Sermon — The Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Imagine yourself in the middle of the scene. You’ve traveled nine hundred miles from your home in Pontus on the Black Sea coast of what’s now northern Turkey, all the way to Jerusalem, to celebrate a great feast. Today, it would be an eighteen-hour drive, but back then, the journey would have taken you 17 days at best. But the journey is worth it. You’ve come to celebrate one of the three great holy days of the year, the feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. Just as they would on Passover or Rosh Hashanah, faithful Jews and monotheism-curious Gentiles have gathered in Jerusalem to worship God, to offer sacrifices in the Temple and celebrate the arrival of spring.

Your fellow-pilgrims come from all over the known world, from Parthia in the east to Libya in the west, from Pontus down to Egypt, from Judea and from Rome. Those from the further-flung regions wouldn’t make it to Jerusalem every year. This is a special day, and people are excited, but they’re tired. You’re in a crowded room, but the volume is low. Suddenly the rush of wind fills your ears, like a strong gale blowing through the walls; and fire appears all around you, in the shape of tongues, resting on people’s heads. The room erupts into a hubbub of excited speech.

The people around you are amazed and bewildered, and they express their astonishment at these miraculous events: “Wait, aren’t those guys from Galilee? I don’t speak Galilean. How come I understand?” They don’t comment on the fire that’s divided into tongues. Nobody says a word about the wind. The miracle of Pentecost, it seems, is not the extraordinary signs and wonders; or rather, it’s the greatest wonder of all: The idea that you could hear someone else speaking and actually understand.

At the heart of the miracle of Pentecost, at the heart of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, is the paradox of language. Language is the human gift from which all the rest flow, the thing that allows us to cooperate and collaborate, to learn from one another’s discoveries and to express our love; and yet language, in its messiness and imperfection, is the source of so much misunderstanding and pain.

The miracle of Pentecost is a reversal, in a way, of the curse of Babel. Do you know the old story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis? Linguists love it. In the generations after Noah’s family survived the Flood, the story goes, the whole world spoke one language. We could understand, and be understood, by everyone, and all the people lived together in a city. And in that city they decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens. God didn’t much like this idea. If they could build a tower that could reach the heavens, they might think that they could be like God. So God puts an end to the project. Not by destroying the tower—they would soon begin to build another—but by transforming their shared tongue into many different languages, so that they could no longer understand one another.

And then on Pentecost, God acts again. God gives them the gift of understanding, and of speaking, in other languages. It’s not that God undoes the scattering of Babel, restoring them all to one common tongue. God hears the diversity of their languages, and rather than erasing their differences, God helps overcome the misunderstandings.

The fruit of the Holy Spirit, you might say, isn’t homogeneity, but translation. And since that day, Christianity has always been a religion of translation. As the Yale history professor Lamin Sanneh wrote, who grew up in a Muslim family in Gambia before converting to Christianity, Christianity is almost uniquely a religion in translation. You can’t become a bar or bat mitzvah, a “son” or “daughter of the covenant,” without learning some Hebrew; the Quran isn’t the Quran if you translate it out of Arabic. But Christianity is not the religion of any one language, culture, or nation. The Galilean Aramaic of the apostles has no special status in our faith. From its earliest days, Christianity has been translated, again and again and again, and it belongs to none of our cultures any more than to any other.

This morning, St. Peter explained that the disciples could not be drunk, for it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and however decorous you may have been I think some of you laughed; and this is an extraordinary thing. That the voice of a man who died two thousand years ago and four thousand miles away can reach out to you across the millennia and make you laugh—surely, that is miracle in itself.

But this Pentecost miracle of translation is about more than just the past.

The Holy Spirit is always present in our work of translation in the present.

We experience this miracle anew whenever we can get over the ways that language and culture and history divide us, and connect with one another. Sometimes that happens in small ways within a much bigger picture; I think of the Jerusalem Peacebuilders camps run every summer by an Episcopal priest, that bring together Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers to spend time together, getting to know one another, speaking and listening and being heard. Sometimes it happens in big ways within a smaller picture. Language and history can divide us as much in individual relationships, with family or friends or partners, as they do in our collective life, and the miracle of Pentecost is there every bit as much when we really listen to the people we love, and the Holy Spirit helps us really understand what they’re saying. Every one of us speaks our own language, and translation can be hard, but every time we hear one another speaking in a language we can understand, the Holy Spirit’s work is there.

But God is not only with us when we listen. God is with us when we speak! And that’s the other side of the Pentecost miracle. “Each one” of those present “hears [the disciples] speaking in the[ir] native language,” specifically because “the Spirit gave them ability” to speak in those other tongues.

“Spirit” is always present when we speak: the Latin word spiritus, after all, just means “breath,” speech is mind and voice shaping the sound of breath. But sometimes, when we speak, the Holy Spirit is joined to our spirit, and we speak as one. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak words of love and kindness to one another. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak truth to power in the hope of building a better world. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we share the good news, as those ancient disciples did: when we proclaim the love of God to the world, and the Spirit helps us translate what that means to all those who hear it. The Holy Spirit is there, whether we invoke its name or not, when we share out loud with someone else the joy and the pain of life; when we translate our experience into a language someone else can understand, and we are heard.

But God is also with us when we cannot speak, when we don’t know what to say, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans. “The Spirit helps us,” he writes, “in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit is with us when we speak in love, and that’s a wonderful thing. But sometimes we just don’t have the words. Sometimes, a situation is too hard, and there’s nothing we can say. Sometimes, someone’s looking for advice, and we have no guidance to give. Sometimes we know we need to pray, but we don’t even know what it we’re praying for, and yet, the Spirit prays for us, “with sighs too deep for words.” God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and when, despite the Holy Spirit’s help, words fail us, there the Spirit is, praying with us nevertheless.

So I wonder what the Holy Spirit needs to translate for you, this Pentecost. Is there some aspect of your faith or some practice of prayer that you’ve received from someone else but which isn’t quite speaking your language, and which needs to be translated for you? Is there someone in your life who’s trying to tell you something, which you just can’t understand? Is there something you need to say, but can’t quite find the words to express? Or do you simply need the Comforter to come and be with you awhile?

Whatever it is, may the fire of the Holy Spirit give light to your eyes, so that you can see the road ahead; may the wind of the Holy Spirit give you a nudge in the right direction; may the Holy Spirit be your translator, so that you can speak and you can hear; and when there are no words to say, may the Holy Spirit speak for you in “sighs too deep for words.” Amen.

Sermon — May 12, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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.”

Sermon — April 28, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary 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.