Sermon — February 16, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I often wish that I were a magician. Not a magician like my Grandpa was, when he would entertain us at birthday parties with a black cape and top hat and a wand. But a real magician, the kind that don’t exist. I often wish that I were a magician because I often wish that I could wave a magic wand and fix something. I wish that I could cast a simple spell to repair a broken relationship. I wish that I could whip up a quick healing potion for a chronic illness. I wish that I could create a protective shield around the people I love that would make sure that no harm could ever touch them.

I’m not the first person in the world to have this wish. The allure of wizardry has always been that if you could only learn the secret method, if you could only find the magic words, you could make things right. Magic, at its heart, is a kind of technology: once you learn the spell, once you’ve got the ingredients for the potion, you can reproduce it again and again. And amid the uncertainty and fear that human beings have always faced—this has always had a certain appeal.

Now, most people know that magic isn’t real. They don’t go in for pointed hats and wands. But there’s a kind of magical thinking that’s very common, nevertheless. Sometimes it comes with religious belief: If I believe the right things, many people hope, if I go to the right church, if I take part in the right rituals in the right way, then God will bless me, God will make things good, for me, now. If I pray, earnestly, for the people I love, then surely God will help. And even when religious belief falls away, this magical thinking is often what remains: and so you’ll hear otherwise-secular people talk about “manifesting things” in their lives or “speaking things into existence.”

And there’s nothing really wrong with this. What do we do when someone is sick, or mourning, or recovering from a surgery? We pray for them, of course! It’s a natural response. It’s a good and comforting thing. But like all good things, it can go bad. And this impulse to prayer, this desire to take comfort in the idea that good things happen to good people, becomes a problem when we begin to extrapolate—when we begin to think that if good things happen to good people, and bad things are happening to me, or bad things are happening to someone else, it must be my fault, or their fault.

You can see a bit of this in our first reading and the psalm today. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,” Jeremiah says, “[their] leaves shall stay green… and [they do] not cease to bear fruit.” (17:7–8) “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,” the psalmist sings, “everything they do shall prosper.” (Psalm 1:1, 3) But “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals… whose heart turns away from the Lord… [they] shall not see when relief comes.” (Jer. 5:5–6) “They are like chaff which the wind blows away.” (Ps. 1:4) And it’s so tempting for us human beings to read these words and think, “Great! I have a choice! I have some control. Choose goodness and I will prosper like a tree bearing good fruit; choose wickedness, and life will be hard; my leaves will dry away.” It sounds like a kind of magic: a tried-and-true recipe for making good things happen in this world.

But it doesn’t really work. We all know good people whose lives have been much harder than they deserve. You may know people for whom it’s the other way around. And these Biblical texts recognize exactly that. They don’t quite promise that these blessings and curses will arrive in this life. Divine justice extends beyond this world. So the Psalmist doesn’t say that people who do evil will be punished in this life—it says that they won’t stand upright “when judgment comes.” It’s not as simple as “good things happen to good people.”

But there is still a very clear sense of division: good and evil, blessed and cursed, us and them.

Jesus picks up that theme… But he changes it in a very specific way. For one thing, he doesn’t buy the magical thinking at all. Riches and fullness and laughter, for Jesus, are not the signs of God’s blessing, bestowed as a reward for a life of faith or for saying your prayers. It’s the other way around. Those are the woes. And the outward signs of poverty and hunger and weeping are not signs of God’s disdain—no, people who are poor and hungry and weeping are the ones Jesus says are blessed.

But there’s another difference here, as well. In these Beatitudes in this Gospel of Luke, there is no “us” and “them”: there is only “you.” There is no “happy are they” or “cursed are those”—there are only “blessed are you,” and “woe to you.”

There are no good people and bad people, neatly divided into groups. There’s only you, sometimes blessed, and sometimes… Woe! Jesus is talking to his disciples, face to face. And the geometry of the scene is important. Last week, I mentioned Jesus standing on a boat to preach. You’ve probably heard of the “Sermon on the Mount.” On a mountain or in a pulpit or on a boat, you are lifted above the crowd. Sound travels further. And the physical distance creates some conversational distance, too. A preacher is often looking out into the congregation, but it’s a kind of only-halfway look—I’m looking at you, but I’m only very rarely looking at you. You can’t have a real one-on-one conversation with an altitude difference—that’s why my posture is so bad.

So Jesus comes down from the mountain, to a level place. And he looks up at his disciples. He looks at this group of faithful people who have chosen to follow him, and he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” “Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled.” “But woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” “Blessed are you who weep now…blessed are you when people hate you… for your reward is great in heaven.” “Woe to you who are laughing now… woe to you when all speak well of you,” for you will mourn and weep.

And he’s speaking to the disciples. To you. He’s speaking to us. He’s not making promises, he’s not making threats. He’s not saying what will happen if we’re good or if we’re bad, if we pray or if we don’t. He’s acknowledging the truth that a prayer is not a magic spell that brings prosperity. A life of faith is not a surefire way to become healthy, wealthy, and wise. Our lives will be full of many blessings, many real moments of joy. And they will also be full of woe. We won’t live them without tears.

And in fact, it’s more than that. The Christian life is a life in which we will sometimes choose what Jesus calls the more blessed path. We will sometimes choose to make ourselves a little poorer to help the other citizens of the kingdom of God. We will sometimes choose to go hungry, so someone else can be fed. We will sometimes see someone else weeping, and not turn away, but turn toward them, and listen to them, and find that we are weeping too. If we are faithful to the good news of a loving and merciful God, we will sometimes be reviled and mocked. And yet it’s in these very moments that Jesus say that we are blessed.

We celebrate a baptism this morning. This child’s parents and godparents will make promises on her behalf, promises that she may one day take as her own, promises that all of us this morning will renew. Promises to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread.” Promises to “persevere in resisting evil.” Promises to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor[s] as [ourselves],” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

These promises don’t lead to the easiest possible life. They lead to a life that requires some self-sacrifice, some willingness to give up some of our own comfort and prosperity when times are good to support others for whom times are hard. They lead to a life of compassion, a life in which we will sometimes weep.

The life of the baptized Christian is not an easy life, but it’s a blessed life. Not because, if we do these things, we will be rewarded with God’s blessing. Not because the promises we make and the prayers we say give us a magic wand that we can wave to make the world right. But because the measure of the good life is not how comfortable we are, or how easy life is—but how deeply we love one another.

Sermon — February 9, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

From time to time, when I’m just walking down the street, or halfway through getting a haircut; when I bump into a postal worker on the street, or someone calls to ask about a wedding, I’m asked a certain: “What are you again?” As in, “What do I call you?” Are you a priest? A pastor? A minister? Father? Reverend? Greg? And I often give the useless answer, “Yes!” Yes, I’m a priest, albeit not a Roman Catholic priest. Yes, I’m the pastor of this church. And yes, of course, I’m a minister. To most people that’s what “minister” means: an ordained clergy person in some kind of Protestant church.

But in its most basic sense, “ministry” means “service.” And the Episcopal Church believes that all of us, ordained clergy or not, are called to serve. And so if you turn in the Book of Common Prayer to our Catechism, as I’m sure you often do—You’ll find that when it asks, “Who are the ministers of the Church?” the answer is, “The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.” (Nice order, right?) Clergy aren’t the only ones who serve the Church and the world. Laypeople have their own essential ministry: to bear witness to Christ wherever they may be; to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their part in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.

You’re doing it right now! This is “life and worship.” In fact, if you stay for Annual Meeting, that’s “governance” checked off, too. And while I’ll do more than my fair share of talking, the Annual Report is full of shorter reports that reflect our ministry, not my ministry. And there are also many ways in which each one of us serves the world that will never be captured in an Annual Report—ways that we may never have thought of as “ministries” before.

And so I want you to think. How is it that you try to love people in this world? How is it that you participate in God’s work of reconciliation? And what rings true for you, in what I’m about to say about the Gospel, about what your ministry is like?

I see three miniature moments of what ministry is like, inside the church and outside it, in the Gospel today.

First, we see Jesus navigating the dynamic of distance and closeness in his work. Jesus stands on the beach, trying to teach to a crowd. He’s down, on their level, and he can only see maybe ten or fifteen faces in front of him. He can only talk to a few at a time. The physics of sound mean that those who are closer in will block his voice from those who are further away. “The crowd is pressing in,” Luke says, (5:1) and I almost get the sense of Jesus being pushed closer and closer to the water’s edge, as the hubbub of those trying to get closer to hear completely drowns out anything that he’s trying to say.

Have you ever felt this way? Is the urgent noise of the world ever so loud that you can’t hear yourself think? Does the crowd of urgent tasks ever press in so close that you cannot see the big picture? Even if your calendar is more empty than full, even if what’s crowding in on you are your own thoughts, it’s just the same. Our ability to love and serve other people well can be drowned out by a thousand small demands.

So Jesus steps back. He boards a boat. And from up there on the deck, he can see the crowd in a new way. He can speak and be heard. But he needs to take that step back, to give himself a little from the people he’s trying to serve, in order to be heard by them at all. And I think that this is an important skill, for any of us who try to serve: sometimes we need to step back, in order to really engage.

The second scene captures a very different feeling: the sudden lurch from unfortunate scarcity to dangerous abundance. Jesus finishes teaching, and tells Simon to head out from the shore to deeper waters, and to cast his nets. They’ve been fishing all night, and they haven’t caught a thing. That’s not good. But it’s not the end of the world. If you spend one night on the boat and catch no fish, you’re not going to starve. A month, or a year with no fish, that’s trouble. But one night? That’s just annoying.

A day with too many fish is actually a bigger problem. Simon starts to catch so much that the nets are going to break. If you break your nets, you have no fish, and no nets; you’ve only got what you managed to salvage from the catch, and some serious capital expenditures ahead. So the other boat comes to help them out. But now the problem’s even worse. Now there are so many fish that the boats begin to sink—and they’ve gone out to the deep water and there’s a pretty good chance that none of these guys can swim. The miracle seems worse than the problem to me.

I think this has a lesson for us, too. We often work for a long time, with relatively little in return. And then there comes a time when everything happens all at once, and it can almost be too much. Our lives are organized for the everyday and not for great success, and sometimes, if we can’t handle the sudden opportunity, we just don’t miss out on something good—we sink the boat.

This is true for churches that are growing, as they try to make sure that newer members feel welcomed, and no one slips through the cracks. It’s true for nonprofits, like the Clothes Closet, trying to navigate the huge volume of donations people want to make. It’s true, I think, for many parents, who spend so much of their time bouncing from good thing to good thing that, even though each individual activity or event is wonderful on its own, it’s hard to keep your head above the water. When our nets are so full of fish that our boats begin to sink, it can begin to feel like too much of a good thing.

And so we come to my final, favorite scene. Peter—dear, dear Peter—is amazed. And he throws himself down at Jesus’ knees, and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (5:8) Now, the main benefit of having a Rector who is learned in Greek is that you get to hear the funny parts of the Bible more clearly than you do in translation, and this is an important one: strictly speaking, Peter doesn’t “fall down at” Jesus’ knees, he “falls toward” them. It reminds me of an ancient posture of distress, that you find in Homer’s epic poems, among other places, in which a person would throw himself down and clasp the knees of someone else in supplication. I like to picture the scene that way: “Go away from me, Lord! I am a sinful man!” Peter says, falling toward Jesus’ knees. “If I went away from you, Peter, I would fall down,” I imagine Jesus thinking. “You’re holding onto my legs.” But what does Jesus say instead? “Be not afraid. From now on you will be fishers of men.”

Peter feels, as many of us have, a sense of inadequacy when confronted with the task at hand, and the abundance of God’s grace. How could I be enough for this situation, in which God has placed me? How could I be enough to do this work, to which God has called me? How could I be enough to deserve the amazing gifts that God has given me? Or, in the inmost thought of every parent ever sent home from the hospital with their first-born child, “Are you really going to send us alone home with this?” Get away from me! I’m not enough for this!

And yet God draws us in with the great paradox of grace. God’s goodness and perfection draw us closer, however inadequate and imperfect we may feel. And God doesn’t punish us for loving and serving one another imperfectly. God gives us even greater gifts: “From now on, you will be fishers of men.”

So maybe you wrote one of those Annual Reports. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just passing through today. But whoever you are, you are as much a minister as I am—God has some way for you to love and to serve, some way for you to bear witness to Christ, wherever you may be.

And when you find yourself serving, when you find yourself doing your best to love the people you find around you, I pray that you may have the space to step back from the shore onto the boat and take a breath; that when your nets begin to overflow, you do not sink; and that, no matter how much you may feel that you are not enough, you fall not away from but toward the God who trusts you and who is inviting you into even greater things. Amen.

Sermon — February 2, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“This child is destined… to be a sign that will be opposed
so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—
and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:34–35)

The next two weeks on the calendar are full of excitement. Next Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles will duke it out for the title of Super Bowl Champions, just hours after we conclude our—hopefully less-hotly-contested—Annual Meeting. Later that week, on Friday the 14^th, we’ll celebrate the most popular day in the Church’s calendar of saints, when the Episcopal Church, always eager to remain in touch with the culture, observes the Feast Day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, known of course for their invention of the Glagolitic alphabet used to transcribe Old Church Slavonic. I guess some of us will be celebrating Saint Valentine’s Day, too. Then, a few days later, it’s Presidents’ Day. And of course, we kick it all off this morning with a holiday that’s not as well-known as the rest: the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple, sometimes known as the Purification of Mary, and popularly as Candlemas—the day when, forty days after Jesus’ birth, Mary and Joseph bring him to the Temple.

The Church and the world rank the importance of these days in different ways. So, for example, polls show that in a typical year, more Americans are interested in the Super Bowl than in Valentine’s Day, or even than Saints Cyril and Methodius. Church annual meetings are relatively low in the cultural order of priorities, and in this country, at least, Candlemas isn’t very well known.

For the Church, things are the other way around. The Presentation is a major feast. The Annual Meeting is a canonical requirement. Saints Cyril and Methodius don’t have the most devoted followings, but we don’t even list Saint Valentine on our official calendar of saints. While we always pray for the President and the leaders of the world, we don’t observe Presidents’ Day as a holy day; and of course, Super Bowl Sunday isn’t really a religious event, although many prayers will be offered, I’m sure.

But  there’s something that unites this wildly disparate sets of religious and secular occasions, something that draws them all together, nevertheless: each one of these days provides us with an example of the vulnerability that comes from love.

This year, there will be many people whose Valentines are sick or gone, or someone whom they haven’t yet found, but wish they had. This year, there will be Annual Meetings all around the country where congregations will grapple with the reality that the community of worship that they love can no longer be sustained—not ours, this year, thank God. There will be grown adults who cry on Super Bowl Sunday—in joy, but also in despair. Presidents’ Day can be hard, in its own way, for those who love this country and its traditions of government. These days express our love, in many different ways, and anything that we love has the potential to cause us pain.

That’s what speaks to me this morning about our Gospel reading. It’s not the ritual of purification that Mary is there to carry out. It’s not the prophecy of Jesus’ destiny. It’s what Simeon has to say to Mary, as she celebrates the healthy arrival of her firstborn child, once they’ve all made it through forty days of life: “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” (Luke 2:35)

“A sword will pierce your soul.”

That’s certainly been my experience so far of parenthood. Even with a child who isn’t the Messiah. To love a child is to have a sword pierce your soul, again and again. Not because they’re mean to you, or rude—although they sometimes are, especially as they grow. But because it is a heartbreaking thing to love someone who is soft, and innocent, and small in a world that is hard, and cruel, and big. To see your child insulted, and rejected, and mocked by the most powerful people in the land—as Mary did when Jesus was on the Cross—is to have a sword pierce your soul. It’s true of all the struggles of life, small or large. To see a child whom you love left out by other kids, or benched by a coach; to see them neglected by a teacher or addicted to a drug, is to feel that soul-piercing pain.

This isn’t limited to parent-child love. Everyone in this room, I’m pretty sure, has felt the pain of seeing a person whom you love suffer, and not being able to fix it. Maybe for you, it’s been a sibling stuck in an unhealthy relationship. Maybe a friend with an eating disorder. Whatever it’s been, if you have loved another person, I’m pretty sure you’ve known what it is to have a sword pierce your own soul too.

We often talk about “vulnerability.” In Latin, vulnus is a “wound.” So vulnerability is the ability to be wounded. And this wound-ability comes inevitably with love. When we open our hearts to one another, we leave them exposed, and the very words we use to express the best of love reveal the possibility of pain: “compassion” and “empathy” mean, “suffering with” or “being in the suffering of” another person. To allow ourselves to love is to allow the possibility that our souls will be pierced.

I don’t want to be too frivolous, but as a kid, I loved watching sports. This may come as a surprise to some of you who know me now, and who have seen how little attention I pay to sports; last week at Coffee Hour, I somehow managed to segue a conversation about football into one about grammar with only the single line, “You know what I think about when I hear ‘buffalo’?” But as a kid, I used to stretch the Globe Sports section out and read the whole thing. I could spend an hour reading the standings for every high-school football league in the state. The first thing I did every day was to look at the final score from the Sox game, since I usually fell asleep before the end. I spent the years up to 2004 experiencing the agony of the Red Sox fan, and the next few years in the ecstasy of the Red Sox fan, but at some point, I realized that it just wasn’t working for me to start my day happy or sad depending on the fate of the Sox, or the Pats. I also no longer owned a TV, which helped.

And it works, for sports, to cut yourself off. If you find, like me, that you have become overly attached to the ups and downs of your favorite team, you can just stop, so that the New York Yankees cannot pierce your heart, no matter how much money they may spend.

This works for sports. But we can’t let it become true in general for love. The things that make us vulnerable in life are the things that make our lives most worth living: they are the bonds of love that unite us with one another. And in the end, we have to choose, in this life, whether we’re going to act like Peter or like Mary. We can protect ourselves like Peter does when Jesus is arrested, and he denies ever having met him. We can look away, we can isolate ourselves, from the pain of other human beings. Or we can be like Mary. We can follow Jesus to the Cross, and we can stand there, bearing witness to the suffering of this world, and letting our souls be pierced by love.

Christianity is a frustrating religion, because God is frustrating sometimes. Life in this world is hard. There are many things that simply are not right. And we would rather live in a world in which God simply didn’t allow them. A world in which nobody got sick, or died before their time; a world in which no evil deed was done. But we don’t live in that world. And I don’t know what’s true for you, but for me, because I live in this world, as it is, the Christian story is good news.

Because it’s a story that begins, not with our love, not with our wounded hearts, but with God’s love for us—a love so strong that God’s own soul was pierced, a love so strong that in Jesus, “Love came down at Christmas,” as my favorite carol goes. God became one of us, like us in every way, as Hebrews says. Jesus enjoyed the best of human life, and he endured the worst of it—and “because he himself was tested by what he suffered,” Hebrews goes on, “he is able to help those who are being tested.” (Heb. 2:18) When our hearts are broken, God’s heart is broken too. And it’s because God knows what it’s like to be human and to suffer, that God can comfort and help us in our suffering.

But the Christian story doesn’t end there. Jesus suffers and dies, but he dies “so that through death he might destroy…the power of death.” (Heb. 2:14) Jesus’ own death somehow transforms death—Jesus’ own suffering somehow transforms suffering—in a way that we cannot yet fully see. Jesus rises from the grave, with that tantalizing sign: he rises from the grave, still bearing his wounds, still shaped by the things that he’s been through, but no longer subject to their pain.

This promise isn’t enough to soften the blow. We will still feel that ache. But we can also hold fast to the hope that God is drawing us forward into a world in which death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) And we can hold on to our love for one another, knowing that in the end, God’s love will reign supreme.