Sermon — July 2, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

I’ve just finished watching—you might say “binge-watching”—the Netflix cooking competition show The Final Table, in which twenty-four chefs from around the world faced off in a series of culinary competitions. Murray said to me last week while I was cooking and watching, “Daddy, what are you doing? Oh, just watching another show about cooking things you’ll never actually cook?” And it’s true, in the same way that the first thing I do every week when The New Yorker comes is crack open Tables for Two, and read a review of a restaurant I’ll never go to with food nobody else in my family would ever eat. I just love this stuff.

But there’s something I’ve noticed in these cooking competition shows, as well. They’re not just a live broadcast of some chefs in a kitchen with a bit of color commentary. Like any good TV, they try to tell human stories. And so they do background interviews with each of the chefs about their childhoods, or their cooking careers, or their vision for the restaurant they’ve founded. And I’ve noticed, as I watch an episode of one of these shows every evening while I cook dinner, that nearly every chef has a mentor whose legacy they’re trying to live up to. For one, it’s the father and the grandfather who were both chefs and who founded and ran the family restaurant through good times and bad before handing it down to him. For another, it’s his single mom in a blue-collar town who transmogrified the cheapest ingredients, night after night, into a homey dish that showed her love. For another, it’s the renowned chef who took a young kid under his wing, showing her the ropes and supporting her when nobody else would.

Each one of these chefs, in other words, has been given the gift of love by someone who made them into the person they are today. And each one, at some point, no matter how many Michelin stars they have to their name, reveals that they are still trying to live up to the gift of that love.

I say all this by way of introduction to a Gospel passage that is short, sweet, and simple. If all you had were Jesus’ words to his disciples today, you might think that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. And in a sense, you’d be right!

The early Church was full of traveling apostles, of prophets and preachers who’d travel from place to place just like Canon O’Connell visited us last week. Jesus and the early Christians taught that there were spiritual rewards for welcoming these wanderers with kindness. Welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet; receive a prophet’s reward. Welcome a righteous person in the name of a righteous person; receive a righteous person’s reward. (Matthew 10:40-41) Jesus lived in a culture in which hospitality was a household obligation, not the name of an industry. A traveling bishop or prophet would stay in your home, not a hotel. It’s expensive to feed another person, and hard work to host them; and Jesus offers a reward to those who receive and welcome his most prominent disciples as they go about their work spreading the good news.

But then Jesus goes on: “whoever gives even a cup of cold water, even to one of these little ones, in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:42) There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what exactly “little ones” means. (There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what nearly everything means.) Maybe it’s literally children who are “these little ones.” Maybe it’s the socially-disadvantaged, or just “ordinary folks.” But whatever the case, scholars agree that it’s a “deliberate contrast” to the “prophets” and the “righteous,” the famous, great, and good. ^[1] It’s not hosting an elaborate stay for an archbishop that matters; even welcoming the “little ones” counts. And as Saint Jerome noted, it’s not a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee here; it doesn’t cost you anything in fuel to warm it up, or ingredients to mix together. It’s just a plain old cup of water, something anyone can give.[2] And yet this simple, unpretentious act is enough. Whoever does even only this in the name of a disciple will never lose their reward.

So congratulations to all those on the St. John’s Coffee Hour rota. Even if you have no idea how to turn on that baffling coffee machine, even if you just put out the lemonade and iced tea, even if you only served a pitcher of water: you have been saved! You have offered a cup of cold water to dozens of these “little ones” in the name of the disciple Saint John, and you will not lose your reward.

If what you’re interested in is eternal salvation, Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us one thing to do, and it’s such a small and concrete task—once in your life, give a cup of cold water to one of the “little ones”—and you will not lose your reward. And the tininess of this task way of expressing, in Jesus’ form of teaching, the same truth that Paul expresses in our epistle in his own way. Christianity, properly understood, is not a list of rules to follow, or difficult work to be done. It’s the story of what Paul calls “the free gift of God,” which is “eternal life.” (Romans 6:23).

God’s love is free. And it’s a gift. We do not have to do anything at all to earn it, in order to receive it.

But we are left wondering how to live up to it.

This is the tension within which Paul lives in his whole Letter to the Romans. And this is why Jesus does give so many moral teachings. “What then?” Paul asks, “Should we sin, because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15) Should we take this incredible free gift of God, which offers us an eternal reward in exchange for a cup of cold water, and throw it in God’s face? Should we take God’s unconditional love and use it as an excuse to treat one another like garbage, because God will love us all the same? Should we take the freedom we’ve been given and freely choose to follow the way of sin, and violence, and death? “By no means!” the apostle pleads. God loves you unconditionally. That doesn’t mean you should act like a total jerk. Throughout his letters, Paul is constantly trying to juggle these two competing aims: how to convince the early churches, on the one hand, of the amazing beauty of God’s grace and mercy, God’s unconditional, self-sacrificing love; and how to stop them, on the other hand, from acting in ways that are completely off the rails. And we modern Christians find ourselves in the same situation as they were, thousands of years ago.

You have been given the gift of life, and love, and hope. You have been a given a legacy and a model for the person you could be; if not by some mentor in your own life, than by the one big Mentor in whose name we gather here. You have been given a gift, and it cannot be taken away, no matter what you do. But you’ve also been given a choice. What will you do with that gift? What will you do with that legacy? Will you, who have been trained and loved by generations of chefs, turn around and treat your sous chefs like they belong in the compost? Will you, who have been handed the love of home cooking, sell mom’s apple pie recipe to McDonald’s and cash out? Will you, who have been loved beyond measure and forgiven beyond reason by God, hold resentments and grudges and judgments against the people in your life? It’s up to you. You have the freedom. You have the choice. You have been given the gift. You will receive your reward. You do not have to do anything to earn God’s love, anything at all.

But it’s the work of a lifetime to try to live up to it.

^[1]Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary on Matthew 8–20, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. James E. Crouch, vol. 61B of Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 121.

[2] Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 1.10.42.

Sermon — June 18, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

All across New England, it’s officially strawberry season. Towns across Connecticut are holding Strawberry Festivals. Last weekend, when we were down in Long Island, we had our first farm-stand strawberries of the year, a rare chance to bite into a ripe berry that was actually red all the way through, without the tasteless white core of a strawberry picked underripe for shipping from California. And If you’re lucky, this time of year, you might even get the chance to go strawberry picking, and to encounter one of the great paradoxes of food pricing: the less work the person selling strawberries has to do, the more you pay, so that if they pick them in California and ship them here, it’s maybe $6 a quart; if they picked them at a local farm, it might be $9; if you pick them, well that’s like $12, at least. But of course it’s worth the extra couple of bucks, especially if there are kids involved, to have the amazing experience of standing in a field of endless fruit, picking ripe berries warm from the sun and maybe popping one or two in your mouth. (I won’t tell if you do.)

And this is what the incredible bounty of spiritual life can sometimes feel like. We’re surrounded by the beauty of the world and the mystery of God. We can walk into any church on any Sunday morning and hear beautiful music, and reflect on God’s love, and pray. Any time, any day, we can take a moment to sit and be grateful for something, or maybe even to read something from the Bible or a devotional. There’s so much out there waiting for us, and all we have to do is reach out and grab a taste. After all, Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful.”

… “But the laborers are few.”

At the same time that I’m reminded of the incredible bounty of the U-Pick experience, I’m also reminded of the news this week from the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council meeting down in Providence, which noted, among other things, some alarming trends in the availability of clergy. In every region of the church, it seems, there are about four or five times as many open positions as there are priests looking for a new call. And it’s about to get much worse: roughly one-half of our clergy are within ten years of retirement. (Not me, for better or for worse.)

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” And if this is true of clergy, it’s even more true for laypeople. In parishes like ours across the country, a dedicated core of faithful lay leaders and volunteers are in very real danger of burning out as they rotate through every imaginable position in the church to try to keep things afloat. And it’s a vicious cycle: the fewer members there are, the less likely it is they can afford a full-time priest; but the more part-time of a priest there is, they more of the work falls on those fewer members.

And yet the harvest remains plentiful. I’ll admit that people are not strawberries. But I can’t help but think that being a part of a church in a community like this is something like standing in a field full of berries, with only two hands to pick them. There are twenty thousand people in this neighborhood, give or take a few, and only—what, 100 active members of this church, if you’re being generous? And I’d like to think that maybe another couple hundred of those 20,000 might appreciate, might even benefit from, the good news of God’s unconditional love for them, in the same way that you and I benefit from hearing that good news, from being reminded of God’s beauty and forgiveness and grace week after week. There are so many ways we can serve this community; the harvest is so plentiful. But the laborers are few.

What’s true for the church is true for individuals, as well. When you’re in a busy season of life, even if you’re one of the relatively small number of people who want to engage in a deeper spiritual practice, it can feel impossible. The strawberries are there, ready for you, but there’s just too much going on in life to be able to go and pick them. And so prayer or quiet time for reflection become just yet another task on an overwhelming list, and the one that’s easiest to sacrifice in pursuit of the rest.

But it seems that this has always been the case. The harvest has always been plentiful. The laborers have always been few. At least this was true for Jesus’ little crew, a dozen apostles in the midst of a whole culture. They had an incredible opportunity to share the good news of the kingdom of God, but there only twelve of them, and they had so little time. So what are we to do?

Jesus answers this question for the disciples in what I think is an interesting and surprising way. He sends out his twelve apostles, and gives them simple instructions: Go, proclaim the good news. Take take no gold, or silver, or bag. (Matthew 10:7-10) And then he says, wherever you go, “As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you, or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet” and go. (Matthew 10:12-14)

Now, not many of us are likely to become itinerant wandering evangelists, laboring to gather in the harvest door-to-door, as the apostles do. But all of us are laboring in some vineyard, all of us are oot in some strawberry field, trying to harvest something, hoping that we’ve planted bears fruit. That might be in your work life, or your family. It might be in a ministry or a group you’re part of at church. Or it might be in your own prayer life, or just the attempt to get out of your own way. And what Jesus says the apostles should do if it’s not working is really interesting to me. If their efforts aren’t bearing fruit, he doesn’t tell them to “take up your cross” and endure it, he doesn’t tell them to “offer it up” to God. He says, “shake the dust off your feet” and move on.

It seems important to me to say that this is not advice to give up when the going gets hard. “If anyone won’t listen to you, shake the dust off your feet” isn’t good relationship advice, whether that relationship is romantic, or with a friend, or family. But Jesus gives us the permission to do some spiritual discernment, and to ask ourselves: Is this thing that I’m doing right now hard but fruitful, or is it ultimately just fruitless?

Picking strawberries, after all, is hard work. It’s fun for a day trip with the kids, but as a job it’s really tough. But it bears good fruit, and that’s what matters.

There are so many ways to pray. There are so many ways to be involved in a church’s life or in a neighborhood community. There are a lot of jobs, even multiple professions, if you really need a change. Not all of them are easy. But when something is draining you of life, not giving you life, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of strawberries in the field, and maybe this row you’re standing in right now has just been plucked clean and there’s nothing more that’s going to come from it, no matter what you do.

There are many things in life that are worth doing, even though they’re hard. There are many houses that are worthy of your blessing of peace, many fields that are hard to harvest but that bear good fruit. And there are other things that are simply not worth your time, and where the appropriate answer, in Jesus’ words, is to “shake the dust off your feet” and head down to the next town. We are finite human beings living in a world of nearly-infinite possibility, and there is no time to waste on fruitless things; for “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”