Sermon — October 22, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Jesus said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.’” (Matthew 22:21)

You’ll sometimes hear this verse quoted as an argument for the separation of church and state, often in its traditional translation “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” I’ve heard it used to say that you should “keep politics out of the pulpit,” to avoid taking stances on divisive issues in the context of prayer: leave to the politicians the things that politicians say, and keep the content in church focused on the things of God. And I’ve heard it used to say, in the other direction, that you should keep religion and religious values out of schools and courts and legislatures, along much the same lines.

And for what it’s worth, I agree. We’ve seen what can occur when religious fundamentalism tries to drive public policy, around the world. A pretty good rule of thumb comes from the IRS, believe it or not. While churches can and should take stands on any number of social and political issues, from poverty to climate change to racial justice, they can’t engage in partisan politics; if a pastor stands in the pulpit and endorses a candidate for office, then at least in theory, the church risks its tax-exempt status. Fair enough. The separation of church and state is an important principle in modern society.

But it’s not what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel reading today.

When Jesus says, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he isn’t drawing a distinction between mundane political concerns and his own more elevated religious teaching. He’s taking a particular stand on the most important political question of his day. Jesus and his disciples and his audience are the Jewish subjects of an unpopular Roman emperor who rules from far away. The trap the Pharisees set is a good one. They ask him whether it’s in accordance with the law to pay taxes to the emperor. They’re asking about Jewish law; of course it’s lawful under Roman law to pay Roman taxes. But the Roman occupation, like any foreign occupation, was wildly unpopular. So the trap is set: if Jesus answers, “no,” well, that’s sedition. He’d be encouraging people to defy the Roman state, and he could be condemned and arrested, and likely crucified. If he answers, “yes,” well, that’s the kind of collaboration that would discredit him in the eyes of his fellow Jews, at least the patriotic ones. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” doesn’t mean, “leave me alone and keep your politics away from my religion”; it’s one of the two possible political answers to a political question!

But, as he often does, Jesus frames his response in a way that evades the trap. He asks them to take out a coin, and asks, “Whose face is that?” They don’t want to look ridiculous, so of course they say, “Well, that’s the emperor.” The emperor made that money. It’s the emperor’s mints who stamped it with his face. It’s the emperor who uses it to spread his image throughout the empire, so everyone who buys or sells knows whose subject they are. “So,” Jesus says, “give back to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” These coins bear the emperor’s image; he can have them back. But in the same way, you should give to God the things that are made in the image of God. And what’s made in the image of God?

…Well it’s you! And me! All of us. All human beings are “made in the image of God.” And this isn’t just a nice, poetic way to express the dignity of every human being. It’s quite literally the word of God. It’s what God says, in the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis, in the first story of the creation of human beings: “Let us make humankind,” God says, “in our image, according to our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26) The Pharisees are the best and the most devoted and the most pious among the people of God, and Jesus’ response leaves them speechless, because they know what he is saying: Give your taxes, sure, to the emperor; but give your whole self to God. And so Jesus escapes the trap; he refuses to countenance defiance of the Roman Empire, but nevertheless subsumes its importance under the much greater kingdom of God.

In a few moments, I’ll baptize two children in the name of that same God, and we’ll welcome them as new members of the Body of Christ, the Church. The ancient teachers of the Church often wrote that in baptism, the image of God in us is restored; that the smudges and smears we’ve inherited from our ancestors are wiped away, and the image is made clear. They noticed that in Genesis, God said that we were made in the image and likeness of God, and they taught that in baptism the fullness of the image of God is restored, so that over the course of our lives we might grow into that likeness.

Baptism marks an entrance into the life of the Church—not this church in the narrow sense, not St. John’s Charlestown, but the Church with a capital C, the universal body made up of all the baptized. Baptism marks us as God’s own, as human beings formed in the image of God, just as clearly as the coins Jesus held in his hand were formed in the image of the emperor, and marked as his own.

And we carry that mark with us through our whole lives, whether we know it or not. That’s true in a chronological sense, of course: we carry the mark of baptism over the course of our whole lives. Like any of us, the children we baptize today may not always be active members of this or any other local church. But they will be members nevertheless of the Church with a capital C into which they are inducted today, the Body of Christ living in this world. And wherever they go in all the years of their lives, they will always find a home in the family of God.

But we carry the mark with us through our whole lives in a second sense, as well. We are like coins, and we do not change our faces from Lincoln at the supermarket to Washington at CVS. We are stamped with the image of God, everywhere we go. When Jesus reminds us that we carry the image of God, and tells us to “give to God the things that are God’s,” it really is an invitation to offer our whole lives to God. This doesn’t mean that we should give up everything we have and join a convent, although some people do; it doesn’t mean we should dedicate every second of our lives to the church. It means that we should see each little slice of our lives as part of your lives with God, so that we no longer have A work life, and a family, and friendships, and kids’ sports, and hobbies, and spiritual life, each in its own separate compartment; but our spiritual lives, as lives as people of faith, permeate all the rest.

So I want to offer you a challenge, all you beloved, image-bearing people of God: Without changing anything about your weekly schedule or your daily commitments, can you start offering more of the parts of your life to God? Without increasing the amount of time you spend in church or in prayer, can you allow your spirituality to spread through every day? Without talking any more about God, can you come to understand more of your life as belonging to God? And what would that mean? What would it mean to remember that you are marked with the image of God? What would it mean to let God into your life at the most mundane moments in your day? What would it mean, in other words, to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”? Namely, your whole self.

Sermon — October 15, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last weekend, as I flipped through newspaper images of devastation coming out of Israel, one understated caption stuck with me. The photo showed a multi-story building in the city of Sderot that looked like it had come down in an earthquake, with two walls gone and about three-quarters of the floorspace completely collapsed, leaving only half of a shell of the original building. The caption said something like, “Israeli soldiers stand outside the police station in Sderot, damaged during fighting on Sunday.” “Damaged,” to say the least, but not yet totally destroyed.

Soon enough, images of devastation were coming from outside Israel, too, as Israeli airstrikes and shells began flattening buildings across the Gaza Strip, and the familiar cycle of violence and retaliation began again. This week, Isaiah’s words have once again become terrible reality on both sides of the border fence: “for you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin.” (Isaiah 25:2)

And then on Monday, I heard the awful news, and on Tuesday, shared you with the awful news, of Evie Scoville’s death, which was sudden and unexpected, and deeply, deeply sad. And it felt, to me at least, like one of the central buildings in our community had collapsed, because someone who had been a source of comfort and strength and shelter to so many people for so long was suddenly gone.

One way or another, many of us have taken some damage this week. And if by some chance you don’t have family or friends in Israel or Palestine; or if you didn’t know Evie, or didn’t know her well, and your week has been perfectly fine; then for the purposes of this sermon I’d invite you to think about some time when it wasn’t, when you were going through some grief, or pain, when the world felt like it was collapsing around you.

Because the question I want to ask today isn’t a question about the intricacies of Israeli history or Palestinian rights, about how to process an unexpected death or any given crisis in any of our lives. What I want to ask is this: We sing every week in praise of a “God of power and might.” So what is God’s mighty, powerful response in the face of all of this?

In our first reading today, the prophet Isaiah speaks from a place of conflict and grief that’s very familiar in the world today. Isaiah is the great prophet of exile and return, a prophet who not only foresees the judgment and destruction of his people and their holy city of Jerusalem, but comforts them, after they go into exile, with the hope of a future restoration. At this point in the story that surrounds the prophecies of Isaiah, the city of Jerusalem hasn’t fallen yet, but disaster is looming. And Isaiah already looks forward, in chapters 24 and 25, to what he calls “the day of the Lord,” to some future day on which God will finally act to save the people, some day when God will finally come in and clean up this whole mess.

Isaiah’s description of that day has become a key part of the Christian understanding of our future hope. This vision is at the heart of our answer to the question, “What’s God going to do in response to all of this?” Isaiah returns to the theme of the “day of the Lord,” that long-hoped-for future day. God will gather us on the holy mountain, Isaiah says, God will gather all the peoples of the world, and we will feast on “rich food,” and “well-aged wines.” (Isaiah 25:6) But this heavenly feast is not itself the main event. The feast is a celebration of God’s greatest act: for “on this mountain,” Isaiah says, God “will destroy… the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces.” (Isaiah 25:7-8)

This is God’s mighty response to the violence and injustice of this world: not the destruction of the enemies of the chosen people of God, but the destruction of the greatest enemy of all people: the destruction of death itself. This is God’s answer to the grief and pain of this life: not to make it make sense, not to try explain it away, but to wipe the tears from our eyes. This is what Christian hope is: not the naïve optimism that says that things will be just fine, that good things happen to good people in this life; but the conviction that even though things aren’t okay, that even though life isn’t fair right now, a day is surely coming when God will set things right.

Like so many things in Christian life, this is both “now” and “not yet.” It has already begun, but it is not yet complete. God has already defeated death; but the final victory is still to come. Because on that mountain where Jesus was crucified, God destroyed death. On that day when Jesus shrugged off his burial clothes, God cast off the shroud cast over all peoples. When Jesus walked out of the tomb where death sought to swallow him up, God swallowed death instead. And when we finally, one day, see God face to face, our faces will be full of a lifetime of tears, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. And the Resurrection that began with Jesus will be made complete in us.

But until that day comes, here we are, damaged but not destroyed, trying to live in the light of the Resurrection; trying to live as though the things that I just said were true. The promise of “the coming day of the Lord,” after all, isn’t just a pleasant dream about the future. It changes something about how we act in the present.

If “all peoples” are going to feast together one day, that means “all peoples.” It means that there are no enemies in heaven; only dinner companions. It means that no one is too far away or too different from you for you to care about in this world; you might be seated next to them in the next. It means, frustratingly enough, that the people you can’t stand being around in this life are going to spend eternity with you in the next; and you might want to start practicing how to deal with it.

And if God is going to wipe away the tears from our eyes, if God is going to destroy death, that changes something about our grief. It doesn’t take away the pain and the sadness we feel when someone dies, because they’re still gone from our lives now, even if we will one day meet them again. But the people we have loved and lost become to us like the apostle Paul, when he’s writing to the Philippians, writing to them on the assumption that he’ll see them again, and he’ll know what they’ve been doing. Their memories still speak to us, as Paul wrote to the church he’d left behind: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Phil. 4:9) Their memories become a blessing to us, because they inspire us to be the people they would have wanted us to be, and we know that they will one day see us as we have become.

I’ve been thinking so much about Evie this week, and all the memories I have of her from the few years I’ve known her, from my first interview with the Search Committee she co-chaired to the last time I bumped into her walking Santana on Main Street. Evie was, I think, defined by love. She lived the life that Paul describes here. She rejoiced always, fighting hard for joy in times that were sometimes far from joyful. She let her gentleness be known to everyone, with a love that could be fierce when she was protecting the people she loved but was never cruel. She was and she is an inspiration to me, as a parent, as a human being, and as a priest. Her soul rests now in the hands of a loving God, and we feel her absence, and the absence of all those whom we have loved and lost, and it hurts. But we will one day see her again, and see them all again, and God will wipe away the tears from our eyes, and we will say on that day, “this is our God, for whom we have waited, so that God might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation.” (Isaiah 25:9) Amen.

Sermon — October 1, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Have you heard the one about the guy who went to his pastor to complain about the Church?

(It’s a shocking premise, I know.)

So this guy walks into the pastor’s office, unannounced, and the first thing he says is, “I’ve just about had it with the church!” Okay, the pastor thinks. It’s going to be one of those conversations. She gestures, and the man sits down in a chair. “You know, we’re always talking about the Prince of Peace, but from the Crusades on down we’ve never stopped starting wars. You’re always preaching about how important it is to care for the poor, but everywhere I look there are pastors flying private jets and priests wearing fancy robes while people are sleeping out on the streets. Our church claims to be so loving and welcoming, but when I was stuck in bed for a month after my surgery nobody called me, nobody helped out, nobody cared a bit. I’m tired of it all. The Church is full of hypocrites!”

And the pastor leaned back in her chair, and considered it for a minute. And then she said, “Nah, I’m not buying it.”

The guy says to her, “What do you mean you’re not buying it?”

“Come on,” the pastor said. “The Church is not full of hypocrites. We’ve got room for plenty more.”

In his parable today, Jesus invites us to consider whether that might actually be true.

The story is simple enough. It’s hardly even a parable. A man tells his two sons to go and work in the vineyard. One says yes, but doesn’t go. One says no, but shows up anyway. Which one did what the father asked? (Matthew 21:28-31)

It’s not so much a parable as a leading question. The answer should be clear. It’s the child who said no but changed his mind who’s in the right. And you might even editorialize and say that saying yes and then blowing it off is actually worse than just saying no. You can rank the four options, best to worst: the conscientious one who say yes and goes right away comes first, followed by the flip-flopper who says no and then works anyway; the one who says no and follows through isn’t great, but the hypocrite who says yes and then disappears is clearly the worst. It’s hard to see how anyone could disagree.

But then Jesus connects the dots, and that’s where things get a little spicy. He’s in the Temple, remember, talking to the chief priests and the elders of the people, to the conscientious and the diligent, the respected and the holy. And he says to them: John the Baptist came and preached to you, and you didn’t believe him; “but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.” (Matthew 21:32)

You, the good and the great, who claim to follow God and even to lead God’s people, ignored his chosen messenger. But the people who aren’t so great or so good—the ones who everyone else would’ve said were living in violation of God’s will—they believed John. You, the chief priests and elders, are like the hypocritical first son who said you’d work in the vineyard but refused. But they are like the second son, who strayed at first but later changed his ways.

And you could’ve heard a sandal drop, I imagine.

Jesus is like the disgruntled church member in the joke. He walks straight up to the religious leaders and accuses them of hypocrisy, right to their faces. He accuses them of saying one thing and doing another. And he may well have been right.

And it leaves me with the question: If Jesus appeared in our world, today, and took a hard look at our churches, would he say the same thing? Would he accuse us of hypocrisy in the same way that the indignant parishioner does? Is the Church really full of hypocrites? (Or is there, as the punchline goes, room for plenty more?)

Here’s the thing: Not one person in this room is perfect. I know that for a fact. And I know that, not because I’ve stayed up late into the night scrutinizing each one of you and your flaws, but because nobody in the world is perfect. Every single one of us falls short, by one measure or another, every so often; or maybe more often than that. Every single one of us is limited, by our scarcity of time or energy, money or willpower. Not one of us can ever truly love God with all our heart, and strength, and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. We all have days where we say “yes” to doing the right thing, and then flake out; and maybe years where we say “no,” and then change our minds, or don’t.

Every one of us is like each one of those two sons, at different times. And if imperfection is what we’re measuring, then yes, the Church is full of imperfect people, and in many cases we’re here because we need a regular reminder of God’s love and grace, a regular reminder that, as our opening collect for today put it, God shows God’s “almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” We are imperfect, and we are loved anyway, and thank God for that.

But imperfection isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is more like imperfection plus judgment, a kind of “holier than thou” approach, a denial of your own flaws that puts you on a pedestal just high enough to make a big loud crash when you fall. Hypocrites can’t admit that they’re flawed; they certainly can’t admit that they’re hypocrites. And this is what works so well about the joke. To say that the church is not yet full of hypocrites, because there’s room for plenty more, is to disarm something of the charge. It’s not to excuse our many imperfections. It’s just to acknowledge that we know they’re there. There’s no such thing, in a sense, as a humble hypocrite.

And humility is exactly the way we should respond to the fact of human imperfection. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” Paul writes to the church in Philippi, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3) He doesn’t say this to put you down. He doesn’t say you should humiliate yourself, or that other people really are better than you. To “regard” others as better than you is to make the humble assumption that you’re no better than anyone else. He draws a parallel to what Jesus chose to do: to humble himself, giving up the privileges of equality with God and taking on all the messiness of a human life. And Paul invites us to act in the same way, to empty ourselves of any claim to perfection, and to humbly recognize that other people may well be imperfect; but we’re imperfect, too.

Our task as Christians is to cultivate that “mind of Christ,” to live in the dual reality of goodness and imperfection: to hold onto the truth of being a beloved child of God, and to embrace the inevitable flaws that come with being human. This is the way of love and the way of life that Jesus lays out before us: to empty ourselves of our striving for perfection, and to recognize and admit that we are imperfect; and so is everybody else. And yet never to give up on the hope of saying “yes” and following through, of turning toward God and living as fully as God wants us to live; “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for [God’s] good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13)

So maybe the church isn’t full of hypocrites, exactly. It has an imperfect history and an imperfect present. It’s made of imperfect people, like you and me. But even then, the church isn’t full of imperfect people. After all… There’s room for many more.