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.”

Sermon — Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, you might think that scheduling a baptism on Trinity Sunday is just a clever way of getting out of preaching a sermon on the Holy Trinity. You might even appreciate the effort. After all, Trinity Sunday, this Sunday after Pentecost every year, has something of a reputation for rough sermons. Preachers tend to either go very theological, regurgitating large chunks of seminary classes into fifteen-minute discourses featuring words like “perichoresis” and “hypostatic union”; or they tend to veer a bit in the other direction. I once heard a sermon on Trinity Sunday, the day that happened to mark the end of the church “program year,” which started by calling the Trinity a fourth-century political compromise, then proceeded to just list all the wonderful things that the church had done that year, before concluding, “And that’s

So, A baptism might seem like a fitting escape from this dilemma. There’s no better antidote to a dry exposition of fifth-century theological philosophical and theological debates, after all, than a really cute baby. But I’m sorry to tell you that the Trinity and baptism go hand in hand.

Our readings this morning, you may be surprised to hear, were not chosen because we had a baptism. They’re simply the readings for Trinity Sunday. These aren’t baptism readings and yet we begin, just as the Thanksgiving over the Water later in this service will begin, with the image of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of the deep, as God prepares to bless the new life that is coming forth. (Gen. 1:2) These aren’t baptism readings and yet we end with Jesus’ final words to his disciples, taken from the Gospel according to Matthew, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:16)

The Trinity, an abstract, technical, dry topic, seems quite different from Baptism, a hands-on, messy, and rather wet practice, and the two can’t be separated from each other. And the reason for this, it turns out, is that the Trinity is not actually an abstract theological claim. And the Trinity is not really a fourth-century political compromise. The Trinity is a person—or, three persons, anyway, I guess that’s the point. The Trinity isn’t an idea about God, the Trinity is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and this tells us everything about the meaning of Baptism.

To say that God is Trinity is to say that God has always existed and will always exist as a relationship, a community of love within God’s own self. And to say that we are baptized “in the name of the Trinity” is to say that we are invited into that relationship; that each one of us is drawn into that community of love. One of my favorite little New Testament facts is that the preposition Matthew uses here means “in” in the sense of “into,” not in the sense of “by.” In other words, we baptize people “into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” not “by the power invested in the name.” All of us who have been baptized have been baptized into a new identity, a new name, a new family. Baptism adopts us into the family of God, and incorporates us into a community of love.

In one sense, baptism incorporates us into the community of the Church. When a child is baptized she is no longer the sole responsibility of her parents or grandparents; they are no longer her only family. She becomes our sister in Christ, a member of all our family, under God. And we take that as seriously as we can. In a few minutes, everyone in this room will make a promise, on behalf of the whole Church throughout the world, to do everything in our power to support her. And, God willing, when she need us, we will. Wherever she goes, whoever she becomes, she will always have a home in the family of God.

But baptism does more than just invite us into the Church. Baptism makes us part of the Body of Christ, baptism brings us, in a sense, into the very heart of the life of God. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, every person who is baptized is made a spiritual member of the living Body of God the Son, and God the Father looks on her with the same love that has existed within God’s own being from before time, the same love that led God’s voice to boom out from heaven at Jesus’ own baptism and say, “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” God looks at each one of you and sees a beloved child, in whom God delights and is well pleased. And wherever you go, and whoever you become, God’s love and compassion and care will follow you. And God sees you as you see a sweet and beloved little child: indescribably beautiful, unbelievably frustrating, incomprehensibly messy, and loved beyond anything that could ever be imagined.

So, to all who are baptized, welcome into the family of God. May God the Father bless you with the knowledge and love of God, and of God’s love for you. May God the Son inspire you to walk in the way of love for your neighbor. Maybe God the Holy Spirit guide you and comfort you as you grow in stature and in faith. And may you remember that God is “with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

Amen.

Sermon — Pentecost, May 28, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

The last year or so has seen a huge explosion in the field of “large-language models,” artificial-intelligence technologies that can be trained to process text and produce things we never thought they could: art and music and entire conversations, all in response to a paragraph of text. These tools are a little frightening, raising questions about “deep fakes” and plagiarized papers, about the future for copywriters and graphic designers and software engineers in a world where AI is starting to do parts of their jobs. But last week MetaAI—the artificial-intelligence research branch of the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta—released something new, which I’m shocked to say may actually be good for the world.

It’s a service that uses AI to transcribe speech to text, and text to speech, in over 1,100 different languages from all around the world, ten times more than any other speech-recognition approach. These sorts of tools make life better for real people in some very specific ways. Text-to-speech software, for example, lets people who are blind read emails or search the web without the need to see. Speech-to-text software provides automatic closed-captioning, so that Deaf people, for example, can watch cooking recipe videos or church services and be able to read the text. (In fact, if you watch the video of this service on Facebook, you’ll see that it provides closed captioning for the whole service, free of charge!)

And multilingual translation software unlocks even more power. In the very near future a single app on your phone could handle a whole conversation between two people with no language in common at all. Imagine how much easier it would be to be a refugee, or an immigrant, or a tourist, if you could speak into your phone, and have it transcribed, translated, and spoken out loud again, back and forth, all by artificial intelligence.

There’s just one problem. Large-language models depend on having access to, well… a large amount of language. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just really good at recognizing patterns. So what the model needs to learn a language, is to digest and analyze a huge amount of language; and what the model needs to be able to translate between languages is to have access to texts that mean the same thing, in a lot of different languages.

And last week, Meta’s engineers unveiled a great discovery. They discovered a single text that has been translated into more languages than any other and is widely available in a digital form online. Even better, audio files of this text and closely-related bodies of literature are also available online. Their discovery was so big that they just had to put out a press release. “Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge,” they wrote in their announcement this week, “To overcome it…”—and maybe you’ve already guessed where this is going—“to overcome it, we turned to…the Bible.”

There is no institution in the entire world, after all, that believes more deeply in “translation” than the Christian Church. Meta’s machine-learning engineers were able to gather a language-learning dataset based on text and audio recordings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, with an average of 32 hours of audio data per language.

We heard our readings this morning in our familiar English. But thousands of translators have worked for thousands of years translating these same readings into thousands of languages, spoken all around the world. Not just the big ones like English and Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. And not just the languages that seem obscure to you or me—Gujarati or Burmese or Lingala—but are in fact spoken by tens of millions of people. The dataset from Meta includes languages like Muria, spoken by 15,000 people in south-central India, and Kilivila, spoken by 20,000 in Papua New Guinea, and Itelmen, which is down to 82 native speakers at the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Siberia. The New Testament has been translated into all of these languages from Greek, and this is no accident.

The story of Pentecost, after all, is a story of translation. The rushing wind is amazing. The tongues of fire are impressive. But the miracle of Pentecost is, above all else, the miracle of translation. It’s a common tradition in some churches to have this story read aloud in many languages at once, perhaps beginning in English and then having readers join in speaking Spanish and French, Creole and Dutch, German and Arabic and whatever other languages their members speak.

But Pentecost itself, as you may notice, happens the other way around. “Devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) are gathered in Jerusalem for the great Feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. And the apostles begin to speak. They’re used speaking the Galilean dialect of Aramaic; perhaps a bit of Hebrew, perhaps a bit of Greek. But when they open their mouths on this day, “the Spirit gave them ability” “to speak in other languages.” (Acts 2:4) The people gathered from across the world hear them speak and are amazed, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6) The disciples are recognized as Galileans by their dialect; yet the Parthians hear them in Parthian, the Cappadocians in Greek, the Phrygians in Phrygian, the Egyptians in Egyptian, the Arabs in Arabic, the Romans in Latin. (Acts 2:9-11) Each one hears the disciples speaking in a foreign language and thinks it’s drunken babbling. Then they hear themselves addressed in words they understand, and they’re amazed, saying, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12)

What it means is this: the Christian message is, and has always been, and will always be, a message in translation.

This is true, of course, on the literal and historical level, and it’s important to remember. Christianity is not native to our culture. It’s not an American religion, or an English one. The Christian tradition doesn’t belong to us, any more than it belongs to anyone else. With the exception of that small band of Galilean-Aramaic speaking Jews, Christianity comes to every culture as a translation, as a gift or an imposition brought by someone else. It’s important sometimes to remember that our own traditions and understandings are not the whole truth of our faith. And it’s important sometimes to remember that our religion is one of constant change and reinterpretation: that the traditions handed down by the generations before us might sound different from the ones being created by the next, and that’s okay. They’re speaking different languages, is all.

But it’s true on the individual level as well. The Christian message doesn’t only need to be translated from Greek into English, from ancient Mediterranean cultures into a modern American one. The Christian message needs to be translated for each and every one of us, so that what seems at first to be nothing more than random babbling becomes, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a “river of living water,” (John 7:38) an encounter with the living God who is pouring that same Spirit out on us.

We come to this place seeking some way to experience God. And we’re confronted with language. Paragraph after paragraph of language. Some of it comes from the Bible, written thousands of years ago in Hebrew and Greek. Some of it comes from pieces of our liturgy written in Latin a thousand years ago, or in English five hundred years or fifty or twenty years ago. Some of it is set to music, having been composed in verse. Some of it comes out of my mouth, and some of it you hear from one another. But none of it flows directly from God’s mouth to your ears. Most of it isn’t addressed directly to you. All of it needs to be translated from its original language and context and meaning into the circumstances of our lives, because every word that’s ever been spoken loses something as it passes between two minds. (Unless, of course, you’re talking to yourself, which I do, almost constantly.)

And the fact that it makes any sense at all, the fact that some verse or prayer or lyric in this service might touch you somehow, that it might move you, comfort you, maybe even change you, is the miracle of Pentecost happening again. If there is anything in this hour of your Sunday morning that makes sense to you at all, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing you to hear the babble of a thousand voices speaking to you in the words you understand and need to hear. “Would that all the Lord’s people are prophets!” Moses said, “and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them all!” (Numbers 11:29) And he does. God gives the Holy Spirit to us all, God pours out the Spirit on all flesh, (Acts 2:17) God does the work to translate the good news to each and every one of us, so that across the millennia we too, can understand God’s power—not just in the stories of the past, but in all the wonders of the present—and be amazed. (2:12)