Sermon — June 15, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
And hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
(Romans 5:5)
Yesterday I spent most of the morning standing in the drizzling rain with a couple hundred of our fellow Episcopalians, catching up with some friends from my old parish in Lincoln and making new ones, eating the Werther’s hard candies Nancy had brought and then finally, setting off together to be part of the Boston Pride for the People parade. About 275 people were a part of the Episcopal presence at Pride yesterday, clergy and laypeople, LGBT Christians and allies. In Boston, at least, Pride is an uplifting, joyful event: a party/rally that serves as both a celebration of the fierce tenacity of LGBT people and a reminder of the difficult path that brought us to this point, and I walked home feeling more grateful than ever for the generations who have led the way.
As I walked home, I opened my phone to see if the Globe had an estimate on the size of the crowd, and saw instead the horrifying news of the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband, and the attempt on the lives of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. And of course, the news never ends: perhaps like me, this week, you’ve been following the news of the deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, or of the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran; and whether you’ve been following the news or not I hope that you will join me in praying for the people of Minnesota and California, of Israel and Iran, and for the recovery of the Hoffmans and the souls of the Hortmans, in addition to the rest of our prayers today.
All this comes during a week of events in which we celebrate the neighborhood of Charlestown; both its place in the history of the American Revolution and the life of its community in more recent generations. And it comes as well amid all our ordinary joys and struggles—the unending stream of arguments and friendships, births and deaths, diagnoses and graduations and grocery shopping trips that make up human life.
And so I arrived home with fresh ears yesterday, and I did something that I do about once a year or so, and threw away the old sermon and wrote this one instead. Because today, from across a gap of two thousand years, Paul has something to say to us about peace, and about endurance, and about love. And this morning, I need to hear those things. And I thought you might like to hear them too.
The first and most striking thing that Paul says this morning is that “since we are justified by faith,” Paul writes, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5:1) And the peace that we have with God is not an armistice, not a cease-fire; it is not the absence of active hostility, the armed peace of the Cold War or the modern Middle East. It’s the presence of a healed relationship. The kind of peace we have with God is not the peace that comes between friends, in an untroubled relationship. It’s the peace that comes when there is a gap between two sides, and when one side reaches out to the other, and the other accepts.
This is what it means to say that we are “justified by faith,” to be clear. That’s theological language, of course, but for Paul, our justification—the process by which God decides to restore our relationship with God—is all about the Cross. God knows there is a gap, between what humanity is and what humanity should be—between how each one of us behaves, and how we really ought—and God knows, as well, that we cannot close the gap, by trying harder and harder to fix it. So God comes down, instead; in Jesus Christ, God takes the first step toward us. And we kill him for it. But God’s love is stronger than our hate, and God forgives us, and we’re left in the position of being offered a peace treaty by someone who has given everything away, just to be with us, and we’re only asked to give our “yes.” God’s work is making our relationship right. Our work is accepting that gift in faith.
And so “we have peace with God.” Not because we’re perfect people yet, living in a perfect world. We’re not. We have things to change before we can say that we love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. But we have peace with a God who sees us with eyes of love, not of judgment, who chose to lay down his own life for us so that our relationship with him could be restored.
But the fact that we’re at peace with God doesn’t mean we’re in a peaceful world. Paul knew that better than anyone. He had been forgiven greater crimes than most, and he suffered great afflictions, too. He’d been ostracized, and beaten, and driven out of town. And for Paul, at least, this was a source of growth. We “boast in our sufferings,” he writes, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3) And I always feel uncomfortable hearing these words out of context. They can feel as though they’re trying to jump too quickly to a silver lining. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that kind of pious rationalization, maybe you know what I mean.
But at the same time, I think this is an experience that I think many people share. Paul seems to find, as many people have, that the hardest things in life are the ones through which he’s grown. Not in a way that makes them justifies their happening or makes them “worth it” somehow, not at all, but in real a way nevertheless. There is an endurance that can come from suffering—a kind of knowledge that you can survive hard things, and still be there. And there is a depth of character that this can give, a patience and compassion for a suffering world. And there is a way in which this endurance and this compassion are necessary to hope, because it takes endurance and faith to act in expectation of a better future amid the suffering of the present.
And again—you should never try to make this meaning for anyone else. But people find it for themselves all the time. This is exactly the relationship between suffering and character, endurance and hope that I see at events like Pride and in neighborhoods like Charlestown and in so many people’s ordinary lives: there’s a hard-won wisdom that’s born out of struggle, a kind of endurance, and character, and ultimately hope.
You might have a story of your own that goes like this. And God has a story of God’s own. Because if the doctrine of the Trinity tells us anything, it’s that the One who became flesh in Jesus is God; the one who suffered and died on the Cross is God. God has known the depths of human pain, and the God who came to suffer alongside us and is the same God who gives us strength to endure day by day.
But Paul doesn’t end with the peace God makes with us. And Paul doesn’t end with suffering, or endurance, or even hope. Paul ends today with love. “Hope does not disappoint us,” he writes, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom. 5:5)
And this is the story of our faith: the story of God’s continuous, self-giving love. God exults in creation, rejoicing in the inhabited work and delighting in the human race. (Prov. 8:31) God becomes human in Jesus, to set us free from the power of evil, and to give us peace with God. God helps us grow, comforting us in our deepest pain, and strengthening us when we need endurance most. And God pours love into our hearts, so that we might become more like Jesus, the ultimate embodiment of love.
Our world is not at all a perfect place. Our lives are full of broken habits and mistakes. But God’s love has been poured into our hearts, again and again and again. And so we have peace in our hearts, when we know that we are loved by God. We have the strength to carry on, because God has not left us comfortless. We have the power to love, because it is God’s love that works in us and through us in the world.
God’s love has been poured into our hearts. And our hearts fill up, and begin to overflow, so that the love of God which fills our hearts pours out into the world, we do the things we can to love the people God has put in front of us in the world; to serve them, and protect them, and to stand up for them. We walk in love, praying that our hope will not disappoint us, and trusting, as best we can, that God’s love is going before us, everywhere we go.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.