Author Archives: Greg Johnston

The Tower of Siloam

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The Tower of Siloam

 
 
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Sermon — March 23, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Sometimes, when reading the diverse library of ancient texts we bind in one book and call “The Bible,” you’ll read something strange—something that so clearly comes from a different place and time that it can seem impossible to understand without a lot more context. Sometimes, you read something that speaks so clearly to the kinds of questions we ask here and now that it reminds you, suddenly, that in the timeline of human existence, 2000 years isn’t that long at all—that people in the ancient world felt the same things and thought the same things that we do now. And sometimes, these two experiences—this out-of-context strangeness and this sudden familiarity—happen at the very same time.

Take our Gospel today. On the one hand, you can probably tell that Jesus has something to say about a very common question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We asked this thousands of years ago; we still do today. But on the other hand, this story seems to have some context that we’re missing. There are other, less common questions that it raises: “What’s up with the Galileans whose blood Pilate ‘mingled with their sacrifices’?” or “What’s the deal with the tower of Siloam?” or… “What’s Siloam?” If Jesus is referring to these stories to make his point, it seems like it might be important to know more. So let’s start with some of the details about the tower of Siloam, and these Galileans, and then see what that context means for what Jesus is saying. Does that sound like a good plan?

Wrong! It’s a bad plan, I’m sorry to say. (I apologize, I set you up for that.) The sad reality is that there are no more details. There is no more context. In fact, we have no record of these events, other than in the Gospel of Luke. But, to be fair, we can still make some educated guesses to try to understand what he means.

So, some people in the crowd come to tell Jesus about “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” This is probably not literally true; you shouldn’t imagine some kind of gruesome ritual event, with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, literally mixing people’s blood with animal sacrifices. It’s a metaphor for massacre in the Temple, for the killing of some pilgrims who had come from Galilee, just as Jesus is, to worship in Jerusalem. These are presumably upstanding, pious people.  And yet they’re killed, during the very act of religious worship, by their own government. And Jesus asks: Do you think that this human punishment was a sign of divine disfavor? Do you think that simply because the government accuses someone of a crime and punishes them, they are necessarily evil? “No, I tell you!”

There’s a difference, Jesus says, between what’s “legal” and what’s “good,” between what is “illegal” and what is “evil.” Especially under unjust rule, the fact that something is illegal doesn’t mean that it is evil; in fact, the worst governments make it illegal to do many things that are good. Even without the details of the story, we can understand the point: Being punished by Pontius Pilate does not mean that these people are necessarily “worse sinners than all other Galileans.”

But Jesus goes on to make a second point about what we sometimes call “acts of God.” He refers to another story, about the deaths of “eighteen [people] who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.” (Luke 13:4) Siloam is a neighborhood of Jerusalem; we hear about the “pool of Siloam” a few times in the Gospels. But we have no more details about this tower. It seems to be just the tragic story of a building that collapsed, injuring people walking by in the street. Maybe the builders did something wrong, but Jesus doesn’t point a finger. It’s an accident, a disaster, an awful thing that happened at random. “Do you think they were worse offenders,” Jesus asks, “than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (3:4) Were these people singled out by the hand of a vengeful God, who caused a tower to collapse just as they all happened to be walking by? No! It’s an accident, and it’s a tragedy; it’s not a punishment.

And so far, if all you have is these two stories and the rhetorical questions Jesus asks, this all seems straightforward enough. Jesus gives an answer to a that question that people asked 2000 years ago and still ask today: Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a reason for everything? Is it all part of a larger plan? Or are some things simply random? And what Jesus has to say is that human beings do evil things to one another, and that’s bad; but it’s not a judgment of the victims. And disasters happen, and that’s tragic; but they’re the result of the laws of physics, and not an “act of God.”

But then, in both cases, Jesus goes on. “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” (13:5)

And it’s here that finally historical context becomes the key.

It’s tempting to read this part out of context, actually. It sounds like a universal statement, as if it’s addressed directly to us. And depending on the way you look at things, you might take that one of two ways. Some Christians will read this and think it means that they should repent of their own, specific, individual sins, or they will “perish”—probably a way of describing some kind of eternal punishment. And so they’ll scrutinize themselves and others for signs of sin, lest they be condemned. Other Christians will read this and think it means that they should repent of their own, specific, individual sins, or they will “perish”—and therefore listen politely to the text and then file it away in the same mental drawer with the other bits of the Bible in which Jesus comes across as, well, not very Episcopalian.

But in fact, this is not addressed to the “you” of the reader, the individual modern Christian hearing the text. It’s addressed to the “you” of the story, the group of people who come to him and tell him this story about what Pilate did. And it’s here that the historical context comes into play. Jesus was living in a time that was building toward rebellion, a time of increasing patriotic fervor and nationalistic spirit. Just a few decades after his death, this nationalism would explode into an open revolt, a Jewish War against Rome that very quickly developed into a civil war among Jews well. Many of the people who hear the news that Jesus is the Messiah are ready to start things off. They think that he’s the one who will lead them into war. And he tells them, “No, unless you repent—unless you change your hearts, unless you turn aside from the path you are on—you will perish,” not metaphorically, but literally, in the very same way that the people in those two stories did (that’s what “just as” means). Some will fall to the Roman soldiers’ swords. Some will be trapped in a city reduced to rubble. But unless they turn away from the idea that God will save them through war, one way or another they will be destroyed. By the time Luke writes it down, this has already come to pass. And this is not a divine punishment, per se; it’s a natural consequence of what they want to do, and if you aren’t sure what the difference is, ask one of the parents of the toddlers at Coffee Hour, if you can catch them.

That’s a very specific message for a very specific time, but there is a broader message here, one that really is for each of us. There are times when nations are headed down a self-destructive path. It may well be the case that humankind is on that road; it certainly has been before. And it’s definitely true that in our relationships and friendships, in our church communities and in our individual lives, there are times when we are stuck in toxic patterns, headed down a path that can only lead to the destruction of those relationships and those parts of our lives.

But the good news of Lent is that there is always time to turn away. There is always time to repent from our patterns of self-destruction, and return to the way of love. Jesus wants that desperately for us. Because in a world that’s full of people who want to cut your fig tree down, Jesus is the gardener who begs them to hold off for one more year, so he can put some fertilizer down and see what grows. “God is faithful,” Paul says, and God wants you to find the “way out,” and God invites each one of us, again and again, to turn back.

Friendships and families, churches and nations—these things we build together are fragile, and they’re hard. They are the places where we practice what it is to love one another, and sometimes we don’t do that very well. But that’s why we say the Confession every week. That’s why Lent comes every year. Because we need the constant invitation, again and again, to change our hearts, and turn toward the love of God.

I Am Who I Am

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But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:13–14)

Throughout history and in the present day, many people have done many things in the name of God. Emperors have converted nations at the point of the sword. Popes have declared Crusades that led to mass bloodshed because Deus vult, “God wills it.” People have advocated and condemned slavery, abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration, with religious leaders taking stands on both sides of each issue, and all in the name of God. In Sunday sermons all around the world, clergy claim to speak to the people in the name of God, and we should be trembling in our boots. (And many of us do.)

But the name of God itself reveals an elusive and enigmatic person, nearly impossible to pin down.

This Sunday’s reading from Exodus includes a fascinating exchange between Moses and God on the theme. And as is often the case when I suspect something important might not make it into the sermon, I thought I might write a few words here, instead.

Moses has just heard his name called by the voice of God, speaking out of a burning bush. “Moses, Moses!” the voice says. And Moses replies, “Here I am.” (Exodus 3:4) God tells Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry.” (3:5) And God sends Moses to speak to Pharaoh and to lead God’s people Israel out of slavery in Egypt.

But Moses says, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” (3:11) He’s just a shepherd, for now; a prince, nearly killed at birth, saved and found floating in a basket on the river but now fled into the wilderness as an adult. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” And God replies, “I will be with you.” (3:12) And Moses asks, essentially… Okay, but who are you? He puts it more politely, of course. Knowing that the Israelites live among a people of many gods, he asks what name he should give when they ask which God has sent him.

And God answers, not with a name, but with a tautological claim: “I AM WHO I AM.” (3:14) And Moses is still silent, but God goes on, “Say this to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (3:15) This is one of my favorite patterns in Biblical narration. When a character speaks, and then the same character speaks again, it’s meant to emphasis the pause. It’s as if there were a script, and one person’s line is just a big “…”

God: I AM WHO I AM.
Moses: […]
God: Tell that, “I AM sent me.”

And then it happens again! Moses is still completely at a loss. And God goes on to clarify: “The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.” (3:15)

We often print these words in “all caps.” The LORD, printed like this, always stands in for the Hebrew name YHWH, the divine “tetragrammaton” that Jewish tradition considers too holy to pronounce, replacing it with Adonai (the Lord) or HaShem (the Name) instead. “I AM” here is Ehyeh (spelled ’HYH), and both rabbinic tradition and some modern scholars make a connection between these sets of names—while there’s no definitive answer, there may be some connection between the proper name YHWH and the notion of being.

Be that as it may, this exchange should give us pause when we find ourselves claiming to speak in the name of God.

The god we worship and in whom we believe is not one we can or do give a name. Modern scholars have reconstructed the pronunciation of YHWH as Yahweh; others as Jehovah. But neither has been in common use as the name of God, in traditional Christianity or Judaism. We capitalize the common noun “god” and make it a proper name, “God.” Or we use some appellation like “the Lord.” But our traditions have been hesitant to speak the name of God itself. But if we hesitate to speak the name of God, then perhaps we should be more cautious than we are about claiming to speak in the name of God—unless and until we see a burning bush.

“I am who I am,” God says. In other translations, and equally accurately, “I will be who I will be.” (Ancient Hebrew has no past, present, and future tenses, only a “perfective” and “imperfective,” so the present and the future are usually the same.) The God we encounter in the Bible is often unpredictable, a real character with a real personality. The God we encounter in the Bible seems to learn and change, to make decisions and then regret them. God is not a series of principles written down, God is a person, who chooses to say and do particular things, and interact with the world in particular ways—ways which even the prophets often fail to understand!

Sometimes all we can rely on is that God is. “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh has sent me to you.’” “I am.” “I will be.” We often claim to speak in the name of God, but what God would do or what God would say can only be a guess, guided by the character of God we see revealed, a God of compassion and love who cares especially for people who are poor and for people who are strangers in the land in which they live. We don’t always know what God would say, but we know that God is, and that God will be—and that the sufferings of the people of God do not go unnoticed, for “I have heard their cry.”

The Fox and the Hen

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The Fox and the Hen

 
 
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Sermon — March 16, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision,
“Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield;
your reward shall be very great.” (Gen. 15:1)

If I had to identify the most pervasive scams of 2025, I’d pick two. The Scammy Award for Most Pervasive Con would be split between the “‘I’m Your Pastor’ Gift Card Email” and the “‘Notice of Toll Evasion’ Text.” You may have encountered one of these. I actually received them both this week. Both of them are designed, like all scams are, to exploit human emotions.

The pastor scam preys on our goodness and our relationships. It’s been around for a few years now. You get an email from an account with a name claiming to be your pastor, who says they can’t talk by phone right now but they really need you to do them a favor to help someone out. They need you to buy a few hundred dollars in gift cards and send them the numbers by email, so they can give them to a person in need. If you buy the gift cards and sending the numbers, there’s no way to get the money back. You were just trying to help your pastor out, and you were robbed.

The more recent toll evasion scam preys on our fear of judgment. “You have an unpaid toll bill on your account,” one text message I got this week reads. “To avoid late fees, pay within 12 hours or the late fees will be increased and”—here’s the worst part—“reported to the DMV.” At this point, I get 3-4 of these a week. But you can understand how it would work. I might have missed a toll, you might think. Maybe my EzPass was on the fritz? I really don’t want to have to deal with the DMV, so okay, sure, I can pay ten bucks. (PSA, if you ever see one: these are both always scams. And anyway, in Massachusetts we call it the RMV, right?)

These cons have none of the charm of The Music Man. They’re a numbers game, spamming the world with so many emails and so many texts that surely someone will pay. But they prey on the same deep-seated human traits that were so well known to the con artists of old: the desire to be helpful to a person you love; the embarrassment of questioning a confident authority figure; the fear of being seen as the kind of person who doesn’t pay a toll, and the desire to avoid the DMV.

Many religions built on these same traits. But I want to suggest to you today that the good news that Jesus came to share is that we have things exactly the wrong way around. People often act as though God were an eternal con man in the sky. We often act out of the desire to please God by being helpful, or out of the fear of divine judgment. But in fact, in a world of wily foxes, the only thing God wants is the chance to protect you like a hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings.

It’s Jesus who gives us this image of the fox and the hen, of course. And there’s some irony in it. The Pharisees come to warn Jesus to leave Galilee, because Herod Antipas, who rules Galilee, wants to kill him. The warning is superfluous. Jesus is already on his way out of Galilee, toward Jerusalem. But he won’t find safety there. He’s already predicted that’s where he’ll meet his fate. The danger is real: Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas really do think that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to seize the throne, and they see him as a threat.

But Jesus isn’t there to launch a coup. He’s not there to outfox Herod. He says that he’s the other half of a pair familiar from folk tales around the world: If Herod is the fox in this story, then Jesus is the hen. Even in the city, we know who wins that fight. But Jesus isn’t worried about Herod’s threat to himself. He’s talking about his chicks: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” he laments. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Herod isn’t only a “fox” because he wants Jesus dead. He’s a fox because he’s preying on the people, exploiting and oppressing the beloved chicks of God. And Jesus the hen isn’t only the victim of this predator; he’s the one who’s going to protect his people from the threat.

This is the pattern all throughout our readings today. Again and again, you see the enemies who attack and exploit the people of God and the God who tries to defend and protect them.

So our Psalm today repeatedly invokes the “evildoers” who “came upon me to eat up my flesh,” the “army” that is “encamp[ed] against me,” the “war” that “rise[s] up against me.” (Psalm 27:2-4) And the Psalmist turns again and again to God for safety: “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1) The two sides don’t act in the same way. God is not an avenging warrior, but a shelter and protector.

Paul makes the same kind of rhetorical move. There are those who are the “enemies of the cross of Christ,” whose whole purpose is shaped by “destruction,” whose minds are set on “earthly things.” They seek satisfaction and chase after glory. But “our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul writes; our highest allegiance is not to any ruler or nation on earth, but to God, and it is from there, from heaven, that we await a “Savior.” Not someone to destroy our enemies but, again, someone to save us from them. Someone who can say to us, as God says to Abram, “Do not be afraid…I am your shield.” (Genesis 15:1)

These are not symmetric pairs: fox and fox, army and army, enemy and ally. We get the fox and the hen, the army and the refuge, the enemy and the Savior. There are the all the forces of evil and death that do their best to destroy humankind—and there is a God who wants to shield us from them.

And this is what Jesus is going to do. He has a little time, for now, for small miracles: he can cast our demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, but then he’s got to go on to finish his work. The fox is near, and he needs to go gather his chicks, to protect them not only from Herod, or from Pilate, but from the greater power of Death itself. He will shelter the chicks from that fox. His disciples and the people will be safe. But he himself will die, just as the Pharisees tried to warn him that he could. On Good Friday, he’ll die; and on Holy Saturday he’ll rest in the grave; and then on Easter Sunday, on the third day, he’ll finish his work. And in some mysterious way, just as the hen’s self-sacrifice might protect her chicks from the fox, Jesus’ death and resurrection work to overcome the power of death. Jesus goes, of his own free will, to die, and he rises again, and opens the way for us to rise. This is how he resists evil; how we wins the ultimate victory at the very moment that he seems to fail.

Technology has changed. New forms of government have come and gone. But Jesus lived in a world made of human beings just like us. He lived in a world of people who saw raw power as the measure of a leader’s strength. He lived in a world whose rulers tried to dominate the people of neighboring lands. He rejected those rulers, those foxes who used their cunning for their own gain. But he also rejected their way. He didn’t respond to violence with violence, or to power with power. He stretched out wings of love, not to push against his foes, but to protect his people from harm. When given the choice, Jesus chose the side of the weak and the powerless, not the mighty and great.

And this is true for you. God is not an eternal Santa Claus, making a list and checking it twice. God is not working on the same emotions as a scammer does, not trying to manipulate you into doing good deeds, or to scare you away from bad ones. God is trying to protect you, to give you some shelter and some strength. And there’s only one thing that God needs us to do: not to run away.

“How often I’ve desired to gather you together,” Jesus says, “and you were not willing!” And that’s the work we have to do. Not to scatter through the world like chicks. But to accept the hen’s embrace, to shelter under her wings. To accept protection, and to try to live with the courage that it brings: to know that even though the world is full of foxes, full of struggles and pain, there is another and a better way than the way of cunning domination. There is a way of love that leads through the cross all the way to the empty tomb, because on the third day—at the end of the long journey of Lent, at the end of the long journey of this life—Jesus will finish his work.

Lent with LLMs

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New AI (artificial intelligence) software has been all over the news for the last few years, and in the last few months I’ve found it popping up everywhere. Suddenly Google has Gemini in my Gmail inbox, Microsoft has a Copilot prompt when I try to type in Word, and Apple tells me that Apple Intelligence will help summarize my texts, which really makes me ask—Isn’t a text message succinct enough?

Depending on whom you ask, we may be only a few years away from artificial general intelligence systems that can perform most human cognitive tasks, and will forever transform the way we work and live. Or the current AI tools that we have, based on “large language models” (LLMs), may be an environmental catastrophe based on plagiarism and theft. Or they may be mostly irrelevant to your daily life.

This week, I want to reflect on a “Lenten Lesson from LLMs.” In what ways are human beings and AI alike? How are we different? And what might that have to do with Lent?

A few weeks ago, a colleague in another part of the church shared with me an AI chatbot that had been designed specifically to answer questions about the church. It worked by searching publications by the Episcopal Church and Episcopal publishers like Forward Movement, and then by feeding all of that into ChatGPT with some additional guidance, and giving you a helpful response. He knew I worked on an app that made it easier for people to use our church’s various lectionary cycles, so he asked me for some additional data to help it give useful answers to questions like that.

I hadn’t used the tool before, so I opened it up. I asked a few questions about the church and our faith, and it seemed to give some useful replies. It tended to give a link to some official resource or church website, most of the time, which I thought was especially nice. And then I turned to the topic at hand: “Could you draft me a bulletin for the service of Morning Prayer today?”

Word by word, the bot began to reply. It provided a decent outline of the service, including the text of many of the prayers. It gave helpful references to pages of the BCP. And in the middle of the service, it told me there were usually three readings, and that they could be found in the Revised Common Lectionary entry for the day. “Hm,” I wrote back, “Shouldn’t I use the Daily Office Lectionary for Morning Prayer?” “Yes, I’m sorry. We are currently in Year Two of the Daily Office Lectionary, which can be found on page…” “… Wait a minute. Aren’t we in Year One?” (I briefly wondered whether I was wrong.) “Yes, I’m sorry,” it said again, “Because [here it inserts a correct explanation!], we are in Year One of the Daily Office Lectionary. The readings for today are…” And it names three random readings, which are not the readings for the day.

At this point, I start to wonder whether I’m crazy. “Are you sure? I don’t think those are the correct readings.” “I’m sorry,” it replies… and then lists three more readings, also completely wrong.

This was a scary experience. It wasn’t scary that the AI was wrong about how to find the readings for Morning Prayer; that’s a fairly complicated and not particularly important thing to need to do. What was scary is that the AI tool was confidently incompetent: it cheerfully and repeatedly hallucinated answers with no basis in reality, and reported them to me in the exact same tone and with the same level of confidence as its other, correct, answers about the church. It had no ability to reflect on or recognize its own limitations, and while it gave very polite apologies when I pointed out its mistakes, it plunged right back in to making them, nevertheless.

Lent should train you to be the opposite of this kind of AI.

Here are three things you might take away from Lent, that our AI friend would do well to learn:

  1. Learn your limits. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of our mortality, of the fragility of our bodies and the shortness of our time on earth. On Good Friday, we come face to face with the fact that we, like Peter and all the disciples, have often abandoned and betrayed our God. Throughout Lent, we test the limits of our willpower and endurance, again and again. Each one of us has things of which we simply are not capable, but it takes real reflection and self-examination to learn what those are.
  2. Admit when you need help. In Christian life, humility is the goal, not pretension; it is better to admit what you do not know or what you cannot do than to pretend to know what you do not know or to be able to do what you cannot do. There are times when “fake it ’til you make it” is good advice, but there are also times when “act like you have no idea what you’re doing and ask for help” is even better, because it’s true.
  3. Apologies without change are missing the point. In Hebrew, the word for repentance is teshuvah, which means “turning” or “returning.” To repent is not simply to apologize; it is to recognize that you’re following the wrong road, and turn back onto the right path. If you find yourself apologizing for the same thing to the same person again and again, that might be a sign that your wheels are stuck in a rut: you’re trying to turn back onto a better road, but there’s something keeping you in place, and something else in your circumstances needs to change before your wheels can stuck.

Our current AI tools are useful in many ways; just a few days before my unfortunate AI encounter, Michael had used the same tool to learn much more about the Nonjuring Schism and its relation to the Episcopal Church than his seminary professors had taught him or I could give him off the cuff. (And you could learn that, too!)

But what’s missing the most from these tools, right now, is what makes us the best human beings, what virtues we try to practice during Lent: reflection and self-examination, humility and the ability to ask for help, genuine repentance and the recognition that we need to change our ways. Few people would name these as the technical breakthroughs we need as the adoption of AI grows; but I sometimes wonder whether these ways of cultivating grace might be the most important technologies of all.

Temptation, Failure, Grace

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Temptation, Failure, Grace

 
 
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Sermon — March 9, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In March of 1522 in the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli participated in an event that led to outrage and condemnation. Personally, I think there was a missed opportunity for a great Hollywood film to be made on the 500th anniversary, because the name alone is made for the silver screen. The events of that Lent, 503 years ago, became known to history as The Affair of the Sausages.

It was just five years after Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The Protestant Reformation was in its earliest days. But one thing was clear: more and more Christians, clergy and laypeople alike, were beginning to question the commandments of the church. And this was particularly true for the Church’s teachings on things like fasting during Lent. The Church had developed an intricate system of rules for which foods could be eaten when, and which could not. But this seemed to have little to do with the good news. Jesus and his disciples were accused of not fasting enough, in fact, and the Apostle Paul made compelling arguments that Christians had been freed from these kinds of legalistic practices by God: “by grace [they had] been saved through faith, and not by works of the law.” (Eph. 2:8)

And so one night in 1522, Zwingli was invited to the home of a local printer whose workers had been laboring day and night to publish a new edition of the Epistles of Saint Paul, and they shared a meal during which, despite the Lenten ban on the consumption of meat, they ate a few slices of smoked sausage.

The public was outraged. The printer who hosted the meal was arrested. But Zwingli took a public stand. Fasting or not fasting, he argued, was a matter of individual conscience, not something that the Church could demand. Fasting could not save a Christian’s soul; by grace they had been saved, through faith. The Bishop was furious. But Zwingli’s view convinced his fellow-citizens, and he went on to lead the Reformation in Switzerland, at least until his death.

Now, the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church. But we’ve also always occupied a kind of middle way between the most outspoken Protestants and the Catholic tradition. And so at Coffee Hour this week, you might hear people chat about whether they’re “giving something up” during Lent or “taking something on” or simply going about their lives as usual. So I thought it might be interesting today, as we begin this season of Lent, to try to draw this all together; to ask whether there’s a way to understand the spiritual benefits of adopting a Lenten discipline while still embracing the freedom Zwingli found, five hundred years ago, in the good news that he was saved by the grace of God, and not by his own hard work; the freedom to eat a sausage, even during Lent.

The whole practice of a Lenten fast starts with our Gospel story today, in which Jesus fasts for a season of forty days. No ordinary person can go without food for so long, of course, but the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always had certain regulations around eating and fasting during these forty days. And many people choose to fast from a particular thing for the duration of the season. So, for example, I’ve heard of people here fasting from chocolate, coffee, alcohol, Amazon.com, and the reading of novels, among other things.

There’s an important subtlety here. There’s a difference between giving up something you think is bad, and something you think is good. You can give up something that’s bad, a habit or a vice, any time, and Lent offers a great structure to start. But to fast is to give up something good, temporarily, and plan to take it up again at Easter. So the medieval practice of giving up meat during Lent wasn’t about ethical vegetarianism; they didn’t give up meat because they thought it was bad, but because it was good, and hard to give up. And the same is true if you fast from chocolate, or coffee today.

So why would you do that? Here’s the thing: The goal is to give something up where the stakes are low; where it doesn’t matter if you cheat, because the thing you’ve given up is fine on its own; but that’s enticing enough that it can teach you something about how you respond to the cycle of temptation, failure, and grace. So I want to say a few words about temptation, and failure, and grace.

Jesus has been fasting for forty days and he’s “famished.” (Luke 4:2) And now, the temptations begin to come. The devil entices him—You’re the Son of God… Why don’t you just turn this hard stone into nice, soft bread? The devil shows him the kingdoms of the world: I’m a pretty well-connected guy; just, worship me, and I’ll give you however much political power you please. (Hm.) And the devil takes him up to the top of the Temple—Aren’t you always going on about being the Beloved Son of God? Jump off! God won’t let anything bad happen  to you.

Jesus easily resists. But temptation is harder for us. It doesn’t appear with a pitchfork and horns. It doesn’t all come at the end of forty days. Temptation appears in different times and in different ways. And one of the purposes of fasting during Lent is to understand how the dynamics of temptation work out for you. When does that little voice appear that says “Oh, surely it’s not that big of a deal…” Is it when you’re hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? With a certain group of friends, or a certain family member? When you experience the temptation to break your Lenten fast, you can ask the usual questions—the who/what/where/when/why of its appearance, and then the how, as in, How do you resist it? Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Psalms, and that works for him. What’s going to work for you?

And what is it like when it doesn’t work? Failure isn’t a part of the story of the temptation of Christ, but none of us is Christ. We fail. So what’s that feel like for you? What’s it like to try to abstain from Amazon for six weeks and finding your finger inexorably drawn to the orange button tempting you to “Buy Now.” Do you feel the heat of shame when you fail? Do you immediately start to rationalize it to yourself? If you find that you succeed easily in a forty-day fast—if you never give in, if you never fail—then maybe you should try something harder next time, because failing at Lent is a really important part.

Failure is important because it unlocks the third and most important step: grace. What do you do after things go off the rails? How do you get back on the horse? How do you admit that you’ve failed, and start again—not by rationalizing it or by hiding it in shame, but by accepting that you’ve messed up, and you are loved, and you can go on, nevertheless? Jesus raises the bar of perfection. Jesus makes resisting temptation look easy. But Paul lowers the bar completely to the floor. Salvation doesn’t  depend on your perfect Lenten fast. Salvation doesn’t depend on your good deeds. It’s simple, for Paul: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

This is the kind of good news that led to the Affair of the Sausages. Those Swiss workers, after all, had just finished printing an edition of the Epistles of Paul. And what they had found in those letters, again and again, was the message of God’s grace. They discovered that they didn’t need the Church’s whole system of penance and indulgence, fasting and good works. Paul had set the bar so low that all they needed was to put their trust in what God had already done for them, because “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Even as imperfect, limited human beings, they would be forgiven and loved and saved by God, free of charge. And so are you. And so that’s the third thing about which Lent invites you to reflect: What does it feel like to be forgiven, and accepted, even when you fail?

Life is full of temptations, small and large, but they exist on a sliding scale. If you fast from social media during Lent, and find yourself logging in to scroll—that’s okay! The point is to learn how to face the bigger temptations in your life, the ones that really do matter. The temptation to gossip about the secret of a friend. The temptation to violate the trust of someone we love. The temptation to let ourselves be overwhelmed with apathy in the face of a suffering world. Temptation is a fact of human life. But Lent is a chance to play, a chance to train, a chance to experiment, to learn about how temptation works for us. To learn how failure feels for us. To practice accepting the grace that comes, inevitably, even after our worst mistakes, freeing us from the fear and the shame of being imperfect people, for as “the scripture says, ‘No one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.’” (Romans 10:11)