Sermon — May 14, 2023

Lectionary Readings

In a 2006 study, a psychologist at Leeds University asked 92 volunteers to sit down and write out the common English word “door” on a piece of paper 30 times in 60 seconds. You might be able to imagine what happened next. You may even have experienced the phenomenon yourself. If I stand here and start doing it (“Door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door, door…” I won’t go for thirty) I suddenly start to feel very strange. “Door” feels odd in my mouth. Is ”door” really a word? Is it really spelled that way? What a strange combination of sounds! Have you ever felt this way, maybe while writing out identical thank-you notes or invitations? You’re writing and writing and suddenly, ordinary English words start to seem strange?

If you have, you’re experiencing what the psychologist who ran this study came to call jamais vu, in French, “never seen,” the cleverly-named opposite of déja vu, French for “already seen.” It’s an example of what researchers call “semantic satiation,” in which your brain becomes so oversaturated with the meaning of a word that it suddenly seems to become meaningless.

It’s a paradox of familiarity. As the word becomes more and more and more familiar, it suddenly flips to being completely strange. Your mind no longer needs to think about the meaning of the wor,d and instead you start thinking about the very strange process occurring beneath the surface, about the fact that my tongue, and lips, and lungs, and vocal chords are all flapping wildly in an incredible display of choreography simply to produce these very sounds.

It’s a good metaphor, I think, for spiritual life.

God is, after all, both deeply familiar to us, and profoundly strange. God is the one, as Paul the Apostle says this morning, who “gives to all mortals life and breath and all things,” the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 2:23, 2:28) God is, as the theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “the Ground of Being Itself.” With every breath we take, God flows through us. With every move we make, God moves with us. Every step you take, every single day, God is watching you. (Okay, no. That’s Sting.)

Jesus tells his disciples, “You know [the Spirit], because he abides with you, and he will be in you.” He tells them that this Spirit, this divine Breath, this Advocate and Comforter, abides with them, literally lives within them; that God’s Holy Spirit is united with their spirits. When they, when we, feel hope or joy, peace or love, it’s a sign of God’s presence; it’s the Holy Spirit who dwells in our hearts, helping us to grow in love.

So the Holy Spirit of God is deeply familiar to all of us. It lives in us and breathes in us, and we live and move and have our being in it. God knows us better than we know ourselves.

And yet, like that word you repeat over and over and over again, God is so familiar to us that God becomes completely strange.

If it’s true that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, then we’re like the proverbial fish, who can’t tell you what water is until you take them out of it. And I think that’s probably true for most of us in this room. It certainly is for me. Even as a priest, I don’t spend most of the day prayerfully reflecting on the presence of God all around me. I spend most of the day trying to figure out what to cook for dinner that a five year old will actually eat, and wondering why the printer isn’t working, and trying to find someone new to work in the nursery after Miss Laurel graduates. I’m like a fish swimming in water, only occasionally noticing it’s wet.

And I think that’s why Paul so emphasizes the words those Athenians had carved onto one of their altars, dedicating it “To an unknown god.” (Acts 2:23) They had built altars to Zeus and Athena and Hera and then they built a spare, and marked it as such, to make sure none of the gods were offended when it turned out that they’d been left out. Paul sees this and says, “Aha! You’re waiting for an unknown God? Well, let me tell you about the God I know!”

But I think there’s a deeper spiritual truth in this dedication “to an unknown god.” Because God is always, and will always be, both known and unknown; both familiar and strange. In fact, the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition have always taught that the best way to come to know God is actually to un-know God, to strip away all the things we think we know and understand about the one whom we call God, to become so familiar with God that we realize how strange God really is; to slowly realize that none of what we think of God is true, because nothing we small human beings say in our small human way could ever capture God’s full reality, and yet God has given us life and breath and all things “so that,” as one translation says, “we would seek God, and perhaps feel our way toward him and find him.” (Acts 17:27) And we spend our whole lives, whether we know we’re doing it or not, slowly feeling our ways toward this unknown and unknowable God who knows us and abides with us and loves us.

Sometimes we have help. In other words, sometimes there are things in this world that help us feel our way toward God. Sometimes this help comes from art or music, which draw us deeper into the presence of God through their beauty. Sometimes our help comes from nature, which reminds us of God’s presence with us through the changing seasons of our lives, and strikes us with its own sublime strangeness. We very often have help from one another, from what we call the communion of saints, living and departed: the community of people who love us and care for us and inspire us to be the best versions of ourselves, and who forgive us and comfort us when we fall short.

And sometimes our help comes from all three of these at the same time. Many of you are here this morning to celebrate the installation of our newly-restored stained-glass window, and the dedication of the newly-created Beech Tree Medallion, which was given by Marie Hubbard’s daughters Sue and Judy in her memory. The medallion is based on the beloved Beech Tree that stands in our Garden, which Marie in turn had presented to the church in honor of her own parents, Marie and Kelso Isom. The beautiful restoration of the rest of the window was funded in part by funeral and memorial donations made in honors of many members of their extended family tree over decades, as well as by donations made by the whole church during the recent capital campaign.

All of which is to say that that window is more than just a pretty piece of glass. Through the beauty of its artwork, through the way it evokes nature, and perhaps most importantly of all, through its connection with the communion of ordinary saints, of blessed and beloved people who’ve gone before us, that window will guide each one of us and generations yet to come as we continue to feel our way toward God. It’s an incredible blessing for me to get to see it, from where I stand, right here, every Sunday, a living testament to a person and to the people who’ve made this church the amazing place it is. We look at a window, or we look at a tree, or we think of a person, and we know them all so well; but then suddenly we think, “Oh, my God; what an incredible thing.” And suddenly the grace of God shines through the people or places or pictures we know so well. And we are struck by their beauty and inspired by their love.

In a few minutes, I’ll say a formal prayer of blessing and dedication for the new window. But I want to add an informal dedication, as well, a subscript that we put on every beautiful thing in this place, a dedication “to an unknown God”; that in its beauty and in the memories it holds, we might be led every day, one step closer to the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

Amen.

Sermon — May 7, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9)

If there’s one thing that human beings are really good at, it’s immediately picking up on the small signs that identify whether someone else is a member of a particular social group. In every decade, teenagers have been able to identify who’s young and who’s old by their ability to understand the meaning of simple words like “slay” or “lit,” “groovy” or “the cat’s pajamas,” depending on your generation. But adults can do this too. Most of us can tell you exactly what it means for someone to be carrying around a large regular iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts when it’s 45 degrees in May—namely, that you’re a New Englander, and probably not a tourist. Just the other week I turned and asked a colleague if she was a New Yorker when I heard her say the word “water,” and I’ll never forget the moment I heard Steve Spinetto say about three words the first time we met, and then asked him where exactly in Cambridge he’d grown up.

For one evolutionary reason or another, human beings are very good at distinguishing those who are in a particular group from those who are out. In fact, sometimes we’re too good at it. You might even say that this is the source of some of our biggest problems: our seeming inability to treat other people like human beings across some of these very visible dividing lines.

And at times, it seems the Bible doesn’t help. Our Gospel reading this morning includes a verse that’s often used to condemn the followers of other religions, when Jesus says, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) As Bishop Alan said in his homily at our Clergy Conference this week, this verse is the kind of thing that makes us cringe when we read it at funerals, as we often do, wondering who is sitting out there in the pews feeling as though we’re declaring that they’ve been cut off from God.

Likewise our epistle can often be read in an unfortunate way. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that Peter’s words have been twisted to disastrous effect during the history of the Church. Imagine the sermons that have been preached to white churches in apartheid South Africa or to slave-owners in the antebellum South or by nationalist priests in Russia right now, that have begun from the verse, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” (1 Peter 2:9) We all hear these words as if they were addressing us. And because the common Civil-Rights-era saying that “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” remains as true now as it was seventy years ago, we have to reckon with the fact that right now, in hundreds and thousands of churches across this Commonwealth and across this country, all following the same lectionary, white preachers or readers are looking out over all-white or nearly-all-white congregations and saying to them, “You are a chosen race.”

But there’s a catch. And it’s an important catch. Because we are just not members of an American church, or an Episcopal church, or a mostly-white church. We are members of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the Church with a capital-C, the global, universal Church. And just as there are white preachers looking out over their congregations today all across America and saying, “You are a chosen race,” there are Black preachers looking out over their congregations, saying, “You are a chosen race.” Just as there are American preachers telling their congregations, “You are a holy nation,” there are priests across Latin America telling their people, “ustedes son una nación santa,” and clergy of many denominations around the world are the same thing to the people in their own countries. This very morning, in our one Episcopal diocese alone, there are people hearing these words who’ve been in Boston for ten generations and people hearing them who came here as refugees or immigrants just months or years ago, and they’re being read in English, Spanish, and Chinese; Swahili, and Dinka, and Luganda; and there are probably some I’m missing.

When Peter talks about a “chosen race,” it’s not “the white race” or “the Black race.” When he talks about a “holy nation,” it’s not the United States of America or the Russian Federation. As King Charles III knows better than anyone else, when Peter talks about “royal priesthood” he doesn’t mean the fact that the King of the United Kingdom doubles as Supreme Governor of the Church of England; he means that in Christ, a congregation of ordinary people who have been neither ordained nor crowned have been made into a royal priesthood, the holy people of God, and there is no one who has the authority to lord it over them and there is nobody who stands between them and God.

Peter doesn’t write this letter, like Paul writes his letters, to a particular congregation in a particular place. He begins it, “Peter, an apostle of Christ, to the exiles of the Diaspora in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” (1 Peter 1:1) He writes, in other words, to people who are not his people, not his tribe or nation or race, people who don’t even speak his native tongue; people who are not one people, but many, and who—and this is important—are not a majority gathered in their community, but tiny minorities, scattered and dispersed throughout the world. “Once you were not a people,” he writes, “but now you are God’s people,” (1 Peter 2:10) and it’s true. Through their shared faith in Christ, these tiny scattered groups, minorities within their communities, have been transformed into a new nation, a new people, whose identity is formed not so much by their language, or their location, or their nationality, but by their allegiance to Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God, by their decision to follow what the Letter of James calls the “royal law”: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (James 2:8)

This isn’t something you can see in someone’s face. It isn’t something you can hear in their accent or their choice of words. Even the apostles can hardly recognize the presence of God, after all. It strikes me that in this very passage that can sometimes feel exclusive—“no one comes to the Father except through me”—Thomas says to Jesus, “Lord we do not know where you are going,” (John 14:5) and Philip makes a request that’s so completely missing the point (“Lord, show us the Father, and we’ll be satisfied”) that Jesus responds with dismay: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don’t know me?” (John 14:8-9) Are you among my closest followers and you still have no idea at all what’s going on? How much more true is that for us, two millennia later, when we look at another person’s religion and claim that we can judge whether that’s of God or not. If even Thomas and Philip don’t know where Jesus is going or where God has been revealed, maybe we ought to just be humble, and not pretend that we know what God is doing in someone else’s life, even if they don’t seem to believe the same things we do.

What’s “chosen” about the “chosen race” is not that it’s one race that’s chosen; it’s that people are chosen from among all the races of the world. What’s holy about the “holy nation” is not that one nation is more holy than the rest, it’s that citizens from all the nations of the world, which all have their ups and downs, good and bad, have been formed into a new nation whose values are at odds with the values of the lands in which they dwell, whose way of self-sacrificing love of neighbor and of God sometimes overlaps with, but is ultimately incompatible with, the way of the world.

We are, and always have been, and always will be, a tiny fraction of the world. Jesus would say we’re like yeast, or like seeds, or like a few fish in the sea. And that’s our gift and our calling: not to separate ourselves from the world, as if the world were evil and we are good, but to love the world, because we hold dual citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven and the many kingdoms of the earth.

Every one of you is a “royal priest,” a holy leader who has the power to set an example for the world, and the power to share God’s love with the world and to share the world’s needs with God. You have the power to love the people around you, whoever they are and whatever that means. You have the power to pray for them, to care for them, to simply hold them in the light of God, and sometimes even to share with them a little bit of the story of how you ended up right here today. For “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9-10)

Sermon — April 30, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I just finished re-reading the 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow. It’s really is one of the best books I’ve ever read; if I were as popular as Oprah (and I’m not sure why I’m not), it would be sold in supermarket checkout aisles with a little “Greg’s Book Club” sticker on it. The book opens with the thirty-something-year-old protagonist, Count Alexander Rostov, standing before a special tribunal in the days shortly after the Russian Revolution, charged with the crime of being an aristocrat. The Count had written a revolutionary poem in his college days before the Great War, and so the court is merciful, and instead of sentencing him to death for his noble birth, he’s sentenced to house arrest for life. He’s moved out of his grand apartment in the luxurious Hotel Metropol into a tiny room in the attic, and told that he may live, for now, but if he ever sets foot outside the hotel, he’ll be shot on sight.

The novel follows Count Rostov across three decades spent in the hotel, as the young and idle man becomes an older and more mature one. He turns his aristocratic knowledge of etiquette and fine food and wine into a career as the hotel’s head waiter. He befriends a young girl named Nina, who lives in the hotel, and who shows him all its secret doors and passageways. In his late forties, this once-careless bachelor begins to raise the young child of a friend who’s disappeared into the gulag archipelago, and the story follows them over the years as she grows into a remarkable young woman and he grows into a true father.

Toward the end of the book, in the Soviet 1950s, the Count is talking with his dear friend, Anna, who’s reading a copy of the American LIFE Magazine. He says to her, “You sound as if you dreamed of living in America.” “Everyone dreams of living in America,” she replies. “Half of the inhabitants of Europe would move there tomorrow just for the conveniences.” “Conveniences!” he says. “What conveniences?” And she flips through the magazine, showing dozens of photos of what appears to be “the same woman in a different dress smiling before some newfangled contraption. ‘Dishwashing machines. Clothes-washing machines. Vacuum cleaners. Toasters. Televisions!”

The count thinks for a few minutes. “‘I’ll tell you what is convenient,’ he [says] after a moment. ‘To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

“I came that they may have life,” Jesus says, “and have it abundantly.” And I can’t help but think that that’s an interesting choice of words.

Jesus doesn’t tell his disciples that he came so that we would live easily. Peter acknowledges as much in the epistle this morning, when he reminds the disciples that they will endure pain, that they will suffer unjustly; and that this is not a sign of God’s disfavor. In fact it’s quite the opposite: in a world that’s not quite right, we’ll sometimes need to suffer for what is right. (1 Peter 2:19-21) So Jesus doesn’t say that we will live conveniently. He doesn’t say that we will live comfortably. He says he came so that we would live life abundantly.

“Abundant life” isn’t “easy life” or “comfortable life” or “convenient life.” It’s not breakfast on a tray, or a carriage at your command. It’s life’s abundance, its fullness, that Jesus identifies, and to me, it’s an ambivalent turn of phrase. It reminds me of the equally-ambivalent imagery of the Twenty-Third Psalm: a cup so full of good wine that it runneth over soundeth like a very good thing, after all, until you’re the one responsible for cleaning the tablecloth onto which it hath overflowed. Life sometimes feels abundant, all right, and that’s the problem: there’s just so darn much in it.

But the abundance Jesus is talking about isn’t an abundance of things to be done. The “abundant life” is not the “busy life,” the one in which we just keep piling things on as we try our best to love God and our neighbor, to be good friends and good neighbors and to volunteer for the church and to advocate for a more just world; perhaps to be good parents and good employees and to find some quiet time alone for prayer.

In the “abundant life,” it’s not our schedules or our bank accounts that overflow. It’s our hearts. It’s a simple life, a community life, a life of relationships of love. It’s not a life that’s defined by adding things on our to-do lists, but by paring them down. The Book of Acts tells us that Jesus’ earliest disciples reorganized their lives, actually changed the way they were living, so that they could devote themselves “to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42) They decided to spend the time they had on the things that mattered most: reflecting on Jesus’ teachings and the stories told about him by the apostles; spending time in fellowship with one another, loving and caring for one another; being together in worship or over a meal. They took what they had and shared it with one another, to each one according to their need, so that the conveniences of a few might not drown out the necessities of all. (2:44-45) They chose to live as if they were members of one family, one household, as if their lives truly depended on one another. And this was where they found abundance: not in the depth or intensity of their own prayer, but in the strength of the community of prayer; not in the protection of their own wealth, but in the way they could share it with one another; not as isolated individuals, but as members of a community, whose fates were really bound up with one another. To share in celebrating other people’s joy, and to share in feeling other people’s pain, that’s what makes for an abundant life, a life full of more than one person alone could ever live.

Jesus doesn’t promise us a luxurious life, as if his blessings would guarantee our prosperity or fortune or luck; we know that’s not the case. He doesn’t promise us an easy life, as if God is a heavenly snowplow parent, clearing the difficulties out of our way. Jesus the Good Shepherd invites us to enter through his gate, and to become another sheep in his flock. He invites us to take the risk of an abundant life, a life so full of love for one another that it just might break our hearts.

We can’t control the circumstances in which we live, any more than the imaginary Count Rostov could when he stood before that Soviet court. But we can control the way we choose to live, whatever the circumstances; and if we choose to love, we too may find that in the end, all the hassles, all the pains, all the inconveniences that make our cups sometimes feel like they runneth over, are the very things that turn out to have mattered us to most.