Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Freed to be Yourself

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Freed to be Yourself

 
 
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Sermon — March 2, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last week, I went on a short trip to London, and after getting four hours of airplane-seat sleep on the way over, spending the day with my one- and three-year old nieces, going to a conference with a few hundred people, flying back on a plane full of British teenagers on a school trip, then making it through church and confirmation class, on Monday I somehow strangely found that I was coming down with a cold. Who could’ve imagined?

It wasn’t a bad cold, not at all. But it gave me that feeling that a head cold or allergies often do, of a kind of fuzzy barrier between my brain and the world. Do you know what I mean? As if there was a layer of gauze in front of my face, and I just didn’t feel myself. So although I wasn’t particularly tired, and I didn’t have a particularly sore throat, or much of a cough, I just didn’t quite feel like myself.

And then over the course of the week, I finally felt a little better each day, until finally, on Saturday, I woke up feeling like myself again, and it was as if a veil had lifted from before my face.

There’s a question that I have sometimes when I read these two stories about Moses and Jesus, in which they are transfigured and a divine light shines from their faces: Is this a process of addition or subtraction? In other words—In these moments, is God adding to their faces something new, some holy light that wasn’t there before; or is God taking something away, removing some outer layer that had obscured the divine spark within? Is the Transfiguration like putting on a layer of makeup and looking extra good—or is it like recovering from a cold, and suddenly finding that you are yourself again?

The answer may be different, of course, in the two stories. Moses has been up on Mount Sinai with God, receiving the Law, basking in the divine presence. And you can almost imagine him as an iron left in the fire, heating up. He’s been immersed in holiness for 40 days, and when he returns, he glows—like the iron pulled from the fire, he is himself a source of heat and light. And the people are afraid. He has to veil his face; he has to hide that light. He needs something to obscure his holiness so that the people are not burned. But whenever he goes into the Tabernacle to be with God, he lowers the face again, and it’s as if his holiness is continually renewed by returning once again to the presence of God.

For Jesus, it seems to be the other way around. Jesus goes up a mountain, too, but in this case, he’s the source of light. As he’s praying, it seems that an invisible veil has fallen away. His face is changed, and even his clothes become “dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). In this moment on the mountain, Jesus’ true nature is revealed. A voice comes from the cloud that overshadows the disciples, and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (9:35) And they are stunned.

When Moses comes down from the mountain, it seems like addition: the Spirit of God has added something to Moses to infuse him with a holiness that is visible and palpable. When Jesus goes up on the mountain, it seems more like subtraction: the Spirit seems to take away something that otherwise hides the divine reality of who Jesus is.

But we didn’t only hear two stories of change, today. There was a third, this strange story of a boy who’s been possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Now, we could speculate about the medical details of his condition, but that would miss the point. There is some spirit, Luke tells us, some outside force, that’s in control. It oppresses him, it makes him act unlike himself. And Jesus frees the boy from the thing that is controlling him. He heals him, he restores him to wholeness, and the boy’s true self, no longer weighed down by the power of this spirit, is revealed. It is the miraculous version of recovering from a cold: The greatest miracle Jesus does is to allow this boy to be himself, as he really is. The boy is revealed just as Jesus was: he is himself, exactly as he is.

This is the beauty and the promise of the Transfiguration for us. We are not Jesus. But sometimes in our spiritual lives, we are like Moses, and what we need is to spend some time in the presence of God, and be filled with God’s holy warmth and light, so we can bring those back down to the world. And sometimes, we’re like the boy; sometimes we need to be freed from the things that are weighing us down, so that we can be revealed as ourselves, as we truly are.

It’s occasionally been observed that churches are full of quirky people. And it’s true. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but if you’re sitting in a church on a Sunday morning in Boston in 2025, you must be at least a bit unusual. (In a good way!) In a statistical sense, just by virtue of being among the small fraction of the population who regularly go to church, you’ve proven that you’re kind of strange, but that actually misses the point. Here’s my thesis: Every human being is kind of strange; faithful Christians are just more willing to admit it. In a healthy church community you should expect more quirkiness than in the world outside, because the nature of the Gospel is that it frees us to be ourselves.

We come here into the presence of God, and we hear that God is love. We hear that God loves us, as we are in our inmost selves, and not as we pretend to be. And at our best, we can lower the veil for a moment that hides our faces, and see one another as we really are. For a moment, together, we can see the glory of God “as though reflected in a mirror,” and we can be transformed, growing from glory into glory. (2 Cor. 3:18) We can absorb a little bit of the radiance of God, and more importantly, we can be freed from the unclean spirits of judgment and criticism that afflict us in the world. We can be ourselves, and we can be a little weird, thank God. Because God wants us to recover from our life-long spiritual cold. God wants to set us free from the things that keep us from being our true selves. God wants us to lower the veil, and to let our faces shine with the radiance of God’s own love and light.

And this may sound like a frivolous thing, like a whole sermon built around the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” But I think it’s the most serious thing in the world. I genuinely believe that the message of God’s unconditional love is good news, and I genuinely think that is has the power to change the world: not by giving us a new burden, a new commandment to love one another as God has loved us; but by releasing us from the burdens the world puts on us to be anything other than the people we truly are.

There is a weight of expectation that seizes many of us and dashes us to the ground. There is a veil we use to hide ourselves in shame, praying that nobody really find us out. There is an epidemic of anxiety driven by the brutal judgment of social media and dating apps. There is a real crisis of masculinity driven by our failure to say that to be kind and compassionate and vulnerable is, in fact, to be a man, and a better man than the one who’s brash and arrogant and rude. There are a thousand small ways in which we veil our faces so that the world cannot see us as we are, and every one of them is a lost opportunity for light to shine in the world. And while I don’t want to go through a whole list, I really do think that there are dozens of social and political effects of our basic inability to believe that God loves us, and that God’s grading us with a rubric that’s nothing like what we would call success.

So Lent begins this week. And Lent is a good time to make an honest reckoning of who we are. Lent is a good time to let go of some of the ways in which we hide our true selves in shame, and to let the veil disappear. Lent is a good time to act with great boldness, as Paul says; to be who we really are, as God has made us and as God loves us. To turn toward the Spirit of the Lord, knowing that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” (2 Cor. 3:16) and to let ourselves be freed from the burdens that hold our spirits down, so that we stand before God and be transformed from one degree of glory to another.

Is Such the Fast That I Choose?

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The seasons are changing—and I don’t only mean the sudden warmth outside. (Okay, maybe “warmth.”) This Sunday is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and the celebrations of Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday will soon move on to the solemnities of Ash Wednesday. In other words, this is the final News & Notes before Lent begins.

Conversations this time of year often include the question, “What are you giving up for Lent?” Some people choose to fast from something they enjoy; others take the opportunity to permanently turn away from something they regret. Many people choose to “take something on,” a new spiritual practice or act of service.

Whether you’re still wondering about a Lenten fast or practice, or you’ve already decided—or even if you aren’t planning to change a thing!—I want to invite you to think about the words of Isaiah in our first reading for Ash Wednesday.

Isaiah describes his people’s practices of fasting, more than 2500 years ago: practices of piety and self-humbling, intended to appease their God. And then the prophet says—speaking in the voice of God—

5                Is such the fast that I choose,
                                    a day to humble oneself?
                  Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
                                    and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
                  Will you call this a fast,
                                    a day acceptable to the LORD?

6                Is not this the fast that I choose:
                                    to loose the bonds of injustice,
                                    to undo the thongs of the yoke,
                  to let the oppressed go free,
                                    and to break every yoke?
7                Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
                                    and bring the homeless poor into your house;
                  when you see the naked, to cover them,
                                    and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

(Isaiah 58:5-7)

With these words, God reorients our attention. God looks at our practices of repentance and piety—our bowing down and kneeling, our foreheads marked with ashes, our many pious words—and asks: “Is such the fast that I choose?” Is this what will please God? Or is it something else? Is it humbling ourselves that turns us toward God? Or is it embracing someone else?

Lent is a season of reconciliation, in which we seek to restore our relationships with God and with one another, by participating in Christ’s work of reconciliation. In truth, this is always the work of the Church—Lent is just a season that focuses our attention on it in a special way. We always run the risk of turning Lent into a self-improvement challenge, a way of taking on a project that’s about individual spiritual growth or moral improvement.

But God doesn’t seem so concerned with our attempts to reconcile ourselves with God. God seems more interested, here, in our reconciliation with one another. Is not this the fast that God wants us to choose—“to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” God envisions our fast not as a way to improve ourselves, but as a way to improve the life of someone else. And this is why fasting and almsgiving have often been linked: you can take the money you don’t spend on chocolate in Lent (on alcohol, meat, coffee, whatever the case may be) and spend it charitably instead.

So if you’re trying to figure out which small luxury or minor vice you might give up this Lent—or if you’re wondering what practice it is that you might take on—I wonder whether you might take some time to reflect on these words: “Is not this the fast that I choose… Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

These are big demands, and noble goals. Perhaps we can only begin to answer them in small ways. But this is the fast that God has chosen, for us: to turn outward, this Lent, not inward; to reflect on our mortality and our imperfection and to make them the basis for solidarity with our fellow human beings, because what’s true for one of us is true for all of us: We are but dust, and to dust we shall return.

Leaving Winning Behind

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Leaving Winning Behind

 
 
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Sermon — February 23, 2025

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

One thing you all may have gleaned about me after a year and a half together is that I am quite artsy and craftsy. I partly get this love of arts and crafts from camp–where one can spend long languid days making friendship bracelets and tie-dyeing. The other parts of camp are appealing too: swimming in the lake, doing the climb tower, archery. Though there is one part of camp that I am wary of–both as a child and as an adult.

That would be any kind of competitive team sport–dodgeball, capture the flag, basketball, you name it. A few things are almost guaranteed to occur: you get a bunch of 9-15 year old boys who sign up, and then almost inevitably you will have a lot of 9-15 year old boys who are extremely angry and sad and disappointed. Cabinmates who were once friends are deeply at odds over accusations of cheating, younger campers feel betrayed by older campers who greatly outmatch their physical skill. Many of these animosities dissolve quite quickly, others fade with some time, and yet others become deep seated for the remainder of these children’s time at camp. 

To me, the core problem seems to be that, in each of these games, there must be a winner. With every other activity, there is a built in sense of togetherness and camaraderie–archery gets people to cheer each other on; you often find campers helping each other figure out how to make friendship bracelets; campers regularly encourage each other at the climb tower. There is no winner at friendship bracelets, nor does any one person “win” at the climb tower at another’s expense. 

I feel a brief digression may be in order. I am not, on principle, opposed to team sports. I know I am preaching to a congregation that is upwards of 50% hockey lovers? or parents of hockey lovers, or just likely has a team sport they enjoy rooting for. I think team sports are incredibly important for childhood development, it is particularly important to learn how to lose with grace. However, at camp, unlike with regular team sports, a camper now has to live alongside the group of people who just beat them at dodgeball–which can get, as I’ve said, oddly personal at times.

I think the issue with these scenarios at camp points to bigger tendency in our society: we love winning. I am taking a broad view of “winning” here. I would say the feeling of “winning” can take many forms in our day to day lives–revenge, one-up-man-ship, smugness, generally getting to feel superior to someone else–are all different kinds of winning. I might point to feeling smug in class when someone else asks a question that was clearly in the reading they did not do-feels like winning; overhearing a couple fighting on the subway and thinking I am sure glad that is not me-seems like winning; or even when Carrie Underwood destroyed her cheating boyfriend’s car in her hit song “Before He Cheats”–she definitely “won” that interaction. Or better yet, and maybe more locally, the feeling of shoveling out a parking space, and then keying someone’s car when they park in it–feels good to win (though I am sure nobody in this room knows about that instance of winning). 

These things might be justifiable, but that isn’t really the point. Sure, it is a natural drive in our culture to want to be the best, or have the best for ourselves and loved ones. We enjoy when we are not the butt of the joke, or when we did the work someone else didn’t do, and other examples abound of moments where we feel justifiably smug or correctly righteous. However, our Gospel has another thing to say about this prevailing attitude.

Our Gospel story today is actually a continuation of what we read last week. In our reading last week, we got a new vision for the world through Luke’s version of the beatitudes–blessings for those who are poor, hungry, sad and hated and woes to those who are rich, full, well-liked, and laughing. We get a new vision for how the world might be, and this vision continues into this week’s reading. In this week’s gospel we get some words about how we might begin to live that out in our lives right now. 

However, it is tempting, but would be a misreading to think that these instructions we get in today’s gospel lesson can be treated as some kind of to-do list. It would be a mistake to think that we can complete this list of nice things and then sit back, content at a moral life well-lived. Sure, these are good things to strive for–but to treat them as a checklist misses the wider point of the teaching. The message that this is a deeper change to our disposition in the world, a disposition that calls us away from this attitude of “winning”, judgement, and condemnation. 

Just as it would be a misreading to think that this is a to-do list. It would be a further misreading to read it as a to-do list by which God will measure us. The clue is right there in the text. We are not merciful, forgiving, and generous because it will make us great people. We are inspired to try and live out these ideals because that is the nature of God, and we are called to emulate that attitude in our own lives. We are called to be merciful because Our Father in heaven is merciful. 

Even so, these are not easy actions to take. It is incredibly difficult to forgive. It is hard to be incredibly generous with whatever wealth we may or may not have. It is difficult to not return violence for violence; or get passive-aggressive for perceived slights. It is difficult to feel okay with not “winning”. More than a series of difficult actions, it can feel like an overwhelming task to do these things in a world that feels, day by day, increasingly unkind, aggressive, and unforgiving. It is hard to have mercy in a world that, oftentimes, seems to mock mercy. 

Back in 1948, C.S. Lewis had a helpful response when asked about a different daunting and gigantic facet of life–the newly invented atomic bomb. When asked by someone what they should do, now that society was permanently at risk of destruction from this new and terrible weapon. He says, 

“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb–when it comes–find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

Obviously, in today’s gospel lesson, we are not talking atomic bombs–we are talking about showing generosity and being merciful. But I think the advice can still apply. Instead of a world newly beset by the anxieties of the atomic bomb, we must wrestle with how we are supposed to–essentially–continue to be kind in a world where it is easier, encouraged, and sometimes applauded to be unkind. We must struggle not with the atomic bomb, but with the fact that we are encouraged, to use my earlier illustration, in many small and big ways to “win” in life through so many different means. 

I think the advice of C.S. Lewis applies in two ways. The first way: we must not gather together to think about the unkindness of the world, until such unkindness comes knocking on our door (again). The second, applies to how we are meant to go about living: I think the answer might be quite normal–do sensible and human things: forgive the person who cut you off in traffic, remember to bring in clothes for the community clothes closet, chat to your friends over a pint and a game of darts, do not judge the people on the subway, pray, teach, listen to music.

The key to living out our gospel from this week that C.S. Lewis illuminates is that in the face of the big harshness of the world, we often can do only the sensible human things within our own reach. Just as most of us do not have the time and skill to contend with the atomic bomb, we also do not have the time and skill to deconstruct the hostility and meanness of our society. However, each of us has the time and power within our lives to do “sensible and human things”. I ask you this week to find a “sensible and human” way to pull back from the desire to condemn. I ask you to find a “sensible and human” way to forgive those who may need forgiving. I ask you to find a sensible and human way in which you can refrain from judgement. 

We do this not because we strive for perfection, we do this because we seek to be merciful like our Father in heaven is merciful. We do this because we know our Father in heaven is merciful, and full of love, and I preach to you all in the name of that One who loves us first. 

Blessed are YOU

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Blessed are YOU

 
 
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Sermon — February 16, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I often wish that I were a magician. Not a magician like my Grandpa was, when he would entertain us at birthday parties with a black cape and top hat and a wand. But a real magician, the kind that don’t exist. I often wish that I were a magician because I often wish that I could wave a magic wand and fix something. I wish that I could cast a simple spell to repair a broken relationship. I wish that I could whip up a quick healing potion for a chronic illness. I wish that I could create a protective shield around the people I love that would make sure that no harm could ever touch them.

I’m not the first person in the world to have this wish. The allure of wizardry has always been that if you could only learn the secret method, if you could only find the magic words, you could make things right. Magic, at its heart, is a kind of technology: once you learn the spell, once you’ve got the ingredients for the potion, you can reproduce it again and again. And amid the uncertainty and fear that human beings have always faced—this has always had a certain appeal.

Now, most people know that magic isn’t real. They don’t go in for pointed hats and wands. But there’s a kind of magical thinking that’s very common, nevertheless. Sometimes it comes with religious belief: If I believe the right things, many people hope, if I go to the right church, if I take part in the right rituals in the right way, then God will bless me, God will make things good, for me, now. If I pray, earnestly, for the people I love, then surely God will help. And even when religious belief falls away, this magical thinking is often what remains: and so you’ll hear otherwise-secular people talk about “manifesting things” in their lives or “speaking things into existence.”

And there’s nothing really wrong with this. What do we do when someone is sick, or mourning, or recovering from a surgery? We pray for them, of course! It’s a natural response. It’s a good and comforting thing. But like all good things, it can go bad. And this impulse to prayer, this desire to take comfort in the idea that good things happen to good people, becomes a problem when we begin to extrapolate—when we begin to think that if good things happen to good people, and bad things are happening to me, or bad things are happening to someone else, it must be my fault, or their fault.

You can see a bit of this in our first reading and the psalm today. “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,” Jeremiah says, “[their] leaves shall stay green… and [they do] not cease to bear fruit.” (17:7–8) “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked,” the psalmist sings, “everything they do shall prosper.” (Psalm 1:1, 3) But “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals… whose heart turns away from the Lord… [they] shall not see when relief comes.” (Jer. 5:5–6) “They are like chaff which the wind blows away.” (Ps. 1:4) And it’s so tempting for us human beings to read these words and think, “Great! I have a choice! I have some control. Choose goodness and I will prosper like a tree bearing good fruit; choose wickedness, and life will be hard; my leaves will dry away.” It sounds like a kind of magic: a tried-and-true recipe for making good things happen in this world.

But it doesn’t really work. We all know good people whose lives have been much harder than they deserve. You may know people for whom it’s the other way around. And these Biblical texts recognize exactly that. They don’t quite promise that these blessings and curses will arrive in this life. Divine justice extends beyond this world. So the Psalmist doesn’t say that people who do evil will be punished in this life—it says that they won’t stand upright “when judgment comes.” It’s not as simple as “good things happen to good people.”

But there is still a very clear sense of division: good and evil, blessed and cursed, us and them.

Jesus picks up that theme… But he changes it in a very specific way. For one thing, he doesn’t buy the magical thinking at all. Riches and fullness and laughter, for Jesus, are not the signs of God’s blessing, bestowed as a reward for a life of faith or for saying your prayers. It’s the other way around. Those are the woes. And the outward signs of poverty and hunger and weeping are not signs of God’s disdain—no, people who are poor and hungry and weeping are the ones Jesus says are blessed.

But there’s another difference here, as well. In these Beatitudes in this Gospel of Luke, there is no “us” and “them”: there is only “you.” There is no “happy are they” or “cursed are those”—there are only “blessed are you,” and “woe to you.”

There are no good people and bad people, neatly divided into groups. There’s only you, sometimes blessed, and sometimes… Woe! Jesus is talking to his disciples, face to face. And the geometry of the scene is important. Last week, I mentioned Jesus standing on a boat to preach. You’ve probably heard of the “Sermon on the Mount.” On a mountain or in a pulpit or on a boat, you are lifted above the crowd. Sound travels further. And the physical distance creates some conversational distance, too. A preacher is often looking out into the congregation, but it’s a kind of only-halfway look—I’m looking at you, but I’m only very rarely looking at you. You can’t have a real one-on-one conversation with an altitude difference—that’s why my posture is so bad.

So Jesus comes down from the mountain, to a level place. And he looks up at his disciples. He looks at this group of faithful people who have chosen to follow him, and he says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” “Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled.” “But woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” “Blessed are you who weep now…blessed are you when people hate you… for your reward is great in heaven.” “Woe to you who are laughing now… woe to you when all speak well of you,” for you will mourn and weep.

And he’s speaking to the disciples. To you. He’s speaking to us. He’s not making promises, he’s not making threats. He’s not saying what will happen if we’re good or if we’re bad, if we pray or if we don’t. He’s acknowledging the truth that a prayer is not a magic spell that brings prosperity. A life of faith is not a surefire way to become healthy, wealthy, and wise. Our lives will be full of many blessings, many real moments of joy. And they will also be full of woe. We won’t live them without tears.

And in fact, it’s more than that. The Christian life is a life in which we will sometimes choose what Jesus calls the more blessed path. We will sometimes choose to make ourselves a little poorer to help the other citizens of the kingdom of God. We will sometimes choose to go hungry, so someone else can be fed. We will sometimes see someone else weeping, and not turn away, but turn toward them, and listen to them, and find that we are weeping too. If we are faithful to the good news of a loving and merciful God, we will sometimes be reviled and mocked. And yet it’s in these very moments that Jesus say that we are blessed.

We celebrate a baptism this morning. This child’s parents and godparents will make promises on her behalf, promises that she may one day take as her own, promises that all of us this morning will renew. Promises to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread.” Promises to “persevere in resisting evil.” Promises to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor[s] as [ourselves],” and to “respect the dignity of every human being.”

These promises don’t lead to the easiest possible life. They lead to a life that requires some self-sacrifice, some willingness to give up some of our own comfort and prosperity when times are good to support others for whom times are hard. They lead to a life of compassion, a life in which we will sometimes weep.

The life of the baptized Christian is not an easy life, but it’s a blessed life. Not because, if we do these things, we will be rewarded with God’s blessing. Not because the promises we make and the prayers we say give us a magic wand that we can wave to make the world right. But because the measure of the good life is not how comfortable we are, or how easy life is—but how deeply we love one another.

Presidents’ Day

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On Monday we celebrate Presidents’ Day, officially known at the federal level as Washington’s Birthday. George Washington was, as about ten of our Presidents have been, an Episcopalian. Or rather—he was a devoted member of the Church of England, who nevertheless found that his loyalties lay with the colony in which he lived rather than with the Crown, and who therefore found himself numbered among the most prominent members of the nascent “Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.”

The Episcopal Church’s relationship to political power has changed over the course of its history. Colonial parishes began as parishes of the Church of England under the authority of the Bishop of London, and subject to the Supreme Governor of the Church—the King of England. After independence, these colonial Anglican parishes reorganized themselves along democratic lines and formed the Episcopal Church.

This new church inherited much of the political establishment, especially in Virginia, and so the early Episcopal Church counted Washington, Madison, and Monroe among its members, not to mention many non-presidential names. And yet even in the early days, these Episcopalian Presidents were fierce advocates for the separation of church and state, and for the value of religious pluralism in the young republic. As the nation grew and diversified, this early influence waned. And yet the Episcopal Church retained a kind of cultural cachet and elite appeal. The Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington was built to serve as the “National Cathedral,” an almost-but-not-quite-ecumenical center for national events, and families like the Roosevelts and Bushes found a home in their local Episcopal parishes.

Over time, of course, the church has lost much of this cachet. The National Cathedral still stands, and still hosts events like prayer services and funerals for Presidents with no connection to the Episcopal Church. But the Episcopal Church’s days of the being the establishment at prayer, the go-to pew for the wealthy and educated (but not particular pious?), are long gone.

That’s not such a bad thing. On the one hand, a church that includes people with great influence can have a great influence; it can have the potential to shape their actions for good. But on the other hand, there has always been some danger to being the established church, or being the church of the establishment: the danger of being “captured” by establishment concerns. A church whose Supreme Governor wears the crown, a church whose members fill the highest roles in government and the most prestigious titles in the professions, can easily lose sight of the challenging moral witness of the Gospels and lapse into a kind of milquetoast moderation. (And so these prominent early Episcopalians, for example, enslaved their fellow human beings, and the Episcopal Church was notable for its reticence in opposing slavery and its eagerness to reunify with the Confederate branch of the church.)

This Sunday, we’ll read the Beatitudes from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Plain.” I wonder if you might think to yourself, this Presidents’ Day weekend, this George Washington’s Birthday weekend: How would George III have heard these words? What about George Washington? How might they have shaped the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt? How might they shape the Church’s witness today? How do Jesus’ words speak to you, in your own circumstances, now?

20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. 21 “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22 “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 24 “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. 25 “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. 26 “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.