Sermon — August 25, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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.

Sermon — August 18, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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.

Sermon — August 11, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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?

Sermon — July 7, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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.