape punishment for a while, but eventually, you will reap what you have sown; bad things will happen to you.

Now, this is an over-simplified version of the real Buddhist or Hindu idea of “karma,” but in fact, most people believe in some form of it. It’s just the timeline that changes. So, some people really do believe that “what goes around comes around” in this life: if I do good things, good things will happen to me. It may be in a week, or a month, or ten years, but it’s coming. Of course, the various Hindu and Buddhist traditions from which the word “karma” actually comes, have a much more nuanced idea of things, especially when you introduce concepts like reincarnation: I may be repaid for the good or evil I’ve done in this life in some future life, after my death and rebirth. And of course, even most people’s ideas of how “heaven” and “hell” work are variations on the same theme, but again with the timeline changed: God is just, and justice will be served, not in this life, but after death. So no good deed goes unrewarded, and no evil deed goes unpunished; it’s just that it happens in the afterlife.

Jesus dives right in to this debate. It’s clear that he rejects the most simplistic version of “karmic retribution,” the idea that “good things happen to good people” and “bad things happen to bad people,” because this amounts to a kind of victim-blaming. Jesus names a couple of recent news stories to make the point; we don’t know anything about them, but you can probably understand without much context. Think about those Galilean pilgrims, he says, whom Pilate killed in cold blood at the very Temple itself, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Think of those eighteen poor souls killed when that tower collapsed. We might say: Think of those families huddled in subway stations in Kyiv, of that friend who’s sick and fighting so bravely, of that family member who was bullied at school for years. Is their evidence of some hidden wrongdoing? Is it simply that “what goes around comes around”?

Jesus dismisses that idea out of hand. Do you think they suffered in this way because they were worse sinners than all the rest of us? “No, I tell you,” he says—“but…” (Luke 13:3)

There’s an old saying that preachers ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and Jesus knew it well. To those who are worried that their suffering is a sign of God’s wrath or vengeance, Jesus simply says: Be not afraid. It’s not your fault. You’re not being punished for anything.

But to those who are comfortable, who have the leisure to come to him with speculative questions about the cause of human suffering and the problem of evil, Jesus says, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish, just as they did.” (Luke 13:3, 5)

“Repentance” is such a church-specific word that it’s sometimes not obvious what it means. Our English word “repent” comes from the Latin verb repenitire, a verb which means “to feel regret.” It’s tightly tied to ideas of punishment: the pen in repent or penitence is the same Latin word as in penalty or penal; in fact, it’s an alternate spelling of the pun in punish. To “repent” is to “feel really bad,” because to “punish” is to “make someone feel really bad.” But Jesus didn’t speak Latin. The Greek and Hebrew words for repentance have slightly different connotations. You may have heard a preacher quote the Greek word metanoia, the word used in the original language of the New Testament for repentance. Metanoia doesn’t mean “punishment” or “regret” but “transformation of the mind,” a reorientation of a person’s values and beliefs. And the Hebrew and Aramaic word for repentance is even clearer about that reorientation: it’s teshuvah in Hebrew, “turning” or “returning.” Not feeling guilty, not being punished, not even changing one’s mind, but turning away from a path that’s leading to destruction, and returning to God.

It’s this “turning” that Jesus is talking about, I think. Jesus is speaking to people living under foreign occupation in the decades before an explosive, failed revolution that will end with their defeat and the destruction of their city. Pontius Pilate isn’t a generic bad guy. He’s the Roman official charged with maintaining control of this part of the empire. Those Galileans were probably killed for resisting Roman rule, one way or another. And when Jesus turns and addresses the crowd, he’s begging them to resist the Romans in a different, non-violent way, because the rebellion they are planning will lead them to their destruction. To be clear: Jesus is not claiming that unless they repent from their personal sins, whatever, God will destroy them as individuals. He’s claiming that unless they practice teshuvah, unless they turn aside from the path they’re on, they will be destroyed; by Rome or one another or.

We are living in a different place and time. But we nevertheless sometimes find ourselves walking paths that lead us toward destruction. Perhaps it’s a personal path of destruction, an addiction or an obsession or simply an unhealthy way of relating to another person that’s destroying you, day by day. Perhaps it’s something bigger, like the path that’s leading us inexorably toward environmental catastrophe. But it is as true for us as it was for those Judeans and Galileans long ago: Unless we repent, unless we turn aside, we will all perish. This is the sense in which “what goes around comes around.” Not as the result of karmic retribution or divine justice, but simply as the consequence of our own actions. Jesus doesn’t tell these people that they’re going be suffer forever in hell. He tells them that if they don’t turn, they will perish. But what if they do turn and look to see what’s on the other road?

Like many of the heroes of the Bible, Moses isn’t much of a hero; at least not to begin with. This first reading comes from Exodus chapter 3. So far, Moses has been born into an enslaved people under the threat of violence. His fantastic escape down the river in a basket is a testament to his mother’s ingenuity and to the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter, but we can’t give any credit to baby Moses himself. That’s chapter 1. Chapter 2 mostly tells the story of Moses as a hot-headed and violent man. Raised a prince of Egypt, he’s nevertheless killed an Egyptian man and fled, leaving behind his family and his homeland and all his privilege to tend the flocks of Jethro, the priest of Midian. It’s not a great start.

But no spiritual journey ever starts with our good behavior. It starts with God’s unprompted, undeserved calling. And so the “angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” and Moses noticed. (Exod. 3:2) And Moses said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” and “when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see,” God called to him by name: “Moshe! Moshe!” (3:3) And Moses replied, Hineni, “Here I am.” (3:4)

It is not because Moses’ mother sets him afloat down the river in a basket that God calls him to stand up to Pharaoh and lead his people. It’s not because he’s particular good at nonviolent resistance, which he’s not. It’s not because he’s a good public speaker—in fact, he’s such a bad public speaker that God gets his brother Aaron involved to help him out. It’s because when he sees God’s glory flaring out from the bush, he turns aside to see. And when God saw that he had turned aside, God called to him.

Moses turns away from the path of destruction, the path that had led him from the royal court to a lonely wilderness, from his life being saved from Pharaoh’s violence to ending another man’s life by violence, and he turns onto another path, a path of freedom and of life. And while that path is not always easy—while Moses suffers much along the way—there is never a sense that he’s getting what he deserves, there is never a sense that what goes around comes around, there is never a sense that God is punishing or will punish Moses for this inauspicious and violent beginning, in this life or the next. Because as soon as he turns aside, he has left the path that leads to destruction, and he is safe.

God calls us each by name, as good or bad or ordinary as we are. And the God whose name is “I Am Who I Am,” calls each of us as we are, and we respond, “Here I am.” Here I am, as I am. There’s no one else I can be. And if we turn aside—no, since the moment that we turned aside to look—God will and God is and God has been leading us down the paths of life and love and peace, whatever may happen along the way.

As we walk along that path, may God indeed “keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul,” this day and for ever more. Amen.

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Sermon — March 6, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

As people have followed the news from Ukraine recently, I’ve seen a number of different ways to try to understand what’s happening by telling the stories of the past. It’s something we often do. Is this, one might wonder, closer to what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, or is it closer to what Germany and the Soviet Union did to Poland in 1939? Is it more like what Russia did to Georgia in 2008, or what Russia did to Ukraine just back in 2014? Or, if you’re not so familiar with the dates and times of 20th-century European history: Is this, as one headline said, a “David and Goliath story”?

It’s interesting, the way we try to understand, as if picking the right story about a situation can tell us something about the way it will unfold. “David and Goliath” is the perfect example. After all, nobody ever claims to be Goliath, because “David and Goliath” doesn’t just distinguish between “small and big,” it separates those who are small, scrappy, and untrained, but righteous from those who are big, powerful, incompetent, and wrong. And “David and Goliath” aren’t just characters, but a story. We know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And we know that it’s not the story of a small but righteous child slowly crushed, despite his best efforts, beneath the inexorable power of a giant. It’s a story in which the determined, innocent boy overcomes the hardened warrior by the grace of God and by the power of his goodness. To claim the David and Goliath story for oneself is to claim that one will have victory, as unlikely as it may seem; and in fact, by giving courage to your friends and attracting compassion from the world, the telling of the story itself shifts the plot of reality toward the victory. It’s not a magic formula. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want. But it’s a legitimate strategy, and it sometimes really works.

We often call Lent a penitential season, a season in which we repent, as one of our liturgies puts it, for “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf,” and we try to repair the damage. It’s also a season of fasting, which is something different. Fasting—whether from certain foods or from alcohol or from anything else we choose to give up during Lent—is not a form of repentance. We don’t give up chocolate or wine or whatever because they’re evil, but because they’re good. And it’s not a punishment, a way of somehow making amends for our sins by forsaking something we like. It’s a workout for the soul, a way of practicing our resistance to really serious temptations by resisting things that aren’t actually bad to do. Along with repentance and fasting, Lent is also a season of preparation: not only of our preparation for the joy of the resurrection on Easter, but, traditionally, a season in which new Christians were formed in the traditions of the faith as they prepared to be baptized at Easter.

Lent is a season of repentance, and of fasting, and of preparation; but it’s also a season of wandering in the wilderness. The forty days of Lent symbolize the forty days of Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness, which are themselves an echo of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness generations before. And this is the part of Lent I’m really feeling the most this year—not repentance, or preparation, or even fasting (although, ask me in a few weeks)—but that story of the wilderness.

The wilderness is an interlude in the story of the ancient Israelites. It should just be a couple days’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and yet this wilderness stretches on for a long, long time, the Promised Land always tantalizingly just around the bend. Much like the last two years. We’ve left behind an old way of living, and we haven’t quite reached the new one yet. And it turns out that this wilderness time hasn’t just been empty time. It’s been a time of transformation and change and reimagination. It’s not just the gap between Point A and Point B—it is, itself, point B in a much longer alphabet of change.

The Book of Deuteronomy is written as a speech by Moses at the end of this wandering time, forty years after he parted the Red Sea so they could escape slavery in Egypt. Moses reminds them of the law that God has given them, and tells them what to do when they finally make it there: “When you have come into the Land…and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of the ground…” and go to the altar of God, and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” and retell the story of their people, of their ancestors’ own ancient wanderings, of their enslavement, and of their liberation. (Deut. 26:1-2, 5)

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the same river Jordan, he is led out into the wilderness to be tested, and stays there for forty days, a miniature version of their forty years. And each one of his responses to the devil’s tempting offers is a quote from that same Book of Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone,” and “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” and “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” all come from that same moment in the people’s story. (Deut. 8:3, 6:13, 6:16)

Jesus’ wilderness time is at the beginning of his ministry, not the end. But it comes while his people are still enduring another wilderness, not forty days or four decades but four centuries and more of foreign rule, of occupation and oppression. And when the devil tempts him with offers of bread, and power, and safety for himself, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, recalling the whole story of the people’s time in the wilderness and their entrance into the Promised Land. The devil offers a single hungry man a loaf of bread; and Jesus calls forth the story of the God who fed his people with manna from heaven every day. The devil offers him power over the kingdoms of all the world, and Jesus recalls the story of a people who’ve had enough of being ruled. The devil offers him protection, but Jesus calls forth the God who parted the sea and dashed the chariots of Pharaoh, the tanks of the ancient world, into bits.

These words have power. When we quote a beloved text, or we give a ritualized address, when we recite ancient prayers or we write a news headline about a “David and Goliath” struggle, we write ourselves into the story, and that story becomes real in our lives.

Paul writes to the church in Rome that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) It’s not a magic formula. It’s the retelling of a story. Like the Eucharistic prayers that evoke the story of salvation, like the Great Litany that echoes with five centuries of the prayers of the past, it draws upon the strength of the experience of Christians in ages past, and their stories begin to shape our lives and our choices as we live the remaining chapters of our stories. And in fact this retelling doesn’t just call forth the stories of our ancestors; it’s brings God to us. When we tell those old stories, Paul quotes Deuteronomy to say, “The word is near [us], on [our] lips and in [our] heart.” (Rom. 10:8, Deut. 30:14) The uppercase-W Word of God is near us. The Word who became flesh is near us. When we tell these stories, and pray these prayers, Christ is near us, whether we can sense him or not, and he is writing the rest of the story for us as leave this place today.

Only a few words of this service today came from me, or from you. More came from the generations before us, fifty or five hundred years ago. And more still came from generations long past, from those who lived in a far-off live two or three thousand years ago. But their stories are our stories. Their God is our God. Their wilderness is not our wilderness, but their wandering is our wandering, and it feels like we’re getting awfully close to the Promise Land. We don’t know what God has written for us in the next chapter of our story, but we do know where God’s story has brought us in the past: from a wilderness of spiritual fasting to a land flowing with milk and honey; from enslavement to liberation; from the cross to the empty tomb; and together with all those who live among us, we can give thanks to God and “celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord [our] God has given to [us].” (Deut. 26:11)

Amen.

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Sermon — February 27, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

As somebody whose mood mostly revolves around the weather, I can’t stand the kind of overcast skies we’ve been having recently. But as a college newspaper photographer, I loved them. For three years in college, I was a staff photographer and then a photography editor for The Harvard Crimson, an amateur managing amateurs shooting photos for the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, and I very quickly learned about the paradox of light.

In low light, of course, the camera can barely capture anything. If you’re taking candid photos of some visiting scholar at a dimly-lit evening lecture, you can’t just use a flash like a paparazzo. Your only options are to reduce the shutter speed to let in more light (and making your photo blurrier) or to increase the film speed to capture more light (and make your photos grainier). And while printing photos onto newsprint gives you a certain amount of wiggle room—ink bleeds, after all—the digital era takes it all away.

Outdoor events are much better. You have all the light you need. In fact, it’s often too much light. A sunny day is hard for photographers, too. The rays of the sun, coming from a single point, tend to cast harsh shadows. The nose creates a black triangle across the cheek. The bags under the eyes deepen. And the range between the bright highlights and the dark shadows can be hard to capture. Hand the newspaper over to a bunch of freshman photographers on a sunny day, and it looks like The Phantom of the Opera; half the subject’s face is covered in a white mask of over-exposure.

But a cloudy day is photojournalist heaven. A cloudy sky acts like the celestial version of one of those white umbrellas you’ll see in a studio, diffusing the power of the sun. You no longer have a single light source shining down and casting shadows. In fact, on a really overcast day, when the sky’s not just filled with clouds but uniformly grey, it’s as if your subject is illuminated from every direction at once with a soft light, giving you crisp, glowing photos with absolutely no skill required.

This, by the way, is why you’d never want to go on a first date in an airport bathroom. (Well, there are several reasons.) The harsh overhead lights show you exactly as you are; and then some. But the gentle glow of a romantic restaurant, with soft lighting from above and candles from below, shows you in, quite literally, your best light, better than you looked ten years ago on a good day.

Well, you have come to church, not to a photography class (or an airport bathroom), and you’re presumably here to hear about God, not mood lighting. So let me put it this way: while there are many ways to understand who Jesus is and what he does, one school of thought is to say this: Jesus is “the light of the world”; (John 9:5) and he shows us in two very different lights.

One of them is like the harsh light of the sun: beautiful and necessary for our life and growth; unflattering and dangerous to behold with our bare eyes. This is the divine light that shines out of Moses’ face when he comes down from Mount Sinai, fearful to behold. It’s a light so brilliant that you might almost describe it as “sharp.” Indeed, the Book of Exodus literally says something like “his face sprouted horns of light.” (Ex. 34:29) It’s an odd phrase, and indeed it’s the source of a misunderstanding in medieval art, because while every other ancient translator of the Bible ignored the image and simply translated “his face was shining” or something similar, Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, included the bit about horns. He was fluent in Hebrew, he understood that it was just a poetic turn of phrase, but his later readers did not, leading to a thousand years of Western art that depicts Moses with little goat horns on his head. Which is not the point.

The point is that Moses doesn’t just glow with a peaceful, heavenly light. He radiates light in beams so sharp they piece the soul. It’s a symbol of the soul-piercing power of the Law, which he delivers with his face uncovered, the Law whose perfect precepts show human beings exactly as they are. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might,” (Deut. 6:5) shines forth, and the shadows begin to appear; and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) and our imperfections become clear. In the bright light of God’s word, none of us look very good.

And indeed, it’s with such light that Jesus appears when he is transfigured in prayer. “The appearance of his face changed,” Luke writes—get the reference?—“and his clothes became dazzling white,” (Luke 9:29) and again (not to make this an ancient-language seminar) the literal sense of the words is important: “his clothes were white,” Luke writes, “flashing like lightning.” What sharper beam of concentrated light could there be than a bolt of lightning?

And like the Law given to Moses, Jesus’ life is full of love so perfect as to be unflattering for the rest of us. It’s a self-sacrificial, unconditional, patient, peaceful love; a love that loves not only its friends and neighbors but its enemies, as you may recall. This love is an ideal to which we can all aspire, but by whose measure we inevitably fall short. And so Jesus’ light, like Moses’ light, illuminates our flaws. His brightness deepens our shadows. The lightning that flashes from his very clothing stuns his closest followers; even the most holy saints can’t stand before it.

But Jesus shows us in another light, as well, because he is not only the bright sun, but the cloudy sky; not only the shining Word of God, but the veil that softens its radiance. He doesn’t just dazzle Peter and James and John with his light, he brings them into the cloud that buffers it, and they hear the voice of God speaking to them from within. (Luke 9:34-35)

In Jesus, God became human. He faced temptation, and pain, and he knows what it is like to be a human being suffering, and has nothing but empathy and compassion for us. Jesus chooses to become the veil or the cloud or the umbrella that softens the harsh light of his own perfection, and the light of God’s law of love that highlights our flaws by contrast becomes the soft and loving light of God that shows us at our best.

People sometimes say that when God looks at you, God sees Jesus. And this is meant to be a reassurance about divine judgment and divine mercy: God doesn’t see and condemn your imperfect self, God sees and loves Christ in you. But of course, God sees us, God knows us, and God loves us. It’s just that God has chosen to see us in the light of Christ: in the bright light that shows how far from Jesus’ sacrificial love we really are, but ultimately in the soft light that shows us at our best.

And that light, if you take St. Paul’s word for it, not only shows us at our best; it begins to transform us into our best.

I’ll just say up front, be careful about Paul’s interpretation of the veil and the reading of the Law in this passage from Second Corinthians. It deserves a longer aside than I’m going to give it about inter-faith relations. If you read it a certain way, you can draw out some implications about Judaism that are condescending or even dangerous. I’ll just say now that it’s helpful to remember that Paul isn’t a Christian criticizing Jews; he’s a Jewish author, writing to the leaders of a mostly-Jewish religious community, about the way other Jewish religious leaders read the Bible they all share, and he writing without knowing the legacy of Christian violence against Jews that would eventually come.

What interests me, though, is Paul’s idea that seeing this divine light transforms us into that light; that seeing the image of the glory of God, as if it were reflected in a mirror, transforms us into that same image. That it’s not just that God has chosen to see us in our best light, that God chooses to see us at our best and therefore forgives us. It’s that seeing us at our best is what begins to transform us.

It’s almost like the romantic lighting on a first date in that dimly-lit restaurant, which has the power not only to show us in our best light, but—by bringing us into a relationship with someone who will bring out the best in us—has the power actually to make us better. (And, to be clear: I mean it makes us better people, not better-looking people.)

This kind of light doesn’t work by hiding our flaws, but by revealing the goodness of our true selves beneath the exterior. And it’s that light that God chooses to shine on us, not only seeing us in our best light but by making us into our best selves. “Therefore,” Paul writes, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” (2 Cor. 4:1) Since it is by God’s mercy that we, all of us, are engaged in this ministry—in this Christian journey of love—we do not lose heart, because we know that God sees us in that loving, forgiving, transforming light. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18) Amen.

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Sermon — February 13, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

There’s been a subtle change in the way people use the word “blessed” over the last decade. Ten years ago, if I asked someone how they were and they said “blessed,” I’d assume they meant they were grateful to God for the good things God had given them, even—maybe especially—the little things. “How are you today?” you might say to a taxi driver as you got into the backseat. “Blessed,” he might reply. Life’s not perfect. I’m not rich. But I’m blessed to be here, blessed that God woke me up this morning to spend another day driving people around.

With the rise of social media, “blessed” has acquired a new sense. In the age of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, where you can tag photos or videos with a word or phrase, “blessed” quickly became a cliché. Circa 2014, if you posted a photo of yourself suspended mid-air off the back of a yacht as you leapt into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, there was only one thing to say: #blessed. This kind of mock humility or gratitude could be especially infuriating. No no, it’s not bragging to post a photo of my incredible resort hotel room with an ocean view. It’s gratitude! It’s prayer! See: I’m blessed!

blessed became such a cliché that as early as 2015 it had generated a harsh response from none other than Vogue magazine. “The #blessed hashtag,” writes columnist Hayley Bloomingdale, “is only acceptable when used ironically. Note: The #blessed hashtag used unironically (e.g., an image of a green juice with the caption ‘#greenjuice #cleanliving #lovemylife… #blessed #soblessed [several hashtags omitted]) is a clear indicator that you should unfollow that girl and avoid her in real life at all costs.”

Still, even today, you can find people unironically using the phrase “blessed” when they’re really showing off about how awesome their life is, and in fact—how awesome they are. It reflects a broader pattern, even a theology: there’s a certain strain of American culture and American Christianity that sees your success in attaining the pleasures of this life as a sign of God’s grace.

Jesus would be surprised to hear it.

“Blessed are you who are poor,” he famously begins, “for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you…” (Luke 6:20-22)

blessed #soblessed

These “beatitudes,” these blessed-are-yous, are completely upside-down. Even leaving social media and the prosperity gospel aside, reasonable people wouldn’t see this as a blessed way of life. Poverty, hunger, tears; these are not the blessings for which we thank our God. Riches, fullness, laughter—these are not our woes.

It’s so difficult to wrap our heads around this inversion that people have come up with ways to try to make Jesus’ words make sense. Perhaps the most common response is to spiritualize them, and you see this already in the small differences between Luke and Matthew’s versions of these says. In Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who are hungry…” (Luke 6:20-21) in Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” (Matt. 5:3, 6) and he adds several more: “Blessed are the merciful… Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers…” and so on. (Matt. 5:7-9) In this spiritualized version, It’s not about material poverty and wealth, hunger and fullness; it’s about spiritual hunger and spiritual poverty, yearning for God and giving up our pretenses to control. (But keeping the cash.)

Others have played with the sense of time in Jesus’ words. There’s a kind of cycle here that reminds me of the famous verse from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (Eccl. 3:1 ff.) “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… [But] woe to you who are full now, for” — no matter how filling the meal — “you will be hungry.” Read this way, the Beatitudes become a commentary on the cyclicality of time, a reassurance that this too will pass—whatever this is for you right now, be it hunger or mourning or fullness or laughter. For better or for worse, all things come to an end.

To others these are both unsatisfying ideas. Luke’s gospel is, after all, the one with the most clear-eyed concern for the poor and the outcast. It’s in Luke that we find Mary’s words that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” (1:52) It’s in Luke that Jesus, in his opening sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth, proclaims that he has come to “proclaim good news to the poor.” (4:18) And so it should come as no surprise that it’s in Luke that Jesus stands before his disciples and bluntly says, “Blessed are the poor; for yours is the kingdom of God.” And to the extent that you are poor or hungry or reviled, this is a fantastic thing. Jesus smashes the prosperity theology of the culture of #blessed-ness. If you are poor, or hungry, or mourning, it is not a sign of God’s displeasure. No, “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” And if—this third school of thought wants to say—if this offends you but you are rich and full and happy, then that’s not Jesus’ problem. It’s yours.

So, all of these interpretations have centuries of tradition supporting them, and I encourage you to hang onto whichever one draws you closer to God. For my part, I just want to make two observations.

First: in Matthew’s gospel, this is part of the famous “Sermon on the Mount.” In Luke, we find it in the shorter and significantly-less-famous “Sermon on the Plain.” It’s delivered not from high up on the mountain, evoking the holy Mount Sinai from which Moses delivered the Law millennia before; but face to face, for “Jesus came down… and stood on a level place… and looked up at his disciples.” (6:17, 20) Jesus came down among us, not just in a metaphorical way in the Incarnation, but in a very literal way, and walked among the rich and poor alike, not with condemnation or with legislation, but with a compassionate heart and a healing touch.

Second: this isn’t a third-person description of categories of people as good or bad. It’s a word of comfort in the second person, face to face; and, to be fair, a word of warning. It’s not “blessed are the poor…blessed are the hungry…woe to the rich.” It’s Jesus, speaking to his disciples, to us, and our ecclesiastical ancestors, and saying, “Blessed are you, who are poor. Blessed are you, who are hungry. Blessed are you, who weep.” And “woe to you, who are rich. Woe to you, who are full. Woe to you, who are laughing now.”

The reality is, we’re always both at once. We are, as the Church has always been, a mixed body. And in fact, every one of us is a mixed body. I do not know a single person who is so #blessed that they are full and laughing and rich in every part of their life. And when we see someone who we think is, when we compare our lives with someone who really does seem to be living the dream, we have to remember: it’s a front. It’s an important front, sometimes. We need to keep ourselves together somehow. We don’t actually want to answer every person who asks how we’re doing with the whole truth. But I would be shocked if a single person came up to me after this service and said, “Greg: my life is perfect. I have no pain. I have no tears. I have no hunger.” If that’s you, please tell me! I would love to know! But I’ve never seen it before in my life. Rich or full or cheerful as we may be, we are all poor, or hungry, or weeping, too.

A few years ago I went to a conference and picked up some materials from a booth being run by a group that offers “strategic missional consulting” for local churches. And you can type in the address of your church and get a detailed demographic breakdown of the local area, with Census statistics and marketing demographic breakdowns and a free 45-minute phone call where they walk you through it; and then try to sell you the full consulting package for, like, ten grand.

And after walking me through the details, the priest-consultant on the call asked me a question that came from a few decades of ministry: “Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”

And I said: “Well, you know, it’s a pretty affluent area of the suburbs, but there’s actually a pretty big refugee community here, and there are a lot of elders living on fixed-incomes with pretty high property taxes, and I go to this monthly meeting of human services providers and I’ve always been surprised to hear how busy the food pantry is and…”

And he said, “No, no, no. Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”

We are all sometimes full and often hungry. We are all sometimes laughing and often weeping. And I know that I’m just falling into that same trap of spiritualizing away the very real material point of this text, but we are all, however rich we may be, somehow poor; and, in this country, relative to the human condition writ large, however poor we may be, we are still relatively rich.

What’s hunger look like in our community? What’s hunger look like in this church? What’s hunger look like for you, rich or poor, hungry or full, laughing or weeping; for you, as one of those blessed children to whom Jesus has promised the kingdom of God?

For “blessed are those,” whoever they are, “who trust in the Lord,” says the prophet Jeremiah, “whose trust is in the Lord.” (Jeremiah 17:7) Amen.

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Sermon — February 6, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I live among a people of unclean lips!” (Isaiah 6:5)

Welcome to my annual report.

No, I’m just kidding. But this is a fitting set of readings for a Sunday on which we’ll vote to elect the new leadership of this parish, with two new wardens and four new Vestry members. Our readings today grapple with the overwhelming sense of responsibility that can come with a transition, in any area of life. If you’ve ever gotten a promotion at work, or taken on a leadership role in a community organization, or become a parent, you’ve probably felt that combination of dread and commitment, of “Woe is me!” and “Here I am! Send me!” Even simply to babysit for a few hours for the first time is to enter into a terrifying realm of smoke and fire and quaking thresholds; surely they’re not about to entrust me with this child? And then they do, and there you are, and it’s okay. Hopefully.

Of course, these new responsibilities come with many benefits, including some of the greatest joys and satisfactions in life: the ability to practice new skills or finally use the ones we have, to make a bigger impact on the world, to see our children as they change and grow, to eat anything we want from some random people’s fridge while we’re babysitting. It’s not so bad.

If you ever have any anxiety about new responsibilities, just read one of the gospel stories about Simon Peter. I always love these stories, because for a chief apostle, he’s such an ordinary guy. He is both a clumsy, bumbling leader, and a model for who we all should be, and that should be a comforting thing, because—while we may never catch prodigious numbers of fish, or go to lead the Church of Christ in Rome, we probably also won’t warm ourselves by the fire outside the place where Christ is being sentenced to death and deny we’ve ever heard of the guy, so we’re not doing too badly, overall.

I want to make a few observations about leadership, responsibility, and discipleship from our Gospel reading this morning.

First: It begins with saying yes, despite our doubts. Jesus asks Simon Peter to come out into the water and cast his net, and Simon is a bit skeptical. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing…” he says. “Yet if you say so…” He’s not sure it’s the right time or place for him to try putting out his nets, but he trusts the one who’s inviting him into it, and he says yes, and amazing things happen.

Things that are somewhat too amazing, in fact. Observation #2: our successes can be as overwhelming as our failures, if not even more so. You can imagine that Peter and his companions were a little disappointed to have caught no fish, wasting a long night’s labor. But it’s not the end of the world. Yet the success that comes when they follow Jesus’ invitation really could be the end of the world: “they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break…and they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.” (Luke 5:6-7) Their failure is a disappointment; their success is a catastrophe. These are ordinary people, small-time businessmen; their nets and their boats are all they have. And there is always a risk in trying something new, in ascending up a new run on whatever ladder we’re climbing. It’s just as true for a church or a neighborhood. If we want to grow, in numbers or in ministry, there’s some risk. I wonder: What would it look like for our church’s boats to be so full of fish in 2022 that they began to sink?

Observation #3: the opportunities and possibilities of this new thing can and should come with a serious sense of humility. Just as Isaiah cried out, when called to speak the words of the Lord, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!” Peter, too responds with humility. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” And yet Peter didn’t go away, “he fell down at Jesus’ knees.” (Luke 5:8) In fact this is too weak a translation. It was an ancient posture of supplication to kneel down and grab onto someone’s knees; if you were begging someone for your life, you’d grab their knees and plead with them. So Luke writes that Simon “fell toward Jesus’ knees,” and you can imagine Jesus’ amusement at the sight. “Go away from me, Lord!” Peter cries. Um, sir. Those are my legs.

It’s a powerful symbol, though, of a spiritual truth: when we realize that we are unworthy to answer God’s call, that we can’t fulfill the vision God has for us, what we need is not to push God away, but to lean in closer; not to reject the calling, but to accept God’s gracious response to all our failings.

And we can lean in closer to one another, too. That’s observation #4: leadership is not an individual characteristic, but a communal effort. “James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon” on the fishing boats become his partners in ministry, the inner circle of a web that stretches from Jesus; to James, John, and Peter; to the Twelve; to the five hundred Paul names and more. Their leadership is a collaborative calling of which none of them is worthy on his own, and yet to which they can respond if they bear one another’s burdens along the way. And this is why we lead the church as a Vestry of which, at this point, the majority of our adults have been members. It’s why we work as teams and raise children as villages. We cannot bear the burden alone. But together, we can.

And even together, sometimes we can’t; and yet that is the greatest observation at all. Sometimes we try things and we fail. Sometimes our efforts simply aren’t good enough. Or at least we think they’re not. And Jesus responds to our inadequacies and limitations by inviting us into even greater growth, even greater responsibility. Your boat’s sinking? You’re a sinful man, not worthy of catching so many fish? “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” (Luke 5:10) And so the simple “fishermen” becomes the “fishers of men,” on the way to a lifelong pursuit of an ever-greater harvest.

So many of you bear the burden of responsibility in your lives. Maybe it’s at church, in formal or informal leadership, on the Vestry or the Building Committee, as stewardship chair or with the ECW, or in a thousand other ways. Maybe it’s at work, or at home, or in school. You may sometimes feel that you’re not good enough for the responsibility you bear. But God’s response is not to smite you for your failings. It’s not to judge you for your flaws. It’s to take you as you are, an ordinary person, good but not perfect, and to give you the strength to answer the call, so that when God asks you, “Whom shall I send?” you hear the unexpected sound of your own voice: “Here am I; send me!” (Isaiah 6:8) Amen.

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Sermon — January 23, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

Even in 2022, with so many free travel amenities of the past gone, 80% of hotel rooms still contain a Bible. In part, it’s because they tend to stick around. Hotels don’t have to endlessly replace tiny travel-size Bibles after guests stuff them all into their suitcases every day. And of course, they were mostly free in the first place. These hotel-room Bibles are usually donated by the Gideons, who’ve been doing exactly this for over a hundred years. You can easily picture the imagined audiences for these books: the faithful executive with no room for a Bible in her carry-on luggage; the salesman at a convention facing the temptations of the big city; the bored and unchurched traveler, who sits alone in the isolation of a modern high-rise hotel, quietly turning the pages of the Bible, and finds Jesus there for the first time.

It’s a rather different way of reading the Bible than the one I once heard from my old Syriac professor. Syriac is the classical Aramaic dialect used in the liturgy of the Maronite and Assyrian churches of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and around the world. It’s written in its own distinctive script, a vague cousin of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. And when some of us were grumbling about how hard it was to learn the Syriac alphabet, George, our teacher, told us that we had it easy. George was born in Bethlehem, and he’d learned to read the Syriac alphabet when he was a child, at a monastic school in Jerusalem. He had to learn to read it in every direction—right-to-left, top-to-bottom, upside-down or backwards—because during services, he’d crowd with all the other choir boys, around a single giant, handwritten psalter to sing the psalms. You might be standing at the bottom of the page and reading rightside-up while you sang; or you might be standing at the top of the page, and reading upside-down, but either way—you certainly weren’t sitting in a hotel room alone.

There’s a strange paradox about the Bible in Episcopal churches. If you took a poll of Episcopalians asking how much of the Bible they read on their own in an average week, I’d have to think the median answer would be “none.” But walk into any Episcopal Church on any Sunday morning, and you’ll hear an uninterrupted stream of Biblical text for most of the first half of the service. The same is true of Catholic churches and many others. It’s not true in most evangelical churches, where the preacher might read a single brief “teaching text” on which he’s going to preach, or simply lace references to chapter and verse throughout the talk, for the congregation to follow along in their Bibles. This evangelical pattern has a lot of individual or small-group reading at home, little or no liturgical reading in church, and long sermons. The typical Episcopalian pattern has little or no individual reading of the Bible, lots of liturgical reading, and—one can only pray—fairly short sermons.

We’re often a bit defensive about this pattern, or dismissive about the notion of reading the Bible on your own, which is just another kind of defensiveness. Now, individual Bible reading is a wonderful thing. It can help you understand the stories of our faith more deeply and lead you to encounter God in prayer. But it’s also true that this pattern—the one we’re doing right here, right now—reading the Bible together in church, that is older and, in fact, more Biblical way of reading the Bible.

The crucial difference between reading in the modern world and reading in the ancient or medieval world is that before the invention of the printing press, every word in a every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. That’s how we ended up with the tradition of a lectionary book and a gospel book that only print the assigned readings; not for convenience or because it’s cool to walk around with a special book, but because the cost of copying out a whole Bible would’ve been prohibitive.

The expense of books and the lack of any kind of public education meant that reading was a very different thing. Books were relatively rare; readers were even rarer. But reading was common, because for most people, it meant listening to someone else read aloud. For most of human history, and most of the history of the Bible, a book was not something you looked at, but something you listened to; not pondered by yourself, but something someone else read to a room full of people, interspersed with questions and conversation. It was very much like what we do on Sunday mornings. It was very much like what Ezra and Jesus did long ago.

I can’t help but notice how familiar some of the details of these stories feel. The people gather together (Neh. 8:1; Luke 4:16) and a reader stands before them. (Neh. 8:3, Luke 4:16) One of the verses we skipped in Nehemiah says that Ezra stood in a “wooden tower,” maybe something like an old-fashioned pulpit or lectern. (Neh. 8:4) Ezra says a blessing, and the people respond give a response. (Neh. 8:6) (“Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Wait, no, that’s us.) And when the reading’s done, or as it goes along, they pause for interpretation—whether the three hours of reading and explanation as in Nehemiah, or in Jesus’ short quotation and punchy sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Neh. 8:8, Luke 4:21)

These practices of reading are communal; they’re done together, not alone. They’re liturgical; they begin and end with ritual movements and prayer. They’re architectural and postural: the reader stands, often in an elevated place, to be seen and heard more easily through a crowd. They’re often musical. While it’s not explicit in Ezra or Jesus’ case, most public speaking in the ancient world was basically chanted; not to make it fancier or because people liked to sing, but simply because, like St. John’s, they had no speaker system, and singing is a way of projecting speech.

The words they read from the Bible were not assumed to be clear and simple enough to be splashed across a billboard or a bumper sticker, or even read alone without context. They required interpretation, and often multiple interpreters. Our lectionary reading skips the verse, for reasons soon to become obvious, but Nehemiah lists thirteen Levites who assisted with the task of interpreting the law: Ezra read, but “Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, [and] Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand.” (Nehemiah 8:7)

(By the way: Always take a look at the text in advance if you’re signed up to read.)

Okay, you know me. I love historical tidbits much as much as the next guy, if not much more. But this isn’t just trivia about the practice of reading. It’s actually about the substance of these readings.

When you sit alone in a quiet room and read the Bible, and hear God speaking words of comfort or inspiration or exhortation to you, it is a marvelous thing. It has the potential to create a deeper relationship between you and your God. And we should probably all do it more often.

But when we sit or stand together in a crowded (or a not-so-crowded) room, and we hear the word of God read aloud, and we say “Thanks be to God,” and we listen to some one of our number get up and offer a few words of interpretation, it too is a marvelous thing, because it calls into being, it literally creates, a community, the people of God gathered around the word of God, growing into a deeper relationship with God.

It’s no accident that these two stories happen when they do. Ezra and Nehemiah are the leaders of the first generation of Jews to be allowed to return from exile. They come back to their shattered homeland to rebuild. They’ve lived for years under someone else’s law, not their own law from God, and so when they finally return to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes, they come together to hear Ezra read from the law, and in this communal act of reading, they are made a people again.

Likewise, Luke tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to go and read in the synagogue, but he only writes one story about it, here at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He’s just been baptized in the river Jordan, and driven out to be tempted in the wilderness, and now he returns to civilization to announce what he’s about to do and to gather a movement around himself. And so he goes to the synagogue, where the people gather, and he reads.

And he reads to them, as Ezra does, from a text of liberation and solidarity. The Torah is sometimes mocked for its dietary rules and sacrificial laws, but it contains one of the earliest and most profound codes of social ethics in existence, with numerous laws to prevent the poor from going hungry and to reduce inequality, not least the “year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus announces, the Jubilee, in which debts are forgiven, and accumulated wealth redistributed. We can scoff at the Book of Leviticus all we want, but it’s there that Jesus finds the commandment that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) And when Ezra’s finished reading from the law, the very last thing he does is to command generosity and social solidarity: “Go your way, eat…drink…and send portions…to those for whom nothing is prepared.” (Neh. 8:10) Jesus’ sermon is Nazareth is the announcement that in him, God’s reign is becoming manifest, and this is “good news to the poor…release to the captives,” freedom for the oppressed, (Luke 4:18) because solidarity and justice are the cornerstones of God’s holy law.

Standing and reading together, sitting and listening together, are not just something to do; they do something. They bind us together as a community, as a people gathered around a book like a dozen chanting choristers huddled around the psalter. And it’s not just any book. It’s a book that tells the story of a world being transformed by God into something else, of a people being knit together into a single body in which, as Paul writes, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,” in which “the members…have the same care for one another,” in which “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor. 12:22, 25-26)

This is the glorious work of God: God is transforming us and our world into something very different from what it is. And this is the gift of reading Scripture together: we can hear these words from two thousand years ago, these dreams of a world of justice, solidarity, and love, and say, with Jesus, every time: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)

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Sermon — January 16, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

When time seemed to slow down in March 2020, some people’s kitchens slowed down too. All around the world, people with too much time on their hands tossed out their sliced bread in favor of sourdough starter. And it was the perfect solution to a very specific set of problems, helping limit the frequency of their grocery trips, giving them something to fill their time, and creating a new, socially-distant hobby of posting excitedly on Facebook when you found a store that actually had flour in stock. (Seriously, I bake bread sometimes. It was, like, six weeks before I could find flour at the grocery store. The guy at the corner store was selling it in little plastic containers.)

When these new converts would talk about how slow sourdough is but how much it was worth it, homebrewers laughed. Brewing beer and baking bread are both the responsibility of slow-working yeast, but on wildly different timelines. A good sourdough loaf takes an hour or two of mixing and kneading and a few days of fermentation. A batch of beer takes six or eight hours of mashing and six weeks to ferment and bottle; a whole quarantine’s worth of time before you can take a drink.

But when homebrewers talk about how slow beer is to make, home vintners roll their eyes. A six-week-old wine sounds like the punchline to a joke. If you want to make your own wine at home, as some of my retired relatives have done, you’ll be waiting something more like six months, at least; at the time that beer has begun to lose its carbonation and hoppy aroma, wine’s only just starting to age.

And that’s wine made from a kit. They ship you the juice. It’s nothing like real wine made from grapes growing on vines planted a generation ago in the hopes that one day the sun and the rain and the soil would all be distilled down intp the flavor and the color and the aroma of this grape, that the produce of an acre of vineyards would be painstakingly harvested and crushed into juice, strained and fermented and aged until its very terroir was captured in this Trader Joe’s box of Two-Buck Chuck. Or maybe even something nicer.

Sourdough is slow food. Beer is sluggish. Wine is positively glacial.

So you can imagine everyone’s surprise when Jesus shows up to a wedding, to which he seems by John’s account to have been invited in part as a courtesy to his mother, and, in a single instant, with a single phrase, turns 150 gallons of water into wine.

Cheers!

This story of the wedding at Cana is perfectly clear on the literal level. There’s no interesting alternative translation or important bit of historical context to understand what Jesus is doing. He’s turning a whole lot of water into a whole lot of wine, and the scope for scholarly debate has mostly revolved around exactly how big those containers really were.

It’s less clear what it’s supposed to mean. And so preachers throughout the centuries have each put their own spin on it, in ways that usually reflect the things they were already thinking about.

The fifth-century bishop Maximus of the city of Turin in Italy, for example, takes the story as an object lesson in the interrelated divine and human natures of Christ (a fifth-century concern if there ever was one): “as a man,” he writes, “he was present at the wedding, and as God he changed the water into wine.” (Sermon 23) (A classic example, by the way, of early Western Christology, which often verged on dividing Jesus’ divinity and humanity from one another.)

Later preachers, too, allegorized the story to fit their own concerns. Philip Melanchthon, who began the process of turning Martin Luther’s thought into a Lutheran theological system, interprets the story with a typical Lutheran concern for Law and Gospel, telling the story of the transformation from the plain and joyless water of the Law to the sweet, intoxicating wine of the gospel. (Commentary on John 2:1)

My favorite leader of the first generation of reformers, Martin Bucer of Strassburg, says there’s no allegory here. It’s a plain historical account, showing that Jesus asks only for our faith in his power. Jesus and Mary don’t reject marriage or celebration or even drinking a bit of wine at a wedding when the crowd’s already tipsy. And Bucer’s point could seem frivolous, were it not for the story of his own life. Like many of those first Protestant reformers, he had been raised in and taken his own vows of celibacy in a medieval Catholic church in which the everyday life of married Christians was seen as inferior to the celibate life of priests, monks, and nuns. For Bucer, by this point happily married to a former nun, Jesus’ mere presence at a wedding—Jesus’ mere affirmation that marriage could be an equally-holy calling to celibacy—was a profound spiritual comfort.

Personally, I get stuck less on the interrelationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity or between the Law and the Gospel or between marriage and celibacy and more on the surprising details of this story.

I notice first the super-abundance of it all: six water-jars’ worth of wine, each twenty or thirty gallons in volume. (John 2:6) Say 150 gallons of wine, which is about 750 of our standard bottles. Even at a huge wedding—say, three hundred adult guests—this comes out to two and a half bottles of wine per person; and that’s after they’ve drunk everything the happy couple had provided. Their cups runneth over indeed.

I notice, too, the timing. Jesus doesn’t show up to the wedding pulling a little red wagon carrying sixty-two cases of wine. He waits, until the worst moment of the night, when the guests are grumbling and the party’s winding down, and then, reluctantly, he does what his mother says, and makes some water into wine. (“Some,” I say.) And he does it in a way that goes almost unnoticed. The head waiter tastes the wine and sends for the groom, puzzled, and commends him: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10) The waiter compliments the puzzled groom, and Jesus’ place in the story remains unseen.

I notice, finally, that the miracle is not one of transformation, but of revelation and sensation. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water, but he utters no magic spell, no secret incantation or even prayer to turn water into wine. It’s only when the steward tastes the water that it seems to be anything but water, that it seems indeed to be wine, and good wine in fact. And it’s only the steward who ever tastes the wine, and “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory.” (2:11) I’m left wondering whether the water ever became wine at all; or whether, in the presence of Christ, the simplest, plainest water became sweeter than the finest wine could be; whether its own glory was revealed by basking in his light.

It seems sometimes, and in some ways, that we’re living at the tail end of a wedding party in which the wine has run out. We’re tired, and we’re grumbling; the party’s over, and we need to go to bed. And at the same time, Jesus is transforming the tepid water all around us into wine, and we don’t even know. Or perhaps he is revealing that what we thought was water was wine all along, and we don’t understand. We don’t see his Holy Spirit in the beautiful moments we have with one another and with God. We call over the bridegroom and thank him for his generosity, while Jesus stands hidden to the side. In every blessing, in every moment of sweetness, in every drop of metaphorical wine, the power of God’s love is being revealed all around us, right before our very eyes. And those blessings are not just the dregs of a party past, but new wine, gallons and gallons of it, all around us, even now

God, give us eyes to see, and noses to smell, and mouths to taste the good things you are doing all around us; give us the grace to see your place in our lives, and to thank you for it; give us the hearts to love one another and share the abundance of your gifts with one another, as you have poured them out on us; that your glory may be revealed in us and all the world; through Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. Amen.

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Sermon — January 2, 2022 The Rev. Greg Johnston Lectionary Readings

A few weeks ago The Washington Post ran an article with the headline, “The teens who hated Abercrombie are the adults shopping there now — and they can’t believe it either.” It was the kind of article that pads the Style sections of the Times and the Post and the Globe from time to time: completely pointless, offensively frivolous, and endlessly fascinating. The article transported me immediately back to the years I spent wandering bored in the Burlington Mall, caught up in all the complexities of adolescent identity formation as my big sister asserted her independence by buying clothes my parents didn’t like and I asserted my independence by saying she looked ridiculous—and by the way, the music she liked was awful.

(Sorry, Shelley.)

This process of self-differentiation is the bread and butter of adolescent life. At a certain point in life, we all try to discover or create our own authentic selves, separating ourselves from the ideas and habits we’ve inherited from our families and rooting ourselves in new sources of meaning for our own lives. The new friends and trends can vary in how well they’re serving us; in other words, rebelling against your parents by taking up religion or chess is probably better than getting into drugs or golf (just kidding). In an ideal world, this journey away from parents or family ends up where it began, with a newer and stronger relationship in which a young person can relate to their parents on their own terms, no longer either completely dependent on them or in rebellion against them. But assuming you make it through intact, this self-differentiation is a completely normal and healthy process.

In fact, it’s part of what’s going on in our Gospel reading this morning, as we see twelve-year-old Jesus acting like a twelve-year-old. His parents, observant Jews like him, have brought him up to Jerusalem as always for Passover, and on the way back down to Nazareth, he ditches them. He quite literally separates himself from his family of origin—not only his parents but his relatives and family friends—and joins himself with a family of choice, with the scholars and sages and teachers sitting in the Temple.

In a sense, it’s the ideal teenage rebellion, from his parents’ point of view; if he’s going to run away, could there be any better place to find him than hanging out with the rabbis, talking theology? And it ends in the perfect way, with a thoughtful, obedient Jesus returning home with Mary and Joseph. But of course, it must have been terrifying at the time. I can’t imagine the feeling of realizing suddenly that your child wasn’t there and then searching the city for three days before you found him.

I don’t want to minimize the theological and narrative importance of the story by just turning it into an example of a modern psychological process. It’s a hugely important text in its own right. It’s the only story Luke tells—in fact, it’s the only story in the whole New Testament—of Jesus between his infancy and the age of thirty. And it’s not exactly a 21st-century teen drama: this is not a moody Jesus, running away from his parents to buy something at the Jerusalem Abercrombie and Fitch, but a balanced young man, astounding the crowds with his precocious wisdom and calmly asserting that he hasn’t run away from his family at all; he’s sitting, right there, in his Father’s house.

But in a way, it’s that same process, of discovering and embracing who he is, on his own, not through his parents. Throughout Jesus’ infancy in the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph observe all the traditions of their faith, circumcising Jesus and bringing him to the Temple after forty days for Mary’s sacrifices of purification. They’ve taken him up to Jerusalem for all the major festivals of the faith, as any observant Jews would. Now, at twelve, Jesus has taken that identity on as his own, and when we see him emerge in eighteen years it’s as a preacher and religious teacher, but first as a pilgrim traveling to John the Baptist in the wilderness, being baptized, and hearing a voice from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) That’s the identity in which all his ministry is centered, from his birth to his death, and it runs through that moment when he’s twelve years old, sitting in his Father’s house. He is, above all else, a child of God; he is, uniquely, the Child of God.

Last week, I prayed for the repose of the soul of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died early last Sunday morning. If you don’t know, Tutu was an Anglican bishop in South Africa, first as Bishop of Johannesburg and then as Archbishop of Cape Town. He was a leader in the South African anti-apartheid movement, and later in the Truth and Reconciliation process that sought to repair South African society after the end of apartheid, rather than ripping it further apart. More recently, he had taken stands in support of same-sex marriage and the place of LGBT people in society and in the church: famously, in 2013, he said bluntly that he’d “rather go to hell than to a homophobic heaven.”

Archbishop Tutu’s stands against apartheid and against homophobia and heterosexism shared a common theological language. He called them “heresy” and “blasphemy,” writing, “Apartheid’s most blasphemous aspect is … that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that reason alone, it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.” He spoke in similar terms of the Church’s treatment of its gay and lesbian members: “We reject them, treat them as pariahs, and push them outside of the confines of our church communities, and thereby we negate the consequences of their baptism and ours. We make them doubt that they are the children of God, and this must nearly be the ultimate blasphemy.”[1]

It’s ironically and refreshingly rare to hear a church leader make an argument for social change in such explicitly theological terms, rather than in the generic-and-only-vaguely-religious language of love or justice. Tutu’s arguments for liberation flowed directly out of the first three chapters of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’ identity as the unique Child of God was revealed to Mary by the Angel Gabriel. (Luke 1:32) We see it as the core of his self-understanding in this snapshot of Jesus at the age of twelve, as he sits in the Temple. It’s proclaimed publicly to the crowds by a voice from heaven at his baptism.

But it becomes ours in our baptism. As St. Paul reminded us in the Letter to the Galatians last week, at the moment when you were baptized, you were adopted as a child of God, a joint-heir with Christ to all the riches of God’s grace. (Gal. 4:7) And in fact, in the very Incarnation God has, in a sense, adopted all of humanity, bringing human nature itself into the very inner life of God.

This is exactly what Desmond Tutu meant. When we try to exclude one another from the family of God, for whatever reason, we blaspheme God by claiming the authority to throw them out of a household of which we are not the heads. And it goes both ways. Liberation from apartheid had to be followed by Truth and Reconciliation. This didn’t mean accepting the evil of apartheid; it meant overthrowing the system without demonizing its supporters and beneficiaries, because not only the Black South Africans who had been so cruelly oppressed but the most hardened white supporters of apartheid were and are the children of God.

And so are you.

It probably goes without saying that not everyone in the world has been accepted, loved, and nurtured by their families of origin. But however loving or unloving, however disdainful or affirming, our own families may have been or be, we are all children in the family of God. We have all been given a seat next to Jesus in the Temple by one who will never take it away. We have been adopted as children by one who would rather die for us than leave us behind—who will turn back, always, and search for us, not for three days or three years or thirty years, but again and again throughout our lives, as we, like Jesus, “increase in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” (Luke 2:52)

So may we have the grace and the courage to remember, whenever we have been rejected or neglected, that we have been adopted into the family of Christ; that we are siblings, seated with Jesus in the Temple; that we are the children of God; and so are the ones who have rejected and neglected us.

Amen.

[1] For both quotations, see Adriaan van Klinken, “Desmond Tutu’s long history of fighting for lesbian and gay rights,” The Conversation, February 17, 2020.

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Sermon — December 26, 2021 The Rev. Greg Johnston