Sermon — November 5, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Amen.
(1 John 3:2)

You know that I love languages, English and otherwise. Clever wordplay, etymological trivia, puns; these things bring me really unbelievable amounts of joy. Some of you heard me expostulate just a few weeks ago on the distinction between “continuous” and “continual” in something C.S. Lewis had written; and yet I don’t get invited to parties very much…

English is full of odd little pairs like “continuous” and “continual,” in which changing a single syllable changes the meaning in a very precise way. (For those who don’t know, something is continuous if it forms an unbroken whole, without interruption; it’s continual if it occurs again and again, but with breaks in between.) But sometimes there are examples that are even better. Sometimes you get two words in which the literal meanings are exactly the same, but the connotations are completely different.

All of which is to say: “Beloved, we are God’s children now” — at our best, we’re childlike, and at our worst, we’re childish, and they are not the same thing. When we say “childlike,” of course, we evoke all the joy and innocence of childhood: the infant’s wonder at seeing their first piece of bark, the toddler’s excitement to go out playing in the snow, the inexplicable ability some elementary schoolers have to memorize details of paleontology known otherwise only to PhDs.

The Beatitudes, these words of blessing Jesus says to the crowd in the Gospel reading today, are the manifesto of a childlike faith. What is more blessed than being “poor in spirit,” holding adult possessions lightly but being rich in wonder and joy? Who are more blessed than “the meek,” who hide shyly behind a parent’s legs until you ask them about the firetrucks on their shirts? Who hungers and thirsts for righteousness more than the playground rules-enforcers, who insist that every child has a turn. (You know who you are, and we love you for it.) We adult Christians are at our best, Jesus says, when our lives are characterized by childlike simplicity, and innocence, and justice.

When we say “childish,” though, we mean the other side of children’s nature. The toddler’s refusal to allow any other child at the park to touch that toy, even though they don’t actually want to play it themselves. The preschooler’s hunger and thirst for more candy, from more houses, long after bedtime has come and gone. The older child’s self-confidence that they alone, and fourth graders like them, know anything about the world, and you know absolutely nothing, Mom.

And of course, we don’t blame children for being this way. (Well, sometimes we do. But we shouldn’t.) When a child is filled with childlike joy, we can rejoice with them. But when the same child, moments later, fills with childish rage, well… for a child to be childish is pretty much what you should expect, at least linguistically speaking.

In just a few minutes, we’ll welcome three more children into the Church through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Abby and Nora and Bo will be formally adopted as children of God; they will become full members of the Body of Christ. They will become saints, in the oldest and best and most Biblical sense, members of the holy people of God, as when Paul called the members of all the local churches “the saints”; “for the saints of God are just folk like me,” as the hymn goes, “and I mean to be one too.”

But sanctity isn’t perfection, and we’re not perfect people. Billy Joel is right about many things, but he’s wrong about this. We don’t get to choose whether we want to “laugh with the sinners” or “cry with the saints,” because we are all mixed, every one of us. There is no child who is so childlike that they are never childish. And this is true for all of us, adults and children alike. The mixedness of our nature doesn’t change over time; the stakes just get higher, and we remain children at heart.

You may be a parent or a grandparent, a beloved uncle or aunt, teacher, mentor or friend. You may be wise; you’re almost certainly wiser than me. But in God’s eyes, every one of us is still like a little child; and in our more childish moments, we all sometimes act our age.

I don’t mean this as an insult! I mean it as an invitation to empathy, for one another and for yourselves. None of us ever become perfect, fully-formed adults in this world. We are all still growing up, still children of God, through our whole lives. And what a relief. God looks on our childishness like we look on theirs: with frustration, maybe; with impatience, sometimes; but ultimately, more than anything, with love.

“Beloved,” St. John writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Every one of us is, already now, a beloved child of God, valued and cherished beyond anything we could imagine. And every one of us is being transformed, growing into a maturity so incredible that its nature has not yet been revealed. Together, day by day, we grow together toward life in the world that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes, toward a world of righteousness, and mercy, and peace.

Today, Abby and Nora and Bo join a “great multitude…from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (Revelation 7:9) who are being slowly drawn toward the God who loves them now and who love them all their lives. May God give them, and all of us, the grace to love in return; to serve God and our neighbors; to be patient with every childish moment and to share in every childlike joy.

Amen.

Many forest trees and shrubs will have what is called a ‘mast year’, where they produce an extraordinary amount of fruit or nuts. In our region, we most often notice this with acorns. There is no definitive underlying pattern for when mast years occur, nor are forest ecologists certain about how exactly such an endeavor is coordinated. Historically, ecologists assumed in the light of evolution that mast years were an outcome of a basic energetic equation: make more fruit when you have more starch. But if this were true, individual trees would mast by themselves when they have had a good year, but that is not the case. To quote my favorite ecologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer: 

“If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees don’t act as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”

I will point out here that the participation of all trees in mast fruiting means that each and every tree in the grove, across the county, is deeply important. If just the biggest and strongest tree masted, it would not matter and its efforts would be wasted. The biggest tree in the grove relies on and is supported by the sick trees, the young trees, the old trees, and the injured trees; just as these trees are reliant on the healthy trees in other ways. 

The author of that quote, Robin Wall Kimmerer, comes from the Potawatomi Nation which was relocated to what is now Oklahoma; where a mast fruiting species, the pecan, lives. The pecan, in its ability to be stored for long periods, has provided food for people in times where other food sources were scarce (similar to our New England maples). She speaks further of a relationship between mast fruiting and human needs:

The pecan groves give, and give again. Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves. By satiating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.

The story we heard today from Mathew is a familiar one to many of us. I think most of us can name the two greatest commandments without too much thought, they boil down to ‘love God’ and ‘love your neighbor’. It is short and sweet, and beautiful in its simplicity. Especially in comparison to other lists of commandments we get. Try as I might, I can’t necessarily remember *all ten* of the Ten Commandments easily. 

However, something I noticed in this story that feels important, is that Jesus doesn’t just give this list one and then the other. He breaks it up to say something about the second–that it is like the first.

You could take this to mean that the second is like the first in that, when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are loving God. This parallels some other sayings and teachings of Jesus, such as later in Matthew when he gives a lesson on ‘The Least of These’.

You could also take this to mean that they are like each other in that when we pray to God, and love God with all our heart, mind, and soul–we are actually loving our neighbors as ourselves. It is a big endorsement of prayer, and illustrates how much it can matter. Even though we sometimes feel powerless to change the trials and tribulations of our collective lives such as death, natural disasters, and war–we can still pray, and it matters. 

However, we can also take the fact that these two commandments are given as a relationship to each other to mean something more. Maybe it means that we are called to live together in community with one another, that our culture of rugged individualism is a myth. The second being like the first in that it isn’t just a good thing to love our neighbors, people who don’t believe in God do that all the time. It is like the first in that the second commandment is deeper than just charity, if it is like the first, then loving our neighbor should feel/be like loving God with all our heart.

After sitting with this notion for some time, I have begun to think that maybe Jesus was not giving a set of commandments in the strict sense. I think that maybe he was limited by his audience. They, like many of us today, might have felt like they needed commandments and some clear guidelines to follow. A methodology they could replicate to live like Jesus did. They needed two rules to follow instead of a new way of being in the world, commandments instead of an entirely new way of living. I think maybe Jesus, in his wisdom and love, was not *necessarily* giving us new commandments, but maybe giving us a new blueprint of living in a world that can feel like a bummer a lot of the time. A world where we live by being bound together in love to God and to each other. The second is like the first in that the loving, sustaining relationship we have with God is mirrored in the love we share with the communities we live in, that provide us sustenance. 

That sounds really great, I like that sentiment, it also sounds really exhausting to heap this overhaul of my way of living on top of my life as it is–no matter how much I would like to, or how much I want to. I am booked out: I have homework to do, and lots of it. I have family obligations to attend to. I have things I need to do for myself to feel like a person. I have a (wonderful) internship to work at and work in. I have trains to catch. I might be able to get a start on redoing my whole life at the end of the semester.

That all being said. I think there is a different way to go about this “overhaul” thing. I’ll go back to the small ecology lecture I gave at the beginning of this sermon. What I hope you noticed is that this way of living, to love our neighbors and love God, is mirrored for us in the natural world. The pecan trees that mast and provide an abundance of pecans for humans do not do so in a way that depletes them or causes them to burnout; rather they have a life process that both ensures their own livelihood and provides for their neighbors. 

I am reminded of my senior year of college. I lived in an off campus apartment with my two friends who both worked close to 40 hours a week to support themselves. I worked too, but less hours then they did, and for the entire year I had Fridays completely clear. It was awesome, I did my grocery shopping, I baked lots of cool cakes and stuff, and then I did all the dishes in the sink, swept the floors, made the living area look habitable again, and so on and so forth. It became my weekly habit that actually did not require that much of me, that folded easily into my day, but meant abundance to my friends. 

I am not a saint, it wasn’t entirely unselfless, like the pecan groves I also ensured my own survival, because somehow all the sudden my friends had so much more energy on Friday nights. We watched movies all bundled up on the couch together, we played darts (we did not get our security deposit back), we played board games, talked about our silly little hopes and dreams. Our flourishing was mutual, through only some additional chores on my own, I received so much more in return than I ever really gave. So I encourage you to look for the flourishing and the mutuality in your life.