Sermon — January 26, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

What are we doing here?

That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear. But it’s one that’s worth asking from time to time. In a world that’s full of urgent needs and pressing demands, what are we doing when we pause for an hour and gather here on Sunday mornings for worship? Our Scripture readings this morning happen to tell two stories of worship. They happened hundreds of years apart from one another, and thousands of years ago, but they have something urgent to say to us about why we do what we do, and what it can mean for us in the coming months years.

And so I want to invite you to come with me on a little journey through time today: to read these two stories as the pattern for our story as we try to understand God’s vision for this world.

We begin with the Book of Nehemiah, which describes events that took place about 2500 years ago. It comes at the beginning of what’s called the Second Temple period. The First Temple, built by the great King Solomon, had been destroyed about seventy years before. The Babylonians had besieged the city of Jerusalem, and demolished the Temple, and kidnapped the leaders and many of the people and brought them into exile for many years. After the Babylonian Empire fell, the people were finally allowed to go home. They began to rebuild the city. They began to rebuild the Temple. And as they tried to rebuild their life together, they gathered to hear the scribe Ezra read from the scroll of the Law.

There are echoes of what we still do here today. Ezra opens a book in the sight of the people. They stand. He says a blessing, and they offer a response. He reads. And this is a lot like what we just did. (Although we’re all glad that the Gospel reading didn’t last “from early morning until midday.”)

The people read from the book of the Law “with interpretation,” the Bible says.  And we do the same thing. We’re doing it right now. We listen to readings, and we hear them explained. And we do it within a context of community, and ritual, and prayer.

The “Law” here is the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Christians often think of Biblical law as being mostly concerned with ritual and purity, food laws and obscure commandments. And it does have all of those. But throughout the Law that they heard read that day, you also find a clear concern for people at the margins of society: most especially for people who are poor, and for the gerim, “strangers,” people who are not citizens, not members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but residents in the land.

And there’s an unusual characteristic of this law. Over the next few thousand years, the Jewish people rarely had an independent state. But the Law that Ezra read wasn’t something that needed to be enforced from above. It was something that the people could follow for themselves, even as the political authorities changed. It didn’t matter whether the ruler was Persian or Macedonian, Seleucid or Ptolemaic or Roman. Because the Law didn’t lay out an immigration policy that those authorities needed to enforce: it said, “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10:19) You or your ancestors have known what it is to be new to a place; so love the people who are new, as you would love your own family.

It didn’t matter who was king, because the social safety net the Law described didn’t rely on an official bureaucracy: it told the people, “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 23:22) The edges of your property, God said, really belong to the poor and to the strangers in the land. And whatever decisions whoever’s in charge may make, there cannot be a law against generosity and mutual aid. That commandment’s from Leviticus, by the way, a book we sometimes dismiss, but you know what else comes from that book? Jesus’ second-favorite law of all: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) When Ezra reads from the Law, it isn’t for the Persian emperor to hear, it’s for the people gathered there: This is who we are, and in this society we are trying to rebuild, this is how we’ll live, whoever sits on the throne. 

Ezra’s reading of the Law happened once. But that same kind of holy reading would go on, in synagogues and study houses around the Holy Land and around the world.

Jesus did it all the time. He does it in our Gospel reading today. He goes to the synagogue to worship on the Sabbath day. And when he stands to read, they give him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he reads, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

And they wait. Is there a sermon? Is he going to explain?

And Jesus simply says: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” (Luke 4:21)

He’s announced the agenda for the rest of his short life. God has sent me, Jesus says, to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, sent me to let the oppressed go free. He has announced the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of the jubilee, when debts are forgiven and injustices are made right. “He has anointed me,” Jesus says. He makes his claim to be the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, and he does it by recalling people’s attention to the Biblical values of equity, and justice, and liberation.

This is sometimes called Jesus’ “Nazareth Manifesto,” but he’s not making a speech. His comments on the text are brief. He doesn’t lay out policy ideas. He reads from a holy text, and he reminds the people of God’s vision for the world, a vision of good news for the poor, release for the captives; sight for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

You might ask what the point is. Does Jesus really think that word will spread from his little synagogue in Galilee down to Pontius Pilate’s palace, that news will travel across the sea to Rome; that suddenly Herod Antipas will say, “Maybe we’d better do something to help the poor,” that the Emperor Tiberius will let his oppressed subjects go free?

News will spread all right, not of Jesus’ values but of his claim to be the Messiah. Will they accept his claim to rule? Will they accept his word as law? No. He’s gonna be crucified for that.

But Jesus’ words aren’t really for them.

Jesus’ words aren’t for the powerful people, the rulers of his day and age. They’re for us. For all of us who hear his words and are reminded that there is another way to look at the world: through the eyes of a Messiah who spent his life among the people at the margins of society, the Word of God made flesh, the Law of Love in human form.

These words are good news for us who hear them, rich and poor alike, in any day and age, because they remind us that God’s vision of generosity and love does not depend on human politics; that we can live according to that heavenly law whatever our earthly laws may be.

Laws change. Leaders come and go. The Episcopal Church as a whole Office of Government Relations that advocates for our values, whoever the government may be. But whether their words are heard or not, we can live our values now. We can treat our gay and lesbian and transgender neighbors with dignity and respect, love them and protect them as ourselves, as God has commanded us. We can welcome people who are strangers in our land, not because of our opinions on how they arrived, but because we’re all human beings, and it’s really freaking cold, and the only way that we can survive in this land is to welcome one another, and help each other out, as locals have been helping newcomers out for four hundred years and more. We can choose to leave the edges of our fields unreaped to share with people who don’t have enough—even if these days, that takes the less-romantic form of writing a check. We can glean things from our closets that we’d forgotten were ever them, and drop them off at the Clothes Closet to be harvested with joy. There’s a bonus perk for church members: you can even drop them off on a Sunday morning. I won’t tell you came outside the scheduled time.

We can live, in other words, as people of faith have always lived, with our feet in two worlds: governed, yes, by the laws of the land in which we live—but guided by God’s holy law of grace, and mercy, and love.

Sermon — January 19, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

We often imagine ourselves as the main characters of whatever story we tell. Kids read Harry Potter and imagine that they would be among the few Muggle-born children to receive a Hogwarts letter. College students look back on the Gilded Age and throw Great Gatsby-themed parties. Adults watch Downton Abbey and imagine what it would be like to live in that place and time, and when we do, we almost always imagine ourselves “upstairs,” living the glamorous lives of the aristocrats. I call this “the Downtown Delusion.” While the overwhelming majority of our ancestors were ordinary people who spent their time in drudgery, in the Disney movies of our own lives, we are usually the princes and princesses, but only rarely the peasants.

The same goes for Scripture. Like any good book, most of the Bible follows the main character. And as readers, we have a privileged view. We hear the stories of Jesus’ birth that only the shepherds, Mary, and Joseph knew. We hear the explanations that he gave when he took the disciples aside, away from the crowd. We see the miracles he did without anyone realizing at the time. When you read the Gospels, you know more about what’s going on than anyone else but God. And that makes sense: a story that followed some ordinary guy who occasionally bumped into Christ on his journeys around Galilee would be great; but it wouldn’t be the Gospel of John, it would be The Life of Brian.

But most of us live ordinary lives. We are the Muggles who have no idea about the battle against Voldemort happening all around. We are the unseen scullery girls scouring the pans, or the shopkeepers meeting for third-hand gossip about whatever’s happening up at the Big House. Our experiences of life are more like my favorite painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”: a ploughman walks behind his horse; a shepherd stands, gazing up at the trees; the business of a city goes on, and over their shoulder, not quite in the background but hard to see if you aren’t looking, Icarus drowns. He’s flown too close to the sun, melting his waxy wings, but they know nothing of that. Astounding things of mythological proportions are happening all around them, but they go unnoticed.

So I want to re-tell this story, not from the point of view of Jesus and his disciples, but from the point of view of one of the guests. Jesus wasn’t the main character in this story, after all; Jesus was just “also there.”

You, the wedding guest, weren’t there for him. No, you were there because your second cousin Ben was finally tying the knot with Becca, and you were glad, because you’d known them both since you were all kids. You’d all worked together in the fields during the harvest. Ben’s dad had often helped to mend your fishing nets. Becca’s mom made the best bread in the village. And here you all were, with what seemed to be a couple hundred other people, too, and no surprise. These village celebrations sometimes grew and grew, and it had been a hard winter, and everyone seemed to have brought another friend of a friend to join in the feast.

In fact, the crowd had clearly gotten bigger than the happy couple had intended, because murmurs started coming back from the bar that the wine was running low. And that was before the dancing even began. The new couple began to worry—Would people remember this wedding as the one that ran out of steam halfway through? That’s not a very auspicious start to a marriage. But no! Thank God. The bartenders must’ve misplaced a few big jugs, or something, because the drinks began to flow again, and the murmurs turned to renewed delight, and no one would remember this night as anything other than the joyful celebration of Becca and Ben that it was.

A couple weeks later, perhaps, odd rumors may have started: your friend Sue said that her brother Mike said that Nate and Phil were going around saying that the wine really had run out, but Jesus—you know, Jimmy’s brother, Mary and Joe’s kid—these are all real, Biblical names, by the way—that Jesus had just stretched out his hand, and ta-da! the day was saved. Water into wine.

You might just politely back away. Or you might enjoy the delicious feeling of being in the know, being an eyewitness to the events, someone who really had the scoop: “Come on, Sue, I was there! Don’t you think I would’ve known if Jimmy’s brother was doing miracles? I saw him. He didn’t even get up from his seat.”

That’s the baffling thing about this story. On the one hand, it’s a miracle of superfluous proportions. It’s hard to even comprehend the scope. Six stone jars, twenty to thirty gallons each: that’s 120 to 180 gallons of wine. Can you picture 180 gallons of wine? Let me do the math. 180 gallons is 23,000 fluid ounces—that’s 4,600 glasses of wine, ready to be served—after all the wine that had already been drunk. And this wine, the steward is surprised to note, is good. In quantity and quality alike, this miracle is remarkable.

But no one notices. Even the steward doesn’t know where this new wine comes from. He’s impressed at the groom’s generosity, not at Jesus’ power. (John 2:9-10) But the groom doesn’t know what’s going on either. The servants filled the jars with water, so they understand; Jesus and his mother know, of course, and his friends. But this is a quiet miracle done reluctantly. Jesus doesn’t give a speech to explain the theological meaning of the sign. He just handles the situation, as his mother seems to know he will. And so it is that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11) His disciples believed in him. Not the crowd of wedding guests, not the bride and groom, not even the servants who see what he has done; but only that small group really see what’s going on.

In the season after the Epiphany, we reflect on all Christ’s “epiphanies,” all the ways in which God becomes manifest in the world. We hear stories of miracles, small and large, of wondrous events that reveal something about God’s love. But the world doesn’t always seem like a miraculous place. And even when we do have a reason to thank God, we sometimes wish that God had acted sooner. So for example, I’m giving thanks, right now, as many people are, for the emergence of a fragile cease-fire in Gaza, and yet it’s hard to see a miracle in the end of yet another episode in a cycle of violence and destruction, in a world that seems to promise the prospect of more to come.

But I wonder how many miracles are like the wedding at Cana. I wonder how often we play the role of the shepherd in the Bruegel painting, peacefully gazing off in entirely the wrong direction while something amazing happens behind us. I wonder how often we’re like those wedding guests, in fact, who actually receive the gift of the miraculous thing that Jesus has done—who drink the wine, and enjoy the wedding that nearly went awry, without ever realizing who’s saved the day.

I wonder what it would be like to assume that the real story is going on somewhere else. To look for epiphanies everywhere. Not only in the huge, world-changing events, even though they sometimes happen. Not only in the amazing cures, even though they sometimes happen, too. But in the everyday miracles that too easily go unnoticed—in the grown-up son who actually does what his mother suggests, in the gracious guest who compliments the host, in the joyful celebration of a new life begun, in all the smaller ways in which God moves in ordinary life. For all the grief and pain and fear that are in this world, we are surrounded also by grace, and these moments of grace can be new signs every day of Jesus’ presence; little glimpses, every day, that still reveal the glory of God.

Sermon — January 12, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There are three questions that always come up when we get to this particular Gospel reading, as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus on this Sunday after the Epiphany. First: Why does Jesus, of all people, need to be baptized? Second: What on earth is John talking about with this baptism of fire, and why does it sound so scary? And third, for the particularly regular worshipers: Didn’t we just read this? (Like, a month ago?)

And indeed we did! There is a Venn diagram in which the Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Advent overlaps with the Gospel reading for this morning. In December, we read a few extra verses at the beginning, where John calls people a “brood of vipers” and tells them that “the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” This morning, we read the verses at the end, in which Jesus is baptized. And in the middle, the two Sundays overlap with the winnowing fork and the threshing floor, with the Holy Spirit and the unquenchable fire.

And Michael preached a great sermon on that overlapping part back then. (He’s away for a few weeks at seminary, by the way; I didn’t fire him.) He pointed out that this winnowing process isn’t about dividing between people, saying you are wheat but you are chaff—you will be gathered in, but you will burn in unquenchable fire. It’s about something within each person.

You can compare the image to some others that we get. Jesus talks about a fishnet catching all kinds of fish, and the good fish being picked out, and the rotten thrown away. (Matthew 14:47-51) And he talks about dividing the sheep from the goats, on the basis of how they treated people who were hungry, or foreign, or sick. (Matt. 25:31-46)

You can be a good fish, or a bad one. You can be a sheep or a goat. These are separate categories, and you can sort one from the other. But there’s no such thing as a grain of wheat, without chaff. The chaff is just the husk, the protective outer layer around the kernel inside. And the wheat and the chaff are always both there at first. Even the heartiest whole-wheat flour throws away the chaff; but without the chaff, that grain of wheat could never survive. And so you need to thresh the harvested wheat, to loosen the grain from the straw. And you need to winnow it, tossing it up into the air with the fork, letting the heavier grains of wheat fall back to the ground while the lighter husk, the chaff, floats off.

Wheat and chaff aren’t like good fish and bad, sheep and goats, two separate categories into which you, as a person, might fall. We all have both wheat and chaff. They are two parts of each one of us, one that has served its purpose and can be released, and the other that needs to emerge for you to become who you were meant to be.

This makes some sense, I think. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that many of our worst tendencies—or at least the medium-bad ones that matter for most of us day to day—originate as defense mechanisms. Our annoying or difficult or toxic personality traits start out as the ways we protect ourselves against one another, or our parents, or the world—they are our chaff, our own protective husks. But eventually, they’re no longer helping us, they’re hurting, and it’s time to let them go.

So much for John, for now. We’ll come back to him. But what’s up with Jesus? Why is he being baptized today? (Well, Ethan’s being baptized today. Why was Jesus being baptized back then?) Christian give lots of theological explanations of what baptism is and what it means. And for most of those explanations, the Baptism of Jesus is a confusing event. Is baptism about the washing away of our inherited original sin? The who are most adamant that that’s what baptism does would also tell you that Jesus doesn’t inherit original sin. Is baptism way that we symbolize and embody coming to believe in Jesus and accepting him as our Savior? Jesus’ own baptism seems redundant, then. (It’s a sign that he believes in himself?) Is baptism a way of bringing someone new into the Church, making them a part of the Body of Christ in some mystical but also real way? Again, it seems odd—surely Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan isn’t what makes him part of the Body of Christ; his body, when it goes down into the water, is by definition, the Body of Christ.

These are all reasons that we might be baptized, now. But why was Jesus baptized, then?

I don’t know “why,” of course, but I do know “what.” In other words—I don’t know why it is that God chose to act this way, but I do know what happens, according to Luke: the heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends, and a voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (3:22)

Have you ever needed to hear that voice? Have you ever needed God to say, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased?” Have you ever just needed to hear someone say that, for someone to tell you that you are worthy, and you are loved, and they are pleased with you?

Everyone who has ever been baptized, or ever will be, is baptized into the Body of Christ. In some mysterious way, we join with him in that one baptism. We go down into the water with Jesus, and with him, we stand back up. And indeed, God says to each one of us, on that day, and every day, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t any chaff in your life, if you want to bring it back to John. It doesn’t mean God likes everything you do or say. It means that God loves you, like the best parent you can imagine would love you. It means that God wants you to be the best and most true version of yourself. It means that God wants you to try to be faithful to God’s promises of love, and to be faithful to God’s commandment to love as you have been loved. And sometimes a life lived in love feels a lot like being threshed—at least how I imagine being threshed would feel, if I were wheat. Sometimes life turns you inside out, and upside down. It whacks you with a big old flail and it picks you up with a winnowing fork and throws you in the air. Sometimes you find yourself on the floor, thinking, “What on earth was that?” And sometimes, on the other side of all of that, you come out looking a little more like wheat, with a few bits of that chaff in your life blown away.

But God isn’t only waiting for you on the other side of all that tumult, ready to love you once you’re perfect. God is already here, now, loving you where you are, and as you are. And the message that Isaiah delivered to the ancient Israelites is the same message that God has for you: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you…You are precious in my sight,” God says to you today, “and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:1–2, 4)

And everything else—every article of faith, every choice we make in life, every hymn that we sing, each of our baptismal vows—is nothing but our attempt to respond to God in love; to be the beloved children God already knows we are, in the sure and certain hope that we will one day stand before God, and God will wipe off that remaining bit of chaff, and God will say again to each one of us, more clearly than ever before, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”