Sermon — May 21, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Of all the Sundays in the entire church calendar, today seems to me be the one in which the apostles’ lives actually seem something like our own. For the last six weeks, we’ve been in the season of Easter, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Pentecost, and the miraculous and overwhelming manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Most of the rest of the year, we follow Jesus around in his Galilean perambulations, as he heals people and casts out demons and teaches his disciples face to face. And then for a few weeks in December, we’ll eagerly await the Messiah’s birth.

But none of these are the way we spend our lives today. Jesus does not appear to us in his resurrected body and say, “Peace be with you.” (I want you to call me if he does!) We don’t sit at Jesus’ feet and engage in a Q&A about his parables, or see people cured of an illness just by touching the fringe of his garments. And while the Holy Spirit is active among us, it rarely shows up with tongues of fire and the miraculous ability to understand other languages.

Most of the year the “plot” of our church year follows Jesus himself, during a short period, the year or three in his life when he was really, tangibly present with his disciples. But today, this Sunday after the Ascension, finds the disciples in a very different place. And it’s one that’s much more like our world. The amazing story of Jesus’ time on earth, of his ministry and death, his resurrection and reappearances, is over. The miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit is yet to come. The one whom the apostles thought would transform the world and establish a new way of life for them and all their people has gone, and the apostles are left wondering, “What now?”

“What now?” is the great question of Ascensiontide, this strange little mini-season of the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. But “what now?” is also the great question of our lives. Something happens. Somehow, we encounter God. And we’re left asking: What next?

If you’re sitting in this church, after all, it’s not by accident. The overwhelming majority of people in this neighborhood, this morning, are not sitting in church at all. Something happened, for you, at some point, which brought you here. Maybe it was a spiritual experience or a life crisis, a moment of great beauty and inspiration or a parent or spouse telling you that you didn’t have a choice. But one way or another, you’ve found your way here, and the question that you face, whether it’s conscious or not, is, the same as those disciples. Here we are. What next?

Well, if you’re anything like me, your instinct is to plan; to worry, fret, imagine, dream about the things that could come next. Every two or three years of my adulthood, I’ve come up with a five or ten-year plan. And the fact that every single one of them has been almost completely wrong hasn’t been enough to stop me yet. Like the apostles, I crave certainty. They ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, you’ve risen from the dead; now are you going to take charge and set up that kingdom of God you’ve been talking about so much?” (Acts 1:6) I ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, we’ve made it through the pandemic, more or less; now is it time for a big new vision for the church? Okay, Lord, the child’s six months old. (Two years old, three, four, five, fifteen years old.) Now is this going to start getting easier? Okay, Lord, you’ve made your point; I’ve realized that this grudge is only hurting me, and it’s time for me to let go and forgive my father, mother, sister, friend, spouse. Now could you just get them to apologize, first?” And to this, and to every single one of our attempts to predict the future, to force God’s hand, to speed things up or slow them down, Jesus replies that “it is not for you to know the times or periods” that God has set (Acts 1:7).

(Of course, it’s good to have some kind of vision or strategic plan. I worry that the Church doesn’t do this enough, that we just veer from crisis to crisis. And then I remember that the five-year Mission Strategy we adopted in 2016 had nothing to say about pandemic preparedness, and the one we adopted in 2021 will probably miss the crises of 2025. Maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower who put it best, when he said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”)

Well then, maybe plans won’t work; so what’s the plan?

“I know!” the apostles say. If focusing on the future won’t work, then let’s turn our eyes to the past! We know where Jesus went, and we know he’s coming back. So let’s get out our telescopes and fix them on the heavens, and wait and watch for Jesus to return in that very same patch of clouds. And this is something that we, the Church, love to do. We tell and re-tell stories of the past. We cherish the art and the buildings and the memories we’ve been left. We hold onto our traditions and value them, simply because they’re traditions. And we don’t just do this as churches. We do it as individuals, too. You see it all the time when we, as parents or teachers or coaches or friends, try to recreate the best moments of our lives for someone else. Our lives are full of golden memories, beautiful experiences of life or worship or prayer, and we try to reenact them so someone else can experience that same transcendent feeling that we did. And it almost never works.

I don’t even mean this as a criticism. Sure, it can go too far. We don’t want the church to become a museum, a place where nothing can change or grow or be touched. We want it to be a home, and a community, and it is. But there’s nothing wrong with remembering traditions. If those apostles had just thrown out their memories of Jesus altogether, where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be reading the Gospels. But as the pastor and author Sam Rainer says, it becomes a problem when nostalgia trumps devotion, when “memories of the past bring more emotion than the mission of the present.”[1] And it’s not a problem because there’s something wrong with what worked in the past. It’s a problem for the very reason the angels suggest when they appear and ask the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s where Jesus went, and Jesus really was there. But it’s not where he’s going next.

So if we want to follow Jesus in these in-between days, the question remains: What next? We can’t make a fool-proof ten-year plan. We don’t want to become stuck in the past. What’s left?

Well, what’s left is the present. And that’s what the apostles do: they live in the present. Not in the peculiarly-modern YOLO sense—they don’t fly to Bali and drink smoothies and do yoga on the beach, and post it all on their Instagram accounts. It’s something else. They go to a holy place, to the city of Jerusalem, and they go to a room, and they spend their time in prayer.

(Do you like to go to a holy place, and to go into a room, and to spend your time in prayer? Because if not, I have bad news for you, about what you’re doing right now.)

The disciples don’t seek self-indulgent pleasure or isolated enlightenment. They live in community; not just the abstract idea of community, but an actual community of actual people. Annoying people. Difficult people. Not“Beloved Community” in theory, but Peter, John, and James, Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Jameson; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s just fantastic; and all his brothers, who… hmm.

In those remarkable early days, between losing Jesus, the leader of their community, and receiving the Holy Spirit that would lead them to transform the world, the disciples do what we do now. We come, and we pray, and we wait for the Spirit to lead us where it will. And in the meantime, we live together as a community of prayer; as imperfect people made holier by one another and by God.

We can’t predict when the Spirit will come, or what it will say. We know it probably won’t be in the exact same place it appeared in the past. We might suffer along the way, as Peter is always eager to remind us. But God will not leave us comfortless. And even if we don’t know the way, and even if we can’t plan ahead, God is guiding us into even greater things. For “the spirit of glory,” as Peter says, “which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you…” and “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:14, 5:11).

[1] Sam Rainer, The Church Revitalization Checklist (Church Answers: 2021), 59.

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.