Sermon — April 7, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon — Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermon — Good Friday, March 29, 2024

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

There is an uncomfortable question that Good Friday brings up for me. Maybe you have thought this at one point or another. It feels almost blasphemous to really ask. For me, a question I have come back to from time to time is: Why exactly did Jesus have to die?. What I mean, is that, in theory, could the whole story of Christianity have been:

-Jesus, Son of God, comes down and tells everyone to behave, be kind, and love one
another
-Jesus tells us all we are saved
-Jesus goes back up into heaven on a chariot of fire

Instead, Jesus dies a terrifying and horrific death where a good many people are implicated–Judas, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Empire writ large, and even the crowds of people who welcomed him into Jerusalem just five days before. It is a strange thing to grapple with, a strange horror we as Christians revisit year after year. 

It is difficult to know what to do with this sense of horror, how to find a spot for it in our souls. It is tempting to use it to immediately point to its conclusion: the resurrection. It is tempting to not really take it personally. It is tempting to acknowledge the scariness, let it be uncomfortable, and then to let it just pass. I am going to challenge us who have physcially come to church today, or are listening to this sermon online, to let Good Friday really sink in, to take Good Friday personally, and to allow it its due time.

In the spirit of that, I will recite for you all a poem I feel is pretty apt at capturing the tone of Good Friday. It is “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane. I will read it for you two times, because you don’t have the text in front of you. 

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

I read this because to me, it captures the essence of what makes Good Friday so discomforting to us as people. In the poem, we see a beast with no redeeming qualities, completely occupied with one thing, and devoid of anything else. This beast, which was once likely a man, is utterly and completely devoted to one singular act. Devouring his own bitter heart, and relishing in that action. 

In Good Friday, we as people face our darkest moment as Christians, when Jesus is crucified. When the crowds that yelled “hosanna” five days ago on Palm Sunday now scream for the violent, gory death of Jesus as they scream “crucify him”. Here is where Good Friday gets so disconcerting. We are seen in the crowd that betrays Jesus, and we are seen in the beast that eats its own bitter heart. The dark discomfort of Good Friday becomes personal to us, if we let it sink in. We are culpable in the violence and death that take place. 

This returns me to my original question, Why did Jesus have to die?

Many theologians, pastors, and church fathers have wrestled with and addressed this question. The answer that you land on depends heavily on the time period, the denomination, and the person you ask. However, the general consensus is that Jesus had to die for our sins. But the actual meaning of that is still unclear. And, if you think about it, paints a picture of God the Father who demands death and destruction. And sort of goes against the idea of a loving God that Jesus and the scriptures tell us about. What gives. One thing I have learned in seminary is that a way of understanding a belief in God is to understand that by believing in God, we are making a statement that God is an inherently trustworthy person. A bloodthirsty God demanding the suffering and death of Jesus does not seem like a God I can trust. 

Rather than a bloodthirsty God who accepts Jesus’ suffering as a substitute for our own. Who accepts Jesus’s death as a payment for our sins–which treats sin and redemption as almost an economic action. There is another way of looking at it that does not contrast the loving God of the scriptures. One where the perspective is one of trust and belief, rather than fear and deferred punishment. I will invite us to skew our perspective in this way. I will invite us into the perspective of the crowd that called for his crucifixion. The crowd that represents us on Good Friday. 

In this perspective, we can understand that instead of Jesus’ death as a payment. We understand that in going to the cross, Jesus takes our sins to the cross with him. In the words of Archbishop Rowan Williams–the cross is the negation of negation, the killing of our desire to kill. We have shown our deep human bitterness and that is what is destroyed on the cross. In the crucifixion we attempted to kill love and thus our hatred was killed. In this thinking, to return my my original question, Jesus had to die becuase we had to kill him. It was the extremity of our hatred, bitterness, and violence that led to the crucifixion. And almost paradoxically, it is the crucifixion that defeats all of this violence. 

To return to the poem I read to you all. The crucifixion takes us out of our own bitter self-absorption, and destroys that which makes us bitter, destroys that which makes us evil. We get a chance to repent of what makes us so bitter, so self absorbed, so hurtful by the saving action of Jesus. God sees that darkness, destroys it, and gives us another chance again and again–particularly in the darkness of Good Friday.

Good Friday at its core, tells us that no matter how extreme our violence, how deep our hatred goes, how hot our anger, how shameful our pride, God does not abandon us, God is still working with us. It is an uncomfortable truth to hold and to face, that we as good Christians have many parts of ourselves that are angry, violent, fearful, and dark; and God sees that, and these desolate aspects of our human condition are what is nailed to the cross.

This is the good news of this dark day, that as we acknowledge the darkness of the day, God accepts that for what it is, accepts us for who we are. Our deep horrors are transfixed to the cross. I do not wish in preaching this to skip over the darkness of this day. It is necessary to experience this darkness. Witness our own darkness. Witness the terror of this day. The ressurrection after all, cannot exist without it. However, as we wait for the resurrection, which will come in its due time, we can know that, God is here with us in this darkness. In the name of the one who loved us first. 

Sermon — March 24, 2024 (Palm Sunday)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I spent a summer in college studying abroad in England, and while I was there, I chose to balance two parts of my brain: with one, I took a one-on-one tutorial in the history of economic thought from the Renaissance to the mid-20^th century—with the other, a creative writing seminar. The intellectual history was enlightening and engaging and became part of my senior thesis—but the creative writing seminar was where I really learned something, and it was this: the golden rule of narrative writing is “Show, don’t tell.”

For example: if you want the reader to know that little Billy is afraid of the dark, don’t write, “little Billy was afraid of the dark.” Write, ““Good night, little Billy,’ still echoed in his ears as the shadows of the willow branches swirled like ghoul-fingers on the walls.” And so on.

Holy Week is the Church’s great season of “show, don’t tell.” We don’t just say, “Hosanna,” standing primly in place. We march around the room. We don’t just hold our hymnals as we sing. We wave our palms. I don’t just read the story of the Passion to you from the center of the church: we act it out with a whole cast. And all throughout this week, we’ll do the same: in our Holy Week services, we’ll taste and touch and see reminders of the last week of Jesus’ life, and not just be told about them.

But the true expert in “show don’t tell” is not my writing teacher, and it’s not the committee who created our Book of Common Prayer. It’s Jesus, planning the ambiguous events of that first Palm Sunday.

I say “ambiguous” because, at least in the story of Palm Sunday we read this morning from the Gospel of mark, it’s not exactly clear what Jesus means.

Jesus seems to be prepared for a parade. He knows that the colt will be ready to ride. But he won’t explain what he’s doing. He tells the disciples that if anyone asks them why they’re taking the colt, they’re simply to say, “The Lord needs it.” (Mark 11:3) And nothing more. Those in the crowd who know the prophets well might recognize an allusion to the words of Zechariah, who says, “Lo, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey” (Zech. 9:9). The Gospel of Matthew helps the reader understand by quoting the text. But here, we just get Jesus, riding a small horse. He doesn’t quote Zechariah. He doesn’t quite tell you he’s the king. He just goes out and does a royal thing.

The same is true with the palms. Or the not-quite-palms, which the people don’t quite wave. Palm branches are a part of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and they’d become a patriotic symbol of redemption in the first century, such that the coins minted by the Jewish rebels against Rome a few decades later were stamped, among other symbols, with palms. To march around with palms would be the equivalent of a Fourth-of-July parade, a rebellion in the face of the occupying authorities: but simply to cut leafy branches from generic trees and lay them under his feet, as the crowd does in the Gospel of Mark: Well, is that really the same thing?

The same goes for the carefully-worded chants. “Hosanna!” the people shout. “Save us, please!” A prayer addressed to God, or a celebration of Jesus? “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” they say, which is a quotation from one of the psalms of ascent, sung by pilgrims as they processed toward the Temple. Are they saying that Jesus himself is the Messiah, the one who comes in the name of the Lord, or are they just singing a psalm? And they go on, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David,” and you’ll notice they don’t say, as our prayer book had me say when the service began, “Blessed is the King.” They’re careful to keep things abstract. The chants are as ambiguous as the palms are as ambiguous as the colt: Jesus shows those who are wise enough to recognize the signs that he is the Messiah, that this day is the long-awaited return of the King. But he doesn’t tell anyone anything.

He won’t even tell the Roman governor Pontius Pilate what’s really going on. He would seemingly rather die for a crime he’ll neither confirm nor deny than proclaim the truth of the charges to the world, and so when Pilate asks him, “Are you the King of the Jews,” Jesus answers him, with infuriating ambiguity, “You say so.” And he makes no further reply. (Mark 15:2–3)

This whole series of events sets us up for Easter morning itself, when Mary and Mary and Salome go to Jesus’ tomb. As Mark tells the story, they don’t see that Christ is risen, but they see that he is gone. A young man, sitting by the tomb, shows them that it is empty, and he tells them that Jesus has been raised. And they run away in fear, and tell no one anything.

A few days ago I was in a meeting, totally unrelated to this, where a group of people were trying to parse out the meaning of a somewhat convoluted policy. If the policy meant A we’d want to do thing #1, and if the policy meant B, we’d want to do thing #2 instead. And we struggled to figure out whether we should do thing #1 or thing #2, because it seemed the creators of the policy could choose whichever interpretation worked out best for them, even if it left us holding the bag.

After a few minutes’ discussion, one of the wiser members of the group said: “Ambiguity can be a tool.” And isn’t that the case? Ambiguity gives the interpreter flexibility; the real issue in our group was that we didn’t trust the people who’d be enforcing the rule.

But it’s exactly this flexibility that makes ambiguity such a powerful spiritual tool. It’s why Jesus teaches in parables. It’s why he keeps his identity a secret, why he only alludes to messianic prophecies, and leaves later interpreters to connect the dots. Because it’s one thing to be told the truth; it’s another to be shown everything you need, and then forced to work it out yourself.

If Palm Sunday were filled with unambiguous signs, then the story wouldn’t work. The failure would be too clear. If Jesus rode in on a donkey, quoting from Zechariah, and the people waved palm branches in the air, and said, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” then this procession would be unambiguously a coup. And imagine the disappointment they would feel when the parade reached the city, and went straight to the Temple, and instead of proclaiming that the King was finally here, and gathering an army, and throwing the Romans out, Jesus just looked around, and then went home. Jesus would still be put to death, and on the same charges of sedition. But it would look as if he’d simply got cold feet.

Instead, the ambiguity forces us to think. What is Jesus doing here? Why is he not getting ready to fight? What do the symbols in this procession really mean? And if he’s mysterious enough, it might take us long enough to figure it out that there’s time for the full picture to become clear. Because the Palm Sunday story doesn’t end with the Passion, today, with a failed attempt at revolution.   

Because Jesus isn’t quite that kind of king. His ultimate battle is not with Rome, it’s with death itself. And so he doesn’t tell the people that he’s the Messiah, and call to mind their assumptions and ideas. He shows them what the Messiah does. He shows them what true kingship means. He lays down his life, to spare them from death, and up until the last minute, they’re still trying to figure him out. And in the end, only the centurion, the commander of the soldiers who have just killed him, realizes the truth: “Truly, this man was God’s son!” (Mark 15:39)

 Palm Sunday is Jesus’ final parable, the final ambiguous story in which he shows the world what the kingdom of God is like. He doesn’t answer every question for us. He doesn’t tell us what it all means. And it’s not because he’s a bad teacher: it’s because he’s so good, and he knows that what matters for us is not a concise theological truth, but the struggle through which we try to make meaning of the text.

So make meaning of the text. Carry home your palms, and ask yourself what it means to say “Hosanna,” “Save us!” today. Think about this gentle, loving Christ, and wonder what it means to act as if he’s King. And if you don’t have any answers right away, remember that the slow work of figuring it out is the point, after all. So sing this morning, and pray, but ask yourself what it means for you, today, to join your voices with that ancient crowd, and say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”