Sermon — April 28, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God;
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

Four months ago at the Christmas Stroll, we stood out on the sidewalk on a cold night and handed out little bags of cookies and candy with information about Saint John’s and a friendly smile. And in each bag was a card with my favorite verse from the Bible, and the church’s website and logo. And I pulled one out to show you, and I realized that the citation was printed wrong: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. — 1 John 4:12” It’s actually 1 John 4:7, but shockingly enough we didn’t get any phone calls to the office in mid-December, correcting our mistake. I’m not sure whether it’s good news or bad news that nobody bothered to pick up the Bible and check, but then again, at least for me: ignorance is bliss.

It’s an interesting exercise, to pick out the one verse of the Bible you’d want to put on a card to hand out on the street. Maybe that’s your homework today. What’s one sentence that expresses your faith that you’d want someone else to hear?

You might even find it in the passage from 1 John we just heard. It’s one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It’s like a compilation of greatest hits: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us… No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…” and of course, there’s the verse that you’ll hear Michael paraphrase whenever he ends a sermon, “We love because he first loved us.”

As a person and as a Christian, I’ve always loved these words of love. I first read 1 John at a pivotal time in my life, on a Christmas Day long ago, when this reading is part of the service of Morning Prayer, and these words have been one of the touchstones of my faith ever since. Whenever I hear them, I’m comforted by the reminder of God’s love for me, which began long before I could begin to love myself or anyone else. I’m reassured by the reminder that although no one can see God, if we love, God lives in us, and so we can see God like we see the passing of the wind through the trees, in the ripples of love that flow between human beings. I’m challenged by the reminder that there is no fear in love—after all, what do I fear more than failing the people I love?—and then I’m freed from a little bit of fear by that promise that I can “stand with boldness on the day of judgment,” because in the end it’s not the perfection of my love that matters to God. In the end, my whole life is God’s love being perfected in me.

So as a person, I’ve always loved these words of love. But as a pastor, as a preacher—as a guy who occasionally stands out on the sidewalk with one chance to share something with the world—it’s this first verse that stands out to me, today. It’s this verse that I chose to have printed on a card: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

Last week a colleague sent me a set of slides from a church event, which contained an alarming projection. You probably know that the Episcopal Church, like most other churches in America, is experiencing a long-term decline in attendance. Decade after decade, year after year, the total number of people attending an Episcopal church on a Sunday morning has simply continued to decline, in a more-or-less linear trend. It’s a linear-enough trend, in fact, that you can do a linear regression, if you are so inclined. You can extend the line down and calculate the year in which that attendance number would hit 0. In early 2020 you could see that if trends continued, by 2046 there wouldn’t be anyone in church. But trends did not continue. Instead, the pandemic came, and the bottom fell out, and now that number is more like 2039: Just 15 more years, and statistically, on average, if the trends continue, the pews of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts will be empty.

Of course, averages obscure variety. There are plenty of churches like ours, where attendance is growing, not shrinking. But all that means is that for every church that can hold off decline another decade until 2049, there’s one where attendance will be at zero in the next five years. And yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics, and yes, it’s probably an asymptotic curve, which basically means—if you haven’t taken a math class in a few years—there is probably some number of us who are crazy enough to be here no matter what. But still, it’s a drastic enough trend that we have to reckon with it.

When Bishop Alan visited us in December, he gave me a slightly-overdue certificate that institutes me as your Rector, and gives me a certain charge: “Do not forget the trust of those who have chosen you,” it says. “Care alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. By your words and in your life, proclaim the Gospel. Love and serve Christ’s people. Nourish them, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.”

And this isn’t just for me, as a priest. It’s a beautiful description of any Christian life. These words are full of the spirit of love. Care for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor. Proclaim the good news by your words and in your life. “Love and serve Christ’s people,” the letter says to me, and to you.

But what do we do when that line hits zero? What do we do when Christ’s people are all gone?

It’s a trick question, of course. It’s a question that comes from fear and anxiety about the future of the church, and that fear and anxiety come from how much we love the present of the church. But “what do we do when church attendance reaches zero?” is a very different question from “what do we do when all Christ’s people are gone?” If we take the vision laid out in this First Letter of John seriously, then our understanding of who God’s people are cannot be limited to our measurements of who shows up on Sundays: for “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God,” and I don’t believe for a minute that the decline of the Church has meant a decline in people’s ability to love. The Church doesn’t have a monopoly on love—in fact, to our discredit, sometimes it’s the other way around.

And that’s why I love these words. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is a challenge to the Church’s traditional claim to know who’s in and who’s out. To say that “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” is to say that no pastor or priest can ever tell you that you don’t belong in the Church, or that you’re not the beloved child of God, so long as your life is shaped by love.

But these words are not just a challenge to the Church. They’re a reminder and an invitation. They’re a reminder that there are more people who know God in the world than those you’ll find at prayer on a Sunday, and that God’s work is not confined to what we do together as part of the church. And they’re an invitation to go and be a part of that work, to “love one another, because love is from God.”

The Church may be shrinking, but the need for love is not, and the capacity to love is not. As 1 John reminded us last week, love is not about feeling something, or about saying something; in the Christian understanding, love is seeing your neighbor in need of help and doing something. And maybe that is the work of the Church in this new era, as our traditional structures and our traditional ways continue to fall apart. Maybe our work is to look for the people in our communities who are already acting out their love in the world. To recognize, whether they are Christian or not, that in our eyes, they are born of God and know God in that love. To find where Jesus is moving out there, in the world, and to follow him. To join our siblings, carrying out that work. Because we know that “if [we] do not love the brothers and sisters whom we have seen, [we] cannot love God whom we have not seen.”  (1 John 4:20)

So, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8) Amen.

Sermon — April 21, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a beautiful piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this morning, with the title, “The Poems That Taught Me How to Love,” in which Nicholas Casey writes of the summer term he spent in Chile at the age of 19, a summer when he discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s immediately had him hooked: his imagery and emotion captured everything it was to be a freshman full of romantic longing, living in a foreign land. Also, it was the only Spanish poetry he could actually read. “Ah vastness of pines,” he read on the train down to Patagonia, “murmur of waves breaking, / Twilight falling in your eyes.” And yet there was no “you,” for him; no muse to whom to recite all these poems.

Until the last day, at least, when he met a girl. A German girl, visiting from Berlin. They spent the next day together, and the eleven-hour bus ride back into town. He read her Neruda’s poetry after dinner before they went back to their separate rooms.

The next day, as the bus left and they waved goodbye, his heart was breaking. He ran out to the curb—Stop the bus! Please! I forgot something. The driver stopped, and he stepped on, and gave his love a kiss. And in the perfect version of their lives, that would only be the beginning. But this is not the perfect version of life, and there was a boyfriend back in Germany named Jan, and it’s possible she wasn’t quite as into him as his Neruda-addled brain may have thought; in any case, that one day was the story’s beginning, middle, and end.

It’s a great little story—if you don’t get the magazine, you can find the piece online.

It’s a well-timed story, too, because this Sunday is, for us, is all about love. Not romantic love, of course. But it’s tempting to sentimentalize nonetheless, to sing lovely hymns and hear lovely words, to be as intoxicated by “The King of Love my shepherd is” as our young scholar was by the poetry of Neruda, and to think that feeling was love, and to think that expressing that feeling in beautiful poetry was love. But if we go a little deeper into what 1 John has to say about love this morning, it turns out that love cannot be captured in poetry or in hymns, because love is not a feeling or a word: it’s an action.

Of course, the kind of love that Pablo Neruda’s writing about is not the same as the Christian kind of love. You may have heard before, or maybe not, that ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament is written, uses several different words for love. Eros is passion, romantic love; the yearning and pining that we might call a “crush.” in its most refined form, it’s an appreciation of the beauty within another person that leads us to appreciate Beauty itself. This is Pablo Neruda love. The second kind of love is filia, friendship, the kind of mutual affection and loyalty that binds together two good friends. When you like somebody, when you enjoy their company, when you want to hang out and chat after church: that’s filia. But the word for “love,” when the New Testament talks about love, is neither of these. It’s agape, and that means something else. Agape is a hard word to pin down, but it means something like “unconditional love.” It means, as Thomas Aquinas would say, “to will the good for someone else.” It’s a love that’s modeled in God’s own love for us, and in this kind of love there’s more duty than sentiment. As 1 John says, we should “love one another, just as he had commanded us.” (1 John 3:23) And that’s a sentence that makes no sense for the other kinds of love. Eros and filia can’t be commandments. You can’t be ordered to fall in love with someone. You can’t be obliged to like them. But you can be, and you are, commanded to love.

And that’s possible because if we’re talking about agape love, you can love someone without being in love with them. You can love someone without being related to them. You can love someone without even liking them, without having any feelings about them at all. And if that’s the case, then love cannot be about what you feel. Love is about what you do. And this is exactly what 1 John says.

“Little children, let us love,” the Elder writes, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And he asks: “How does God’s love—How does the agape of God—abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help?” (3:17) When you see someone who needs your help, he says, what matters isn’t what you feel: it’s what you do. That’s what love is.

Most of us live in Boston, or Cambridge, or Somerville. I don’t need to tell you that this is a region of great inequality, a place where people with all the world’s goods and people in deep material need live side by side. And it’s also a place where people respond in love. Our only grocery store may be a Whole Foods, but Harvest on Vine distributes 12,000 pounds of food a month. The Clothes Closet was hopping here yesterday, with dozens of people shopping from clothes that dozens of other people had donated. We can always use more filia, more friendship and loyalty and solidarity across our communities, more connections and compassion between people from different backgrounds, but when it comes down to it, what matters from a Christian point of view is not word or speech or feelings of warmth, but action.

And there is more than one kind of need in the world. Every one of us, however wealthy or privileged or not, needs help, in one way or another. And every one of us, however little we may have in the eyes of the world, can love and care for and help someone else. We should yearn for and work for a more just world, in which there is no poverty or hunger, and yet on this side of the kingdom of God, we will always still need help. And when we see someone else who needs help, whether that’s material or emotional or spiritual, we should help, even if it means we have to make some sacrifice: because that is what Christian love is.

I loved the Times magazine piece because it’s the purest comparison I could possibly find. On one end of the spectrum, you have agape, Christian love, the self-giving, servant kind of love that’s not about words, but about action. And all the way over here on the other end, you have a shy college freshman’s Neruda-infused yearnings, hour after hour of poetry and speech, a depth and richness of feeling but no action at all—except that single, perfect kiss.

And yet as different as these two kinds of love are, the story points to something true, right there in the title: “The Poems that Taught Me How to Love.” We need to learn how to love. We need a poet to give voice to our inarticulate yearning. We need someone to model for us what it is to love.

And in the very different world of Christian love, that’s exactly what Jesus does. “We know love by this,” the Elder writes, “that he laid down his life for us.” (3:16) We know love by this. As Christians, we look at Jesus, and we listen to these stories about his teachings, his life, and his death, and we say: “This is what it means to love.”

And what we see, when we turn to these stories, wanting to know what it means to love, is a humble, patient, gentle, caring man, a good shepherd who lays down his own life for the sheep. To love is not to be like the hired hand, who hangs out with the sheep when times are easy, and then runs away and leaves them behind when the wolf comes and things get hard. To love is to be like the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, who’s willing to do anything to love and serve us when we are in need. And he doesn’t just do this to teach us how to love, but by doing all this, he does teach us to love.

And so we are invited—we are commanded—to love. Not to try to stir up inauthentic emotions for one another, not to try to warm our hearts with love, “for God is greater than our hearts,” and God knows already knows whether we like one another or not, and we don’t need to pretend. But to love one another, to give up some small part of our goods, to lay down some small part of our lives, to help one another when we are in need, so that just as we abide in God, God’s love abides in us.