Sermon — January 21, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying,
‘Get up, go to Nineveh…and proclaim to it in the message that I tell you.”
(Jonah 3:1–2)

The Book of Jonah is best known to children and casual readers as the one where that guy gets eaten by a whale. But to those in the know, Jonah has a reputation as the funniest book in the Bible, and it’s also one of the shortest. It’s really just a few pages: if you go home this afternoon and sit down and read it, you’ll probably find that it takes you longer to find a Bible and then find Jonah in the Bible than it does to actually read the book. But this short and funny book packs a serious theological punch, and it’s this: God has chosen to do extraordinary things through completely ordinary people—sometimes when they really don’t want it.

And Jonah really doesn’t want it. That’s where the whale comes in.

The Book of Jonah begins: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah… saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:1) Now Nineveh is a terrifying place, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire that destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and scattered ten of the twelve Israelite tribes, never to be heard from again. The Assyrians were a fierce and mighty people, whose primary contributions to human civilization were their invention of siege warfare and ethnic cleansing. But God tells Jonah to go and travel far to the east, to the Assyrian capital city, and to proclaim a message of divine judgment there.

So what does Jonah do? He goes down to the port city of Joppa, and gets on a ship, and heads straight west, toward Tarshish—as far away from Nineveh as he can get. (Jonah 1:3)

But he can’t get away that easily. The Lord God sends a storm, and the sea batters the ship as the sailors begin to panic, and call upon their gods. Jonah sleeps through it. They wake him up, and tell him, Come on! Pray with us! Pray to your god! And Jonah’s like, … Yeah you don’t really want me to pray to my god right now. Let’s do this instead: Throw me overboard, into the sea, and you’ll be fine. And so, with much drama and many prayers for forgiveness, they throw Jonah into the sea to save the ship.

But still, Jonah can’t escape. God send a fish (or a whale, or a prehistoric shark) to swallow Jonah up. And this is the point of the whale: not just that it’s cool that Jonah gets to live inside its stomach, but that even at the ends of the earth, even in the depths of the sea, Jonah can’t get away from God. He sings a psalm of lamentation and joy, one of the classics of ancient Hebrew poetry, and then the whale spits him up onto the shore.

And then our reading from this morning begins, and “the word of the Lord [comes] to Jonah a second time,” and God says, “Joooonnnaaaaaahhh… Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you.” And Jonah gets up, and goes, but he’s not happy about it, and he wants God to know it, so he does the bare minimum. Nineveh is a massive city, the author tells us, a three days’ walk wide, but Jonah goes barely a day’s walk in. It’s a mighty empire that needs to change its way, but Jonah’s sermon is beyond concise: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” he says, and that’s all. (3:4) There’s no explanation why. There’s no next step, just a declaration of doom.

If Jonah walked into a preaching class and gave this one, his manuscript would come back from the professor with a big red F. But the Ninevites go nuts. The sermon really works. They dress in sackcloth and declare a fast. Not only humans, but animals will go without foods, the king declares; not only without food, but even without water. “Who knows?” the mighty Assyrian king declares. “God may relent and change his mind!” (3:9)

And God does. God changes God’s mind, the Book of Jonah says, and God doesn’t destroy the Ninevites after all.

And Jonah hates it. Hates it. Jonah gets so mad. And at the very end of the story, we finally learn what Jonah’s motivation was all along. “O Lord!” he says. “Didn’t I say that this would happen? That’s why I fled to Tarshish! For I knew,” he says in this ridiculous, accusatory tone, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” (4:2) Jonah’s anger is extreme, it becomes almost beyond words, until he prays to God, “Take my life, for it’s better for me to die than live!” (4:3) And God answers, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4:4) And Jonah replies, Hmph, and goes away to sulk.

I do the impression so well, of course, becomes I sometimes act this way. Just ask my wife.

I sometimes ask myself the question, when I’m reading or thinking about the Bible: If we only had this one book, what impression would it give us of God? What we would know about what God is like? And if you only had the Book of Jonah, the impression really wouldn’t be half bad.

The first thing you learn from the Book of Jonah is that God is willing to pursue you, personally and relentlessly, to the ends of the earth and into the depths of the sea. When God is calling, there is no escape; but neither does God begrudge you all your attempts to run away. God doesn’t punish Jonah for sailing to Tarshish when he should be schlepping to Nineveh; God keeps him safe in the belly of a whale. God doesn’t abandon Jonah as he continues to refuse; God waits, patiently and persistently, and when Jonah’s finally been spit back up onto dry land, God simply calls again: “Joooonaaaaaaahh…”

The second thing you learn is that God is willing to forgive. In fact, God is much more willing to forgive than we are. When the story begins, you think that Jonah runs away because he’s frightened, and that seems fair enough: anyone would be scared to go confront the mighty empire to the east. But it turns out that Jonah’s not scared that the Ninevites will arrest him, or something; he’s worried that they’ll listen to him, and change their ways, and that God might actually forgive them. Jonah quotes the words that all the prophets use when they praise the grace and mercy of God, but he twists them. It’s all in the tone: “I knew you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” You disgust me.

Now, we’re all a little bit like Jonah sometimes, right? We all hold grudges, we all keep score from time to time. There are people in all our lives whom we’re not ready to forgive, for one reason or another; and the idea that God might forgive them, even if we don’t… well, that’s not something that any of us want to hear.

And yet it’s important to remember, whenever we’re keeping score that way, that someone else is probably doing the same thing in reverse. We hold grudges against other people, and other people hold grudges against us. Sometimes maybe we need to be forgiven, in a way we’re not quite willing to forgive. However much we might like God to be strict with our enemies, in the end it’s probably a good thing to have a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in love. And the Book of Jonah doesn’t just tell us that this is what God is like; it shows us, in hilarious detail.

The third and final thing I learn from the Book of Jonah is this: God is not only capable of working through completely imperfect people; God is not only willing to navigate the messes we make of our lives; God seems to take delight in acting through all our limitations and peculiarities. When Jesus wants to gather a group of disciples, he doesn’t go for learned rabbis and mighty kings: he heads down to the bait shop, he gets a bunch of guys who know how to cast nets, guys who will, by the way, all run away from him by the end. When God wants to call a prophet, God doesn’t go for the perfect person who already knows everything about forgiveness and grace and love. God calls a prophet who needs to hear the same message that he’s supposed to preach. God calls Jonah, and Jonah runs away. And Jonah gets to feel what it’s like to be forgiven, before he’s invited to forgive.

It’s possible there’s someone out there, listening today, who feels drawn to the message of God’s mercy and grace and love, the message of God’s love revealed in Jesus that we celebrate every week, who is not yet perfect. In fact, I think I can say, without revealing privileged information, that there might even be more than one imperfect person in the room. I know, because I’m one of them. We imperfect people are sometimes less than perfectly patient. We’re sometimes less than perfectly gracious. But God knows that. God’s known it since the first human beings were alive. And God wants us anyway, God wants you anyway, imperfect as you may be, to be a messenger of God’s grace and mercy and love; and maybe, if you can stop running away long enough, to hear that same message for yourself.

Sermon — January 14, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’
Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’” (John 1:46)

The last few years have seen a steady stream of celebrity Christian conversions. This fall, the “LA Ink” tattoo artist and Goth icon Kat Von D announced that she was turning away from her interest in the occult and had been baptized in a small church in Indiana. On New Year’s Eve, the child star Shia LaBeouf was confirmed into the Catholic Church at a Franciscan friary, and announced that he’s discerning a call to be ordained as a deacon. And of course many people have been baffled as the spiritual journey of the rapper Ye, a.k.a. Kanye West, has taken a strange detour into what seems to be a combination of genuine Christian faith and white supremacism.

But my favorite celebrity Christian conversion has to be the story of Father Deacon Mercurios, who was ordained a deacon by the Archpriest Saba, Bishop of the Georgian Orthodox Diocese of North America, and now serves at the Holy Monastery of Saint Iakovos in Oklahoma. You’ve probably never heard of Father Mercurios, a name he took when he was ordained. You might have heard of Zac Hanson, which is his birth name, and even if you haven’t heard of Zac Hanson, I can almost guarantee that you’ve heard the chorus of the song that launched him and his brothers to late-’90s boy-band fame: “MMMBop! Ba duba dop ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du dop…”

Of course, celebrities and quests for spiritual experience are like peanut butter and jelly. But often these celebrity journeys take them into more individual and internal practices of spirituality. There’s something almost funny about the idea of a celebrity joining an ordinary local church.

Imagine if Matt Damon decided to move back to Cambridge and decided to join St. John’s. He couldn’t roll on down to Charlestown on a Sunday morning and walk into church without being mobbed by paparazzi. He couldn’t chat at Coffee Hour or go volunteer in the Garden on a Monday without making it into the tabloids. Fame isolates celebrities from most of the ordinary experiences of community; and yet Christianity is a communal religion, and God’s call to us is always an invitation into community.

That’s certainly the case when God calls Samuel. On the surface, this is a very individual call. Samuel literally hears the voice of God calling him in the night, while he lies before the Ark in the Temple. But Samuel can’t understand this call alone. He goes, again and again, to his mentor Eli, before they realize together that it’s God who’s calling Samuel, not the priest. God is calling Samuel, the individual, but the call can only be answered in community, through relationship. And once they’ve finally understood the nature of the call, and Samuel can receive the full message, it turns out that God is not only calling Samuel in community; God is calling Samuel for community. Eli’s sons, who are priests working in the Temple, are committing some horrible crimes against the people, and God gives this message of judgment and destruction to Samuel as a warning to give to Eli, on behalf of the community. So yes, Samuel’s call is an individual call from God, the kind of call you or I or any celebrity could hear. But it can only be understood in relationship, and it can only be answered by serving the community.

The same is true when Jesus calls the disciples. They are called individually, but they answer in pairs. And what they’re being called into is a new community with Christ. When we sometimes say that we “follow Jesus” in 2023, it can only be a metaphor. Jesus no longer exists in geographic space. But when Jesus tells Philip, “Follow me,” it’s quite a literal thing. (John 1:43) The disciples leave their homes to join a wandering band. They leave their communities to become a part of a new community. Their faith in Christ is not an idea, some kind of cognitive theological belief. It’s not even an action, like being baptized or serving the poor. It’s an experience of community, of presence, that can only be understood by following Jesus wherever it is he’s going. When Nathanael asks for some justification or explanation—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—Philip can only say, “Come and see.” (John 1:46) And it turns out that the community he’ll see is even wider than he could’ve imagined—it’s not just the disciples, Jesus says, but all the angels of God they’ll see with the Son of Man. (John 1:51) And after Jesus is gone, the community remains, and grows, and spreads throughout the world, greeting each new disciple with the same exact invitation: “Come and see.”

Within a few decades, it was clear to Paul how central this kind of community was. Paul writes all sorts of weird and wonderful things in his letters, but in 1 Corinthians especially you hear, again and again, this image of the “Body of Christ,” with each one of us as one of its organs or limbs or digits. Each member of the body, Paul says, serves a different function, has different strengths and weaknesses, different spiritual gifts. But what each member of the body does affects all the others. When one member of the Church is behaving badly, it’s as if one of your hands or one of your feet had gone off course. But when their gifts are all united and working together, they achieve a harmony that’s an order of magnitude greater than the sum of the parts. And by the way: Paul himself had a famously dramatic individual conversion, a blinding light shining from the sky and a voice speaking from the heavens. But he can only understand it with the help of another disciple, and he answers it by devoting his life to the nascent Christian community he had been trying to destroy. Are you seeing the pattern here?

I don’t think it’s a surprise that two of our celebrity converts feel called to the diaconate, the order of ministry that’s all about serving the community, all about bridging the gap between the church and the world. It seems to me that a lot of people in our culture are yearning for community: that the search for meaning is really a search for meaning in community. It’s hard to have a spiritual life in isolation that doesn’t go off the rails. Just ask Kanye West. Samuel and Nathanael and Paul knew that it’s hard to understand what God is saying to you on your own. It’s hard to do anything alone, actually. Maybe you can pretend to be self-sufficient, for a few years, if you’re young and healthy; but even then, just ask all the people who could go to the gym alone, but seek out CrossFit instead. This is why we read the Bible in community, why we pray in community. And this is why we try to serve our community as a community. And to be honest, that’s what’s most interesting to me in these stories of celebrity conversion—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Zac Hanson and Shia LaBeouf have felt God calling them to the diaconate in particular, to the order of ministry that is focused specifically on service and community, on bridging the gap between the church and the world so that the love we find and feel in this place might spill out into the world outside it.

There’s so much about spiritual life that can’t be looked up on a website or read in a book. There is so much we can’t understand on our own. There are so many questions about religion that can only be answered with the Apostle Philip’s words: “Come and see.” Because while personal prayer and meditation are wonderful things, real spiritual growth happens in community, and it happens for the good of the community.

I realize that I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re hearing these words, you already know some of that. But that also means that you have good news to share. Because you have come here, and you have seen, and presumably you’ve seen something good. And I wonder whether there are any Nathanaels in your life who need you to be Philip for them, any Samuels who need you to be Eli. In other words, I wonder whether you know anyone who’s searching for some kind of meaning or community but thinks they can’t find it in the church, whose response to the words “we’ve found something here” is the equivalent to Nathanael’s dismissive question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I wonder whether there’s anyone you know who’s hearing God’s voice calling them but thinks it’s something else.

And I wonder what it would mean to answer those questions like Philip does: “Come and see.” What’s that Centering Prayer thing about anyway? Come and see. How can you call yourself a Christian with all the awful things the Church has done, and still does? Come and see. What are you doing on this weekend? There can only be one answer that explains the hours we all spend in this church, and guess what: It’s “Come and see.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — January 7, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I apparently made it onto Santa’s nice list this year, and so for Christmas I received many books. Being the person I am, I sat down and immediately read about half of them, one after another.

Each of the stories I was given began in a completely different way. North Woods opens with an almost magical scene of a young couple in love fleeing Puritan Springfield to make their way to a new Promised Land of their own in the forests of New England. The Wager, which tells the story of the shipwreck of the 18^th-century British warship HMS Wager, begins with two rafts filled with castaways showing up a year after their ship had disappeared, each accusing the other of murder and mutiny. Umberto Eco’s postmodern novel The Name of the Rose—a gift from my comp-lit-major wife—opens with an elaborate prologue in which the narrator (or perhaps the author?) tells the story of the discovery (or invention?) of a copy of a copy of a strange fourteenth-century manuscript that either never actually existed or is quoted in a 1930s Italian translation of a Georgian book translating the works of a 17^th-century Latin theologian but which, in any case, the narrator chose to translate into Italian and now presents, as the rest of the book. Turns out to a murder mystery, for what it’s worth.

The way we begin our stories has the power to shape the way we experience the rest. I found myself mourning and rejoicing as the sylvan paradise of the young couple of North Woods is marred by violence, and later flourishes, and declines again. I felt disappointed by the anti-climactic letdown of the totally undramatic court martial at the end of the Wager, after that dramatic opening scene of mutual accusation. I was delighted and intrigued by Eco’s prologue: I mean, doesn’t it make you want to read a novel by an Italian postmodern philosopher and literary critic to know that it begins with a manuscript mystery, before continuing onto an actual mystery plot set among fourteenth century monks? (I’ll admit I haven’t finished that book yet.)

I remember when I was in middle school we learned to draw the plot of a story on a little graph, with the beginning, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the end. But beginnings are unique: the opening words of a story really shape how we hear the rest of it.

So let’s begin, as our morning began, with the beginning: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void…” (Gen. 1:1) The first words of the first book of the Bible begin the story of creation as a story of God coaxing order out of chaos. Genesis begins with a world that is tohu va-bohu, the Hebrew says, “wild and waste.” But the “Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters,” and she’s poised for creation. And God speaks, and the Word of God reshapes the chaos. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light, and God sees that it is good. These few sentences set you up for most of the themes of the whole Bible: There is one God who creates in unity and love, not pantheon of gods engaged in primordial struggle. God works through Word and Wind, through Speech and Spirit. And the world, this creation, is good, but chaos always lies right below the surface.

From this first beginning we fly forward in time two thousand years, to the decades after Jesus’ death, when the apostle Paul travels around the ancient Mediterranean spreading the good news. In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, he arrives in Ephesus, on what’s now the western coast of Turkey, and we hear the beginning of another story. In this case, it’s the beginning of a new spiritual life of Christian discipleship. Paul finds “some disciples,” Acts tells us, but he seems to find them only half-formed. They’re missing half the story. These Ephesians share Paul’s conviction that Jesus was the Messiah, but when Paul asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?” they answer him like a bunch of crusty old Episcopalians: “We didn’t even know there was a Holy Spirit!” We’ve only received the baptism of John, a baptism of repentance, they say. And Paul tells them that there’s so much more: not just repentance, but forgiveness; not just John’s fire and brimstone, but Jesus’ teachings of love. And, perhaps most importantly, there’s not just God the Father in heaven and Jesus the Messiah who walked the earth, but a Holy Spirit who’s moving among us right now. And the Book of Acts is really the story of the Holy Spirit, in the same way that the gospels are the story of Jesus. They’re followers of Jesus, but their spiritual life has not yet begun. And so Paul lays his hands on them, and the Holy Spirit fills them with power. And a new chapter in their lives begins.

The Spirit they receive in that moment is the same Spirit that descended on Jesus like a dove, out there by the Jordan River. It’s the same Spirit that immediately drove him out into the Judean wilderness. And this is how Mark chooses to begin his gospel. Now Mark, we’re pretty sure, was the first of the four gospels to be written. So the beginning of the beginning of the stories about Jesus is not the sweet baby lying in the manger, but the a grown man, baptized in a river, who rises and sees the heavens torn open above him and the Spirit of God flowing down out of them, who hears the Word of God declaring that he is the Beloved Son of God. And a new chapter in the Christian story, a new phase in the relationship between God and the people of God, begins.

In the church’s calendar, today we celebrate the Baptism of Christ, the first Sunday after the Epiphany. The season of Epiphany is a season of “manifestation,” a season when we remember and celebrate all the ways Jesus revealed God’s love to the world. And our readings today are almost a tale of three baptisms, each of which is its own manifestation of that love: the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River by John; the Ephesians receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit, as John had predicted; and in Genesis, the baptism of the whole world.

Each is a story of imperfection and love, of chaos and goodness. The disciples who’d received the baptism of repentance now receive the gift of the Spirit. God draws forth light from the murky chaos of the deep, and sees that it is good. God tears open the heavens and comes down, into the murky chaos of this world, to declare a message of love, to invite all those who have come to John the Baptizer for repentance to come to Jesus and follow in a way of love. These stories begin with imperfect people or an imperfect world—but none of them end there. And that’s the amazing thing about beginnings. Sometimes the beginning sets the perfect tone for the story. Sometimes it falls flat. Sometimes you’re still somewhere in the middle of the book, and sometimes a new chapter is beginning, even as the book draws toward its end.

So I wonder: What chapter of your story is beginning this year, and how can you baptize the start? Is there some chaotic water in your life, some formless void that needs the hovering wings of the Spirit to coax it into order and light? Is there some spiritual oomph that you need to transform the tedium of ordinary life with the power of the Holy Spirit? Is there something for which you need to repent, or some wrong you need to forgive? Do you need to see the heavens torn open to really believe that you, too, are the beloved child of God? Or do you just need someone to look at you, as God looks at all creation, and see that you are good?

Wherever the story of this year begins for you, may the God who sits enthroned above the flood give you the strength to know God’s love, and may the Holy Spirit give you and everyone around you the blessing of peace. Amen.