Sermon — November 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while homeschooling a kindergartner whose tastes lean toward the spookier elements of the spooky season, it’s that if you’re going to teach out of an early-elementary curriculum on ancient history, you need to have a strong stomach and a good sense of humor; a graduate education in religious studies doesn’t hurt.

Take, for instance, the case of Ammit the Devourer. The ancient Egyptians, our textbook tells us, believed that after they died, people journeyed to the underworld, in a process that inspired the practices of mummification and pyramid-building that most of us have heard of. At the climax of the journey, they reached the Hall of the Two Truths, where the dog-headed god Anubis would bring them to a set of scales. The heart of the person who had died would be weighed against a feather as a measure of their purity and righteousness. If their heart weighed less than the feather, they passed on into blessed eternal life. If their heart weighed more than the feather, then it would be handed over to be eaten by Ammit the Devourer, a ferocious demon with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the rear end of a hippopotamus.

(Like I said: equal parts strong stomach and sense of humor required.)

Most religions contain a balance between the inspirational and the gruesome, and it seems to me that our readings today contain more than a hint of that Ammit-the-Devourer side of religiosity. Did you hear it in the readings? Can you hear it in the music? Daylight Saving Time ends, and suddenly the hymns are in minor keys, it’s dark in the middle of the afternoon, and our lectionary readings are full of doom and gloom! It’s as though the season of Advent has already started, even though it’s still a few weeks away. The liturgical themes of this time are unsettling and sometimes surprising: in the weeks leading up to Christmas, our readings anticipate not the “First Coming” of the cute baby Lord Jesus to lie in a manger, but the much more ominous “Second Coming,” in which he “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

It’s this day of the coming of the Lord that unites our readings today. We began with the prophet Amos warning the people of Israel against looking forward too eagerly to the coming day of judgment. You want God to return and save you from your enemies, Amos asks the people, judging the world and destroying the unjust? “Alas for you!” You’re trading a fearsome enemy for a God who’s even more frightening! “Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear,” (Amos 5:18-20)— with the head of a crocodile, you might be moved to add, and the bottom of a hippopotamus! Amos certainly has that Ammit-the-Devourer vibe. And he goes on to explain. He condemns the people for their injustice. God doesn’t want their sacrifices and songs; God wants justice and righteousness, and they are sorely lacking. And that’s why the day of the coming of the Lord will be gloom for them: an unjust people, Amos says, should not be so eager for God to come and judge their enemies, because they will be judged as well, and found sorely lacking.

The apostle Paul offers a more uplifting take on the “coming of the Lord.” By the time that Paul writes to the Christians of Thessalonica, it’s been a couple decades since Jesus died and rose again. They believed that Jesus was going to come again soon, to achieve his final victory in this world, and yet it hadn’t happened yet. And even worse, some of that first generation of Christians had themselves died before the Lord’s return. Paul reassures the Thessalonians that their hope has not been in vain. Jesus hasn’t come back yet, but he will come, Paul says; and those who have died will not be left out of the kingdom. They too will be raised. It may be hard for us to wrap our heads around, two thousand years later and still waiting for Jesus to return, but this was a very real concern for the first Christians. But Paul foretells a trumpet’s blast and an archangel’s call, the dead descending from the heavens and the living rising up to meet them in the clouds. The day of the Lord, for Paul, will be a day of reunion and celebration, and we do not need to worry if it seems like it isn’t coming soon enough.

And then Jesus gives us a middle way between the frightening vision of Amos and the hopeful vision of Saint Paul, with a parable about ten bridesmaids: five foolish, five wise; all staying up late into the night to wait for the groom, and all eventually falling asleep. At midnight when the groom arrives, the foolish have no oil for the lamps; the wise have oil but will not share. And so while the foolish run down to 7-Eleven to stock up, the wise bridesmaids and the groom go into the wedding feast together, and shut the door behind them. (Matthew 25:1-12) The five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the darkness, where—as Jesus says often in the Gospel of Matthew, although not in this passage—“there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt. 8:12, 22:13, 25:30, et al) At least they’re not the teeth of Ammit the Devourer. But this is a rather grim vision from Jesus, nevertheless, and it closes with a warning: “Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13)

Amos warns the people not to pray for God’s judgment, because they’re going to be judged by it. Paul encourages the people to remain faithful, because the day of the Lord going to be even better than they thought. And Jesus tells us that it all depends: Did you have oil for your lamp?

I wonder, though, whether Jesus’ parable is as stark as it may seem.

Why is it that the five foolish bridesmaids are left out in the dark? Is it because they’re bad people and the wise bridesmaids are good people? There’s no indication of that. If the wise bridesmaids were particularly virtuous, maybe they would’ve shared. Is this a parable of decadence and luxury—did the five foolish bridesmaids burn up all their oil partying late into the night? No, not at all. In fact, they never brought any oil to begin with. Foolishness, in the parable, consists of showing up to wait for the groom, and thinking that he’ll arrive before sunset. Wisdom is being prepared to wait.

It’s foolishness, in other words, to expect that this great day of the coming of the Lord is going to arrive any time soon; and wisdom to expect God to show up when you’ve already gone to sleep. It’s foolishness to act as the Israelites did in Amos’s day, and allow injustice to fester because God was coming soon to make it right. But it’s also foolishness to worry, as the Thessalonians did in Paul’s day, that God won’t be able to make things right for us in the end, whatever’s happened and however long it’s been. Jesus tells us that we know neither the day nor the hour, and that saying encompasses this tension: we ought to live every day as if it might be our last; and yet to say it might be means that it might not.

Maybe you have a strained relationship with someone, and that relationship needs to heal. And maybe you’ve been putting off that difficult conversation, because it’s hard, and there will always be time for it later. But you know neither the day nor the hour! You may never have the chance to say the things that need to be said. Or maybe you’re in a “grass is greener” mode, where you’re putting in your time now doing something hard, and hoping and yearning for better days ahead. But you know neither the day nor the hour! Those days of greener grass may never come, and it’s a reminder, to me, to try to live in a way that’s satisfying now, and not to push happiness off to a future that may never arrive.

But in the end, here’s the thing: we live in the world of Paul, not Amos. We live in the hope of the Resurrection, not in the fear of judgment. If the world ends tomorrow, and you haven’t made amends—if your father or sister or friend died long ago, and you were never reconciled—you’ll be okay. Because we do not believe in Ammit the Devourer. We do not believe that God is coming to judge you harshly. In fact, in Jesus, God already came to us, and we judged God, and God was devoured by death—and found to be indigestible, and gave Death a stomachache so bad that one day we will rise with him again, and be reunited with Christ and one another, and that there will be time for all the things we never had the chance to say.

So “keep awake,” remembering that you know neither the day nor the hour. And “let justice roll down like waters,” remembering that there’s no time to lose. But be encouraged, always, with the Resurrection hope that you do not have to make it all right, in this life: that all things will be made well, in this world or the next, because God loves you with a love that’s stronger than any crocodile’s jaws. Amen.

Sermon — November 5, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Amen.
(1 John 3:2)

You know that I love languages, English and otherwise. Clever wordplay, etymological trivia, puns; these things bring me really unbelievable amounts of joy. Some of you heard me expostulate just a few weeks ago on the distinction between “continuous” and “continual” in something C.S. Lewis had written; and yet I don’t get invited to parties very much…

English is full of odd little pairs like “continuous” and “continual,” in which changing a single syllable changes the meaning in a very precise way. (For those who don’t know, something is continuous if it forms an unbroken whole, without interruption; it’s continual if it occurs again and again, but with breaks in between.) But sometimes there are examples that are even better. Sometimes you get two words in which the literal meanings are exactly the same, but the connotations are completely different.

All of which is to say: “Beloved, we are God’s children now” — at our best, we’re childlike, and at our worst, we’re childish, and they are not the same thing. When we say “childlike,” of course, we evoke all the joy and innocence of childhood: the infant’s wonder at seeing their first piece of bark, the toddler’s excitement to go out playing in the snow, the inexplicable ability some elementary schoolers have to memorize details of paleontology known otherwise only to PhDs.

The Beatitudes, these words of blessing Jesus says to the crowd in the Gospel reading today, are the manifesto of a childlike faith. What is more blessed than being “poor in spirit,” holding adult possessions lightly but being rich in wonder and joy? Who are more blessed than “the meek,” who hide shyly behind a parent’s legs until you ask them about the firetrucks on their shirts? Who hungers and thirsts for righteousness more than the playground rules-enforcers, who insist that every child has a turn. (You know who you are, and we love you for it.) We adult Christians are at our best, Jesus says, when our lives are characterized by childlike simplicity, and innocence, and justice.

When we say “childish,” though, we mean the other side of children’s nature. The toddler’s refusal to allow any other child at the park to touch that toy, even though they don’t actually want to play it themselves. The preschooler’s hunger and thirst for more candy, from more houses, long after bedtime has come and gone. The older child’s self-confidence that they alone, and fourth graders like them, know anything about the world, and you know absolutely nothing, Mom.

And of course, we don’t blame children for being this way. (Well, sometimes we do. But we shouldn’t.) When a child is filled with childlike joy, we can rejoice with them. But when the same child, moments later, fills with childish rage, well… for a child to be childish is pretty much what you should expect, at least linguistically speaking.

In just a few minutes, we’ll welcome three more children into the Church through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Abby and Nora and Bo will be formally adopted as children of God; they will become full members of the Body of Christ. They will become saints, in the oldest and best and most Biblical sense, members of the holy people of God, as when Paul called the members of all the local churches “the saints”; “for the saints of God are just folk like me,” as the hymn goes, “and I mean to be one too.”

But sanctity isn’t perfection, and we’re not perfect people. Billy Joel is right about many things, but he’s wrong about this. We don’t get to choose whether we want to “laugh with the sinners” or “cry with the saints,” because we are all mixed, every one of us. There is no child who is so childlike that they are never childish. And this is true for all of us, adults and children alike. The mixedness of our nature doesn’t change over time; the stakes just get higher, and we remain children at heart.

You may be a parent or a grandparent, a beloved uncle or aunt, teacher, mentor or friend. You may be wise; you’re almost certainly wiser than me. But in God’s eyes, every one of us is still like a little child; and in our more childish moments, we all sometimes act our age.

I don’t mean this as an insult! I mean it as an invitation to empathy, for one another and for yourselves. None of us ever become perfect, fully-formed adults in this world. We are all still growing up, still children of God, through our whole lives. And what a relief. God looks on our childishness like we look on theirs: with frustration, maybe; with impatience, sometimes; but ultimately, more than anything, with love.

“Beloved,” St. John writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Every one of us is, already now, a beloved child of God, valued and cherished beyond anything we could imagine. And every one of us is being transformed, growing into a maturity so incredible that its nature has not yet been revealed. Together, day by day, we grow together toward life in the world that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes, toward a world of righteousness, and mercy, and peace.

Today, Abby and Nora and Bo join a “great multitude…from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (Revelation 7:9) who are being slowly drawn toward the God who loves them now and who love them all their lives. May God give them, and all of us, the grace to love in return; to serve God and our neighbors; to be patient with every childish moment and to share in every childlike joy.

Amen.

Many forest trees and shrubs will have what is called a ‘mast year’, where they produce an extraordinary amount of fruit or nuts. In our region, we most often notice this with acorns. There is no definitive underlying pattern for when mast years occur, nor are forest ecologists certain about how exactly such an endeavor is coordinated. Historically, ecologists assumed in the light of evolution that mast years were an outcome of a basic energetic equation: make more fruit when you have more starch. But if this were true, individual trees would mast by themselves when they have had a good year, but that is not the case. To quote my favorite ecologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer: 

“If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees don’t act as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”

I will point out here that the participation of all trees in mast fruiting means that each and every tree in the grove, across the county, is deeply important. If just the biggest and strongest tree masted, it would not matter and its efforts would be wasted. The biggest tree in the grove relies on and is supported by the sick trees, the young trees, the old trees, and the injured trees; just as these trees are reliant on the healthy trees in other ways. 

The author of that quote, Robin Wall Kimmerer, comes from the Potawatomi Nation which was relocated to what is now Oklahoma; where a mast fruiting species, the pecan, lives. The pecan, in its ability to be stored for long periods, has provided food for people in times where other food sources were scarce (similar to our New England maples). She speaks further of a relationship between mast fruiting and human needs:

The pecan groves give, and give again. Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves. By satiating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.

The story we heard today from Mathew is a familiar one to many of us. I think most of us can name the two greatest commandments without too much thought, they boil down to ‘love God’ and ‘love your neighbor’. It is short and sweet, and beautiful in its simplicity. Especially in comparison to other lists of commandments we get. Try as I might, I can’t necessarily remember *all ten* of the Ten Commandments easily. 

However, something I noticed in this story that feels important, is that Jesus doesn’t just give this list one and then the other. He breaks it up to say something about the second–that it is like the first.

You could take this to mean that the second is like the first in that, when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are loving God. This parallels some other sayings and teachings of Jesus, such as later in Matthew when he gives a lesson on ‘The Least of These’.

You could also take this to mean that they are like each other in that when we pray to God, and love God with all our heart, mind, and soul–we are actually loving our neighbors as ourselves. It is a big endorsement of prayer, and illustrates how much it can matter. Even though we sometimes feel powerless to change the trials and tribulations of our collective lives such as death, natural disasters, and war–we can still pray, and it matters. 

However, we can also take the fact that these two commandments are given as a relationship to each other to mean something more. Maybe it means that we are called to live together in community with one another, that our culture of rugged individualism is a myth. The second being like the first in that it isn’t just a good thing to love our neighbors, people who don’t believe in God do that all the time. It is like the first in that the second commandment is deeper than just charity, if it is like the first, then loving our neighbor should feel/be like loving God with all our heart.

After sitting with this notion for some time, I have begun to think that maybe Jesus was not giving a set of commandments in the strict sense. I think that maybe he was limited by his audience. They, like many of us today, might have felt like they needed commandments and some clear guidelines to follow. A methodology they could replicate to live like Jesus did. They needed two rules to follow instead of a new way of being in the world, commandments instead of an entirely new way of living. I think maybe Jesus, in his wisdom and love, was not *necessarily* giving us new commandments, but maybe giving us a new blueprint of living in a world that can feel like a bummer a lot of the time. A world where we live by being bound together in love to God and to each other. The second is like the first in that the loving, sustaining relationship we have with God is mirrored in the love we share with the communities we live in, that provide us sustenance. 

That sounds really great, I like that sentiment, it also sounds really exhausting to heap this overhaul of my way of living on top of my life as it is–no matter how much I would like to, or how much I want to. I am booked out: I have homework to do, and lots of it. I have family obligations to attend to. I have things I need to do for myself to feel like a person. I have a (wonderful) internship to work at and work in. I have trains to catch. I might be able to get a start on redoing my whole life at the end of the semester.

That all being said. I think there is a different way to go about this “overhaul” thing. I’ll go back to the small ecology lecture I gave at the beginning of this sermon. What I hope you noticed is that this way of living, to love our neighbors and love God, is mirrored for us in the natural world. The pecan trees that mast and provide an abundance of pecans for humans do not do so in a way that depletes them or causes them to burnout; rather they have a life process that both ensures their own livelihood and provides for their neighbors. 

I am reminded of my senior year of college. I lived in an off campus apartment with my two friends who both worked close to 40 hours a week to support themselves. I worked too, but less hours then they did, and for the entire year I had Fridays completely clear. It was awesome, I did my grocery shopping, I baked lots of cool cakes and stuff, and then I did all the dishes in the sink, swept the floors, made the living area look habitable again, and so on and so forth. It became my weekly habit that actually did not require that much of me, that folded easily into my day, but meant abundance to my friends. 

I am not a saint, it wasn’t entirely unselfless, like the pecan groves I also ensured my own survival, because somehow all the sudden my friends had so much more energy on Friday nights. We watched movies all bundled up on the couch together, we played darts (we did not get our security deposit back), we played board games, talked about our silly little hopes and dreams. Our flourishing was mutual, through only some additional chores on my own, I received so much more in return than I ever really gave. So I encourage you to look for the flourishing and the mutuality in your life. 

Sermon — October 22, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Jesus said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.’” (Matthew 22:21)

You’ll sometimes hear this verse quoted as an argument for the separation of church and state, often in its traditional translation “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” I’ve heard it used to say that you should “keep politics out of the pulpit,” to avoid taking stances on divisive issues in the context of prayer: leave to the politicians the things that politicians say, and keep the content in church focused on the things of God. And I’ve heard it used to say, in the other direction, that you should keep religion and religious values out of schools and courts and legislatures, along much the same lines.

And for what it’s worth, I agree. We’ve seen what can occur when religious fundamentalism tries to drive public policy, around the world. A pretty good rule of thumb comes from the IRS, believe it or not. While churches can and should take stands on any number of social and political issues, from poverty to climate change to racial justice, they can’t engage in partisan politics; if a pastor stands in the pulpit and endorses a candidate for office, then at least in theory, the church risks its tax-exempt status. Fair enough. The separation of church and state is an important principle in modern society.

But it’s not what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel reading today.

When Jesus says, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he isn’t drawing a distinction between mundane political concerns and his own more elevated religious teaching. He’s taking a particular stand on the most important political question of his day. Jesus and his disciples and his audience are the Jewish subjects of an unpopular Roman emperor who rules from far away. The trap the Pharisees set is a good one. They ask him whether it’s in accordance with the law to pay taxes to the emperor. They’re asking about Jewish law; of course it’s lawful under Roman law to pay Roman taxes. But the Roman occupation, like any foreign occupation, was wildly unpopular. So the trap is set: if Jesus answers, “no,” well, that’s sedition. He’d be encouraging people to defy the Roman state, and he could be condemned and arrested, and likely crucified. If he answers, “yes,” well, that’s the kind of collaboration that would discredit him in the eyes of his fellow Jews, at least the patriotic ones. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” doesn’t mean, “leave me alone and keep your politics away from my religion”; it’s one of the two possible political answers to a political question!

But, as he often does, Jesus frames his response in a way that evades the trap. He asks them to take out a coin, and asks, “Whose face is that?” They don’t want to look ridiculous, so of course they say, “Well, that’s the emperor.” The emperor made that money. It’s the emperor’s mints who stamped it with his face. It’s the emperor who uses it to spread his image throughout the empire, so everyone who buys or sells knows whose subject they are. “So,” Jesus says, “give back to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” These coins bear the emperor’s image; he can have them back. But in the same way, you should give to God the things that are made in the image of God. And what’s made in the image of God?

…Well it’s you! And me! All of us. All human beings are “made in the image of God.” And this isn’t just a nice, poetic way to express the dignity of every human being. It’s quite literally the word of God. It’s what God says, in the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis, in the first story of the creation of human beings: “Let us make humankind,” God says, “in our image, according to our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26) The Pharisees are the best and the most devoted and the most pious among the people of God, and Jesus’ response leaves them speechless, because they know what he is saying: Give your taxes, sure, to the emperor; but give your whole self to God. And so Jesus escapes the trap; he refuses to countenance defiance of the Roman Empire, but nevertheless subsumes its importance under the much greater kingdom of God.

In a few moments, I’ll baptize two children in the name of that same God, and we’ll welcome them as new members of the Body of Christ, the Church. The ancient teachers of the Church often wrote that in baptism, the image of God in us is restored; that the smudges and smears we’ve inherited from our ancestors are wiped away, and the image is made clear. They noticed that in Genesis, God said that we were made in the image and likeness of God, and they taught that in baptism the fullness of the image of God is restored, so that over the course of our lives we might grow into that likeness.

Baptism marks an entrance into the life of the Church—not this church in the narrow sense, not St. John’s Charlestown, but the Church with a capital C, the universal body made up of all the baptized. Baptism marks us as God’s own, as human beings formed in the image of God, just as clearly as the coins Jesus held in his hand were formed in the image of the emperor, and marked as his own.

And we carry that mark with us through our whole lives, whether we know it or not. That’s true in a chronological sense, of course: we carry the mark of baptism over the course of our whole lives. Like any of us, the children we baptize today may not always be active members of this or any other local church. But they will be members nevertheless of the Church with a capital C into which they are inducted today, the Body of Christ living in this world. And wherever they go in all the years of their lives, they will always find a home in the family of God.

But we carry the mark with us through our whole lives in a second sense, as well. We are like coins, and we do not change our faces from Lincoln at the supermarket to Washington at CVS. We are stamped with the image of God, everywhere we go. When Jesus reminds us that we carry the image of God, and tells us to “give to God the things that are God’s,” it really is an invitation to offer our whole lives to God. This doesn’t mean that we should give up everything we have and join a convent, although some people do; it doesn’t mean we should dedicate every second of our lives to the church. It means that we should see each little slice of our lives as part of your lives with God, so that we no longer have A work life, and a family, and friendships, and kids’ sports, and hobbies, and spiritual life, each in its own separate compartment; but our spiritual lives, as lives as people of faith, permeate all the rest.

So I want to offer you a challenge, all you beloved, image-bearing people of God: Without changing anything about your weekly schedule or your daily commitments, can you start offering more of the parts of your life to God? Without increasing the amount of time you spend in church or in prayer, can you allow your spirituality to spread through every day? Without talking any more about God, can you come to understand more of your life as belonging to God? And what would that mean? What would it mean to remember that you are marked with the image of God? What would it mean to let God into your life at the most mundane moments in your day? What would it mean, in other words, to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”? Namely, your whole self.

Sermon — October 15, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last weekend, as I flipped through newspaper images of devastation coming out of Israel, one understated caption stuck with me. The photo showed a multi-story building in the city of Sderot that looked like it had come down in an earthquake, with two walls gone and about three-quarters of the floorspace completely collapsed, leaving only half of a shell of the original building. The caption said something like, “Israeli soldiers stand outside the police station in Sderot, damaged during fighting on Sunday.” “Damaged,” to say the least, but not yet totally destroyed.

Soon enough, images of devastation were coming from outside Israel, too, as Israeli airstrikes and shells began flattening buildings across the Gaza Strip, and the familiar cycle of violence and retaliation began again. This week, Isaiah’s words have once again become terrible reality on both sides of the border fence: “for you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin.” (Isaiah 25:2)

And then on Monday, I heard the awful news, and on Tuesday, shared you with the awful news, of Evie Scoville’s death, which was sudden and unexpected, and deeply, deeply sad. And it felt, to me at least, like one of the central buildings in our community had collapsed, because someone who had been a source of comfort and strength and shelter to so many people for so long was suddenly gone.

One way or another, many of us have taken some damage this week. And if by some chance you don’t have family or friends in Israel or Palestine; or if you didn’t know Evie, or didn’t know her well, and your week has been perfectly fine; then for the purposes of this sermon I’d invite you to think about some time when it wasn’t, when you were going through some grief, or pain, when the world felt like it was collapsing around you.

Because the question I want to ask today isn’t a question about the intricacies of Israeli history or Palestinian rights, about how to process an unexpected death or any given crisis in any of our lives. What I want to ask is this: We sing every week in praise of a “God of power and might.” So what is God’s mighty, powerful response in the face of all of this?

In our first reading today, the prophet Isaiah speaks from a place of conflict and grief that’s very familiar in the world today. Isaiah is the great prophet of exile and return, a prophet who not only foresees the judgment and destruction of his people and their holy city of Jerusalem, but comforts them, after they go into exile, with the hope of a future restoration. At this point in the story that surrounds the prophecies of Isaiah, the city of Jerusalem hasn’t fallen yet, but disaster is looming. And Isaiah already looks forward, in chapters 24 and 25, to what he calls “the day of the Lord,” to some future day on which God will finally act to save the people, some day when God will finally come in and clean up this whole mess.

Isaiah’s description of that day has become a key part of the Christian understanding of our future hope. This vision is at the heart of our answer to the question, “What’s God going to do in response to all of this?” Isaiah returns to the theme of the “day of the Lord,” that long-hoped-for future day. God will gather us on the holy mountain, Isaiah says, God will gather all the peoples of the world, and we will feast on “rich food,” and “well-aged wines.” (Isaiah 25:6) But this heavenly feast is not itself the main event. The feast is a celebration of God’s greatest act: for “on this mountain,” Isaiah says, God “will destroy… the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.” (Isaiah 25:7-8)

This is God’s mighty response to the violence and injustice of this world: not the destruction of the enemies of the chosen people of God, but the destruction of the greatest enemy of all people: the destruction of death itself. This is God’s answer to the grief and pain of this life: not to make it make sense, not to try explain it away, but to wipe the tears from our eyes. This is what Christian hope is: not the naïve optimism that says that things will be just fine, that good things happen to good people in this life; but the conviction that even though things aren’t okay, that even though life isn’t fair right now, a day is surely coming when God will set things right.

Like so many things in Christian life, this is both “now” and “not yet.” It has already begun, but it is not yet complete. God has already defeated death; but the final victory is still to come. Because on that mountain where Jesus was crucified, God destroyed death. On that day when Jesus shrugged off his burial clothes, God cast off the shroud cast over all peoples. When Jesus walked out of the tomb where death sought to swallow him up, God swallowed death instead. And when we finally, one day, see God face to face, our faces will be full of a lifetime of tears, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. And the Resurrection that began with Jesus will be made complete in us.

But until that day comes, here we are, damaged but not destroyed, trying to live in the light of the Resurrection; trying to live as though the things that I just said were true. The promise of “the coming day of the Lord,” after all, isn’t just a pleasant dream about the future. It changes something about how we act in the present.

If “all peoples” are going to feast together one day, that means “all peoples.” It means that there are no enemies in heaven; only dinner companions. It means that no one is too far away or too different from you for you to care about in this world; you might be seated next to them in the next. It means, frustratingly enough, that the people you can’t stand being around in this life are going to spend eternity with you in the next; and you might want to start practicing how to deal with it.

And if God is going to wipe away the tears from our eyes, if God is going to destroy death, that changes something about our grief. It doesn’t take away the pain and the sadness we feel when someone dies, because they’re still gone from our lives now, even if we will one day meet them again. But the people we have loved and lost become to us like the apostle Paul, when he’s writing to the Philippians, writing to them on the assumption that he’ll see them again, and he’ll know what they’ve been doing. Their memories still speak to us, as Paul wrote to the church he’d left behind: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Phil. 4:9) Their memories become a blessing to us, because they inspire us to be the people they would have wanted us to be, and we know that they will one day see us as we have become.

I’ve been thinking so much about Evie this week, and all the memories I have of her from the few years I’ve known her, from my first interview with the Search Committee she co-chaired to the last time I bumped into her walking Santana on Main Street. Evie was, I think, defined by love. She lived the life that Paul describes here. She rejoiced always, fighting hard for joy in times that were sometimes far from joyful. She let her gentleness be known to everyone, with a love that could be fierce when she was protecting the people she loved but was never cruel. She was and she is an inspiration to me, as a parent, as a human being, and as a priest. Her soul rests now in the hands of a loving God, and we feel her absence, and the absence of all those whom we have loved and lost, and it hurts. But we will one day see her again, and see them all again, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes, and we will say on that day, “this is our God, for whom we have waited, so that God might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.” (Isaiah 25:9) Amen.