Author Archives: Greg Johnston

The Gospel of Mark

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Savvy readers may know that our readings in worship follow a cycle called the “Revised Common Lectionary,” which tries to read through much of the Bible over the course of three years of Sunday mornings. Each year is assigned a different gospel: Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark, and Year C is Luke.

Even savvier readers may notice that this leaves out John, and indeed the Gospel of John doesn’t have its own dedicated year in the lectionary; instead, bits of John are squeezed into the holiday seasons of every year, and John also features prominently in the year of Mark, which is otherwise the shortest gospel.

All of which is to say: Given that we’ll be spending most of the rest of 2024 reading through the Gospel of Mark (with the exception of a long excursus through John 6 in late summer), I thought I’d say a few words about the gospel as a whole right now, as a way of framing what we’ll be reading for the next few months.

People often call the Gospel of Mark “a passion story with an introduction,” and this is about half true. Mark is the shortest of the four gospel stories in our New Testament canon, and so its story of the Passion takes up relatively more of the text than in the others: Jesus’ ministry in Galilee occupies chapters 1-9, his ministry in Judea chapter 10, and then the story of his trial, crucifixion, and death chapters 11-15. Mark lacks much of the teaching material you’ll find in Jesus’ sermons in Matthew and Luke, and even the familiar stories of Jesus’ birth and childhood—in Mark, Jesus emerges fully grown, travels around Galilee for a year, and then goes to die.

In the early centuries of the church, Mark was often seen as “lacking” in some way, a book that was canonical and inspired but essentially an abbreviation of Matthew, with much of Jesus’ teaching taken out. Modern scholars tend to reverse the story of those two books; while ancient authors tended to believe that Matthew was written first, and abbreviated into Mark, modern scholars typically believe Mark to have been the earliest of the gospels, to which additional material was added and rearranged to form the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

In any case, the Gospel of Mark is worth reading on its own. It confronts the reader with the immediacy of the gospel. “Immediately,” in fact, is Mark-the-Narrator’s favorite word: in the first chapter alone, Jesus is baptized, and upon emerging from the water “immediately he saw the heavens being torn open… and the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” (Mark 1:10, 12) He calls Simon and Andrew and “immediately they left their nets and followed him,” and at the next boat down the beach he sees James and John “and immediately he called them.” (Mark 1:18, 20) If Mark were a movie, it would be an action movie, all quick cuts and special effects.

And about those special effects. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus is a preacher: he gives sermons full of parables and stories. In John, he’s an esoteric teacher, unveiling theological truths. In Mark, Jesus is Jesus Christ, Demon-Fighter. Of course, Jesus does all of these things in all of the gospels, and many more things besides, but the inclusion of different quantities of material from each category gives each gospel a distinct feel.

Andrew McGowan, a scholar of the early church and priest (and my former seminary dean!), writes:

We may be put off by the symbolic language of the demonic, or miss the point by imagining it refers to arcane supernatural matters far from our experience. In the world of the Gospels the forces of good and evil are both metaphysical and concrete; they are manifest in disease, oppression, and suffering of all kinds…

Jesus has not really begun teaching yet. This was not the basis of the movement around him for Mark, because teaching is something that Jesus only subsequently does (see chapter 4), for and with his followers, to provide formation for the movement he has already begun. The reason people are with him is his demonstrated willingness to name and confront the powers of evil, both as manifested supernaturally and in the political structures of the day—if indeed it is right to separate these at all. His movement is coalescing.

You could almost think of the Gospel of Mark as the inspiration for the storytelling genre of the video game or fantasy series. Starting from his home town, Jesus battles against a series of bosses, each one tougher than the last, as he continues along his quest. The story proceeds in a series of episodes, one struggle immediately following another. But this series of adventures isn’t merely the “introduction” to the passion story: it’s a series of battles in the same war.

Jesus’ ultimate enemy is not the Pharisees. It’s not the Herodians. It’s not even the Romans. Jesus’ ultimate enemy is death itself, and every small stand he takes along the way is a stand against some part of the forces of power, evil, and death in this world.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus is accused of using the power of Satan to cast out demons; surely only someone could battle demons so effectively by channeling the power of an even greater demon! Jesus replies, “How can Satan cast out Satan?” Evil is his enemy, not his tool. And then he continues: “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed, the house can be plundered.” (Mark 3:27)

We live in the “strong man’s house.” We live in a world in which the powers of evil and death hold sway. And yet we also live in a world after Jesus’ death and resurrection, a world in which the Strong One has been tied up; dangerous, still, but on the way to defeat.

You may be accustomed to hearing the Gospels and listening for Jesus to teach you or to tell you something, to offer some spiritual wisdom that you might be able to apply to you life. If that’s the case, then over the next few months as we listen to Jesus’ words but hear a lot about his deeds, I’d invite you to consider: What is Jesus doing in the story this week? What is Jesus battling against? What aspect of the Strong One, the power of evil that rules this world, is Jesus “tying up” this week? And if it’s tied up, then — How am I being set free?

The Sabbath was Made for Humankind

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Sermon — June 2, 2024

The 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.

Garden Update

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Many of you know that we’re in the midst of a process to renovate and improve the Garden, especially focusing on making the Garden a more accessible community space: widening and restoring some of the paths so they are accessible, broadening some of the paved areas in which we gather for food and conversation, adding lighting along the pathways, and gently grading the lower section of the Garden so that it forms an accessible ramp up to the upper section, rather than the sunken step (and giant puddle!) currently between the two sections. This work is being funded by a $150,000 Community Preservation Act grant.

This month, our Vestry approved a bid from one of three contractors who submitted proposals. The total cost will be well within the estimate, allowing the full cost of the project to be covered by the CPA grant. (The grant only covers accessibility and lighting, not any additional planting.) The exact timeline of the construction process has not been determined yet, but work should begin this summer.

So this week, I thought it would be fun to share a few reflections, memories, and especially photographs from the Garden’s past, as we prepare for the Garden’s future.

Around this time every year, the Wolcott Cutler Memorial Garden behind St. John’s is transformed into a sanctuary of its own. During the winter and early spring, the Garden is bare and brown, like everything, and often cut off from the world by puddles or snow. But during the spring and in the summer, it becomes an urban oasis. I often sit in the Garden to read or to write a sermon during the warmer months, and sometimes find myself absorbed by the world around me instead. The breeze rustles the leaves high above me, the shade and the cool walls of the church dispel the summer heat, the birds sign hymns all around, and—wait, have I already read this page?

And at the same time, the Garden is a wonderful community meeting place, where people from St. John’s and all of Charlestown come together: for lemonade hours and cookouts, for Monday night AA meetings and the Monday afternoon Turn It Around, Jr. youth group, for Charlestown Mothers’ Association New Moms’ groups and for Charlestown Nursery School nature exploration.

These two uses have always been a part of what was originally called the Forest Garden when it was envisioned by the Rev. Wolcutt Cutler, and later renamed the Cutler Memorial Garden in his memory. The Rev. Mr. Cutler, as you may know, was an avid photographer, and his photographs document some of the early life of the Garden: I thought I’d share some of my favorites below, along with some modern companions!

I share these pictures, the Rev. Cutler’s and mine, with deep gratitude for his vision and for the generations of volunteers who built the Forest Garden and have maintained it for generations, and especially for those members of our church who continue to keep it in such beautiful condition, and to work to improve it, today.

Children’s party in Forest Garden, St. John’s Episcopal Church, June 1946
Back yard picnic, St. John’s Girls’ Choir, plus a couple of younger brothers, enjoy outdoor lunch on grass of Forest Garden, October 6, 1956.

Choir director presides at stone wall lunch counter. Left to right: Doreen Lundberg; Paulette Peters; Carol Johnson; Herbert Dougherty; Eileen Polisky; Geraldine Jaena, infant; Barbara Jaena and visitor.
St. John’s Cookout, September 2022
Winter vista in Forest Garden, 1956
Winter vista, January 16, 2024
St. John’s Church Forest Garden, July ’47
(note the willow that was originally at the center of the lower garden)
Beech Tree dedicated in memory of Marie and Kelso Isom (1989)

May 14, 2023
Bird Bath in Forest Garden This bird bath was made from two pieces of a small chocolate millstone of Italian marble, found in the Mystic River near the Schraffts factory. The tall plants in the picture are self-planted: chicory on the left and bladder campion on the right. There is a small Hawthorn tree near enough for the birds to use it as an approach to the bath.
During the pandemic, the millstone “bird bath” became the baptismal font in a series of outdoor baptisms; preparation for one is pictured here, on October 25, 2020.

An Awesome God

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Sermon — May 26, 2024 — Trinity Sunday

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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!”

The Spirit, Fast and Slow

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In 2011, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he distinguishes between two separate pathways in our minds. “System 1” is the fast path, in which the mind quickly synthesizes information and makes decisions without conscious input. With System 1, you can complete the phrase, “in sickness and in _____,” or drive on the route you’ve been taking home for decades. “System 2” is the slow path, in which your conscious processes of logic and calculation are engaged. With System 2, you can write a letter, or decide on the best way to drive from Charlestown to Braintree for an appointment at 4:00pm. (Trick question: No matter when you leave, you will be late.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a good book. And it’s a great title. The title came to mind for me this weekend, as I sat through the eighth hour of a special diocesan convention on the day before Pentecost, and saw two different sides of the Holy Spirit: Fast and Slow.

The Holy Spirit is, after all, the mind of the Church. Or at least, it’s the Person of the Trinity to whom we assign most of the processes of discernment and decision-making in the Church, the one for whose intervention we pray when we are in need of guidance.

In the modern Church, we often associate the Holy Spirit with the spontaneous and disruptive, the unexpected and miraculous. “Pentecostalism” is, after all, the tradition of speaking in tongues and miracle cures, whose adherents have believed in sudden outpourings of the Holy Spirit since the Azusa Street Revival and even before. When the Holy Spirit shows up, it’s with a sudden rush of wind and fires lit on people’s heads, with charismatic gifts and remarkable events. Most days, the Holy Spirit seems like a System 1 person of the Trinity.

But the Holy Spirit has a System 2, as well; the Spirit moves in more deliberate ways. Last week, I think, I wrote that the Holy Spirit shapes and guides the Church over generations, smoothing out our liturgies, refining our prayers into words that stand the test of time. It’s certainly true that the Spirit shapes us over the course of our lives; it’s no accident that “spiritual journey” has become such a common phrase, cliché as it may be. (When you’re facing the 93 South of life, where the future seems intractable, the Spirit is certainly there.)

And the Spirit moves in church conventions, too, even as they move at a comically glacial pace. Our election convention was already half an hour behind the agenda by the time the first vote was cast. (45 minutes, it turns out, was not enough time for a Eucharist with 500 people.) Each ballot took a few minutes to cast a vote, followed by twenty minutes of counting, then a few minutes to announce the results of that ballot, followed by another twenty minutes for the candidates to decide if they want to drop out before the next one, round after round of electronic voting, each of which was theoretically instant but which took forty-five minutes nevertheless.

But sometimes, the Spirit can’t do its work without some delays. Those forty-minute breaks were essential to the process. The hour we took for lunch between ballots 2 and 3 was absolutely necessary. Taking the time to reflect, and pray, and wait in a beautiful church between rounds of voting transformed what could’ve been a process of political scheming into a holy time of discernment. Sometimes, parliamentary procedure and Robert’s Rules can stifle the movement of the Holy Spirit—but sometimes all that structure and rigamarole slows things down just enough, gives just enough space, for the Spirit to help us work.

The Spirit can move fast, when it wants to, shattering our preconceptions and overturning the world in a matter of minutes. But mostly it moves slow, in our conventions and in our lives, gradually reshaping and redirecting us. The Spirit is not only fire, but wind; not only sudden transformation that burns down everything, but a gentle breeze that slowly takes us where we need to go.