Sermon — August 20, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“She came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’
He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
(Matthew 15:22)

Jesus’ words to the unnamed Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel reading can be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to understand. She comes to him, seeking healing for her daughter. She kneels before him in a posture of humility. At first, he refuses to answer her, and when she persists in asking, his response seems to be somewhere between indifferent and insulting. Matthew’s narration gives no hint of sympathy or compassion. “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus says, as if this weren’t a matter of life and death; as if she and her daughter weren’t children of God of at all, not human beings at all, but “dogs.”

It’s a baffling story, and it’s generated plenty of interpretations.

Some see the woman as the hero of the story, and Jesus’ actions as proof that God can change; that here, unlike most of the Gospels, it’s the Canaanite woman who converts Jesus, and not the other way around. Jesus’ words, in this understanding of the story, aren’t cool or indifferent; they’re angry, disdainful, an ethnic slur, and sexist, to boot. But the Canaanite woman’s persistence in confronting him opens his eyes to see her as she really is, and he leaves the story a changed man. So goes one interpretation.

Another school of thought starts from the other end. Jesus can’t, by definition, they say, be any of these things; Jesus can’t be bigoted, or sexist, Jesus wouldn’t be cold or lack compassion; Jesus doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. He’s testing her. Clearly. And when he discovers her great faith, he grants her her reward: “Let it be done for you as you wish,” he says, and her daughter is healed “instantly.” (Matthew 14:28) She’s passed the test, so the demon can get lost.

Others lean on the old Christian method of making Jesus look good through vicious anti-Semitism. You can’t imagine how many commentaries on this text make off-handed remarks like “Jews frequently insulted Gentiles by calling them dogs” (citing no examples),^[1] or “[Jesus] reacts to the woman’s request as they would expect of a rabbi in those days.”[2] (I beg your pardon?) Given the thousands of years of Christian violence against our Jewish neighbors, I’d think people would want to be a bit more careful about this kind of slander, but alas. It’s tempting for Christians to make Jesus look good, especially in his harsher moments, by making the culture around him look bad. But it just doesn’t work. The story of the people of Israel isn’t a story of exclusion or ethnic supremacism. It’s a story in which God chooses one people, not to the exclusion of all others, but to be the instrument through which God will call all the others. And we need to understand what Jesus says and does in this story as a part of that much larger story.

The story of the Bible is a story of false starts in God’s relationship with us. God starts out by creating humankind in a Garden, by giving Adam and Eve just one simple rule. What could go wrong? Well, things go wrong. Very wrong. But humankind continues to grow outside the Garden, and things go even worse, until it’s so bad that God has to wipe it all out with a Flood, and chooses one family, the family of Noah, through whom to rebuild.

It doesn’t quite work out. After the Flood, we return to our usual ways, trying to build a tower up to heaven so that we can become like gods. God won’t destroy us again, but God scatters us, confusing our languages and dividing us into different nations and peoples. And later, God chooses one family from among one people, the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and promises them that through them and their offspring, all the nations of the world will be blessed. (Gen. 22:18)

The story follows the descendants of Jacob, the people of Israel, as they go into slavery in Egypt and come back out of it; as they enter the Promised Land and struggle with the people living in it; as their kingdoms are destroyed and their homes taken away and the fraction who remain are sent into exile in Babylon, and then return. And yet the prophets promise, again and again, that though God’s people’s are small, and weak, and at the mercy of others, nevertheless, they are the ones through whom God plans the redeem the world. And so the prophet Isaiah, rejoicing in the prospect of a return from exile, receives this message from God: “Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel; I will gather others to them.” (Isaiah 56:8) The foreigners, the Gentiles, all the nations of the world will be joined with God’s people, and “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)

Jesus sees his own life as part of this process; maybe even the central part. It’s in and through him that the good news will finally reach all the nations. And the message that he teaches prepares the way.

The first part of this Gospel reading is about Jesus’ disagreement with some of his contemporaries about the markers of Jewish identity, about the food laws and ritual practices that distinguished his people from their neighbors. Some of his contemporaries thought that the way forward was to emphasize the practices that separated them from the nations around them, the food laws and purity regulations that marked them as a distinctive people with distinctive beliefs, and even to expand them; to apply the same rules of purity to a meal at your own table, for example, that would apply to a sacrifice in the Temple.

Jesus disagrees. What really defiles you in God’s sight, he says, is not your dirty hands, but your dirty hearts. Ritual practices are markers of belonging, things that distinguish one nation from another. But when it comes to “evil intentions,” to “murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander…” these things cross every line of nation, race, or class. And if these are the true markers of purity, then there can be Gentiles who are as pure in heart as any of Jesus’ fellow Jews. People who are not among God’s chosen people and who don’t adopt their religious practices can still become a part of God’s beloved community.

Later, the apostle Paul asks whether this inclusion of the Gentiles means, in turn, the exclusion of the Jews. “I ask, then,” he writes to the Romans, “has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham!” (Romans 11:1) God has not rejected God’s chosen people, not at all. God’s grace hasn’t been moved from one set of people to another. It’s grown to include us all.

So where does this leave us, as we grapple with this strange story?

Well first: remember that Jesus knew this story of God’s universal love. If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, then Jesus the plan and his own part in it. But even just on a human level, Jesus was a teacher who was well-read in Scripture and accustomed to interpreting it. He knew the promise that God’s kingdom would expand to include the Gentiles. He knew that God was calling this Canaanite woman. And in fact, he’d just caused a stir in the next town over by teaching that the things that separated her from him were not so important after all. It can be appealing, in a way, to see this story as a story about the Canaanite’s woman’s agency and her powers of persuasion. But it comes as a relief, at least to me, to hear that Jesus doesn’t need to be persuaded that you’re worthy of God’s love; that this was, in fact, the plan, all along.

I can’t explain Jesus’ tone, when he says these words, when he asks this woman whether he should give the children’s food to a dog like her. But I do know that human beings sometimes treat one another like something less than human. That we divide, constantly, between us and them; insiders and outsiders; the respected and the scorned. And I know that Jesus’ answer, when we make these kinds of distinctions, is that yes, it is right to take the children’s food and give it to the ones we call the “dogs.” That it’s what it is in the heart that makes the difference to him. That if there is ever a time in your life where you’ve been insulted or reviled, called a name or treated like you’re less than someone else—that Jesus condemns “false witness” and “slander,” but God promises to “gather the outcasts.” (Isaiah 56:8)

We do not need to persuade God that we are worthy, or prove that we deserve God’s love. We do not need to be born in the right place, or be a part of the right culture. The only test we need to pass is faith, the only thing we need to do is trust that God is gathering us in, whoever we are and whoever we have been—that Jesus is leading us to God’s holy mountain, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)

^[1]Lane T. Dennis and Wayne Grudem, eds. The ESV Study Bible. Accordance electronic ed. (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2008).

[2] Richard Ward, “Commentary on Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20/commentary-on-matthew-1510-20-21-28-6

Sermon — August 13, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, I’m not usually one to jump to Saint Peter’s defense. Peter is the central disciple, the first leader of the Church after Jesus’ departure, the Rock on whom the Church is built. But of all the disciples, Peter can sometimes be the hardest to love. He has a big personality, to put it politely. Peter’s inconsistent, impulsive; he tends to make every momentous occasion about himself. Who is it who feels the need to insist that he’ll never deny Jesus, even at the point of death, and then immediately denies him three times before the cock crows? It’s Peter. Who’s the one who sees the glory of the Transfiguration and then says, “Lord, it’s good that we were here!” Peter. Who sees the risen Jesus standing on the shore, and jumps into the water with all his clothes on to swim to him, leaving the others, less dramatically, in the boat? If you guessed Peter, then you’ve won our prize: free coffee after the service!

Peter can be hard to love. But in this moment, in this story, I feel bad for him. I wonder whether Jesus is being a little unfair. Because—let’s be honest. If you were Jesus, and you saw Peter coming toward you on the water, trusting so deeply in your divine power that he would step off the side of a boat and start walking, would the first words out of your mouth really be, “O you of little faith”? (Matthew 14:31) It seems to me that must’ve taken quite a bit of faith.

But then again, I’ve found it useful from time to time to remember that I am not in fact the Son of God. And if there’s a story in the Gospels in which my initial reaction is that Jesus is wrong and I’m right, it’s usually worth a second look. So I wonder what Jesus is actually saying here about faith, and doubt, and what they mean in practice in our lives.

There’s an old ice-breaker game called “two truths and a lie.” I might call this story “two faiths and a doubt.” It seems to me that Peter shows his faith in this story in two very different ways, and we’re left wondering: What does Jesus see as Peter’s doubt?

Peter’s first form of faith, of course, is his conviction that Jesus’ power can enable him to do more than he could do on his own. It’s late in the night, in the “fourth watch,” Matthew says, and the boat is battered by the waves, going headfirst into the wind. It’s cold and dark and rough. It’s not time for a swim. But when Peter sees a figure walking on the surface of the sea, and hears that it’s Jesus, he believes that if it really is, then Peter can walk on water too; that not only can Jesus conquer the chaos and the danger of the sea for himself, he can share that power with others, too. It’s the faith that Jesus is not a magician trying to impress us with his own skills, but a God who wants to share his blessings with us. I can’t imagine how much faith it would take to take that first step off the side of that boat.

And Peter’s first form of faith is actually backed up by a second one. Peter doesn’t only believe that Jesus will give him the miraculous ability to walk on the water. He also believes that if he falls, there will be someone to catch him. And to me, this act of faith is even more impressive than the first. It’s one thing to believe that God will give you some extraordinary blessing, because it’s a relatively low risk. The worst that can happen is that you remain ordinary. If Peter had taken a step and just splashed straight into the water, well, I guess he could just scramble back into the boat.

But to take step after step as the boat recedes behind you takes another kind of faith. That’s not the faith that you’ll succeed. It’s the faith to know that if you fail, and it will be okay. To believe that even if you start to sink, you will not disappear; that Jesus will reach out his hand to save you from the storm.

And these are the two halves of the courage that many of us need. We’re often faced with situations that seem to be too much for us, with challenges or opportunities that frighten or intimidate us, with an invitation from God that seems to be beyond us. And we have to believe, on the one hand, that by the grace of God, we can do more than we can imagine, that you are, as Christopher Robin said to Winnie the Pooh, “you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” And we have to believe, on the other hand, that if and when we inevitably reach our limits, when we reach the point beyond which we cannot go, and begin to sink, God will be there to catch us when we fall. It’s much safer to stay back in the boat.

This is the incredible faith it takes to walk on water, and yet Jesus says to him, before he says anything else, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31)

We’re accustomed to think that Jesus is talking about that moment at which Peter becomes frightened, and begins to sink, and calls out, “Lord, save me!” (14:30) He begins to sink, and Jesus immediately asks him, “why did you doubt?” as if it were a relationship of cause and effect, as if, if he were just a little more faithful, had just a little less fear or doubt about what was going on, he could have made it all the way. And that raises some complex theological questions and concerns that boil down to one problem: we can never try hard enough, believe hard enough, to earn God’s love for us. And yet, as Paul reminds us, “no one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.” (Romans 10:11; Isaiah 28:16)

So I wonder if it’s really something else. I wonder if Peter’s true lack of faith is that revealed by the fact that he didn’t stay in the boat. I wonder if his more radical moment of doubt came when he saw Jesus walking toward him, and wouldn’t just stay put, when he found himself in a storm, and he didn’t trust that God would come to him, when he was afraid that Jesus would walk on by. And as a matter of fact, the Gospel of Mark comes right out and says this: in a similar scene, Mark writes that “Jesus meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out.” And Jesus turned aside instead and got into the boat. (Mark 6:48-49)

I wonder whether this is Peter’s doubt, whether this was Peter’s fear: not that he doubted that he could walk all the way to Jesus, but that he doubted that Jesus would walk all the way to him. That he found himself in a cold, dark boat, in the middle of the night, battered by the wind and rocked by the waves, halfway between one place and another, and he was afraid that God had left them all alone. I wonder whether this is what Jesus wanted him to believe, whether Jesus wanted him to stop being Peter for just a minute, to stop being the center of attention and the man of action, and to trust that God would keep them safe, to trust that God would act in God’s own time. I wonder, in other words, whether the lack of faith that Jesus identifies was not so much a lack of faith in Peter’s own sudden miraculous abilities, but a lack of faith that God would come to him, exactly where he was.

I don’t know. I could be wrong. Maybe it is this other kind of faith. But it seems to me that we spend most of our lives on a boat from here to there, working hard with the wind against us, battered by the waves. And it seems to me that there are moments when God is calling us out onto the water, and moments where God wants us to stay put. There are times when we need the faith and the courage to take that step out of the boat, trusting that God will strengthen us and guide us, trusting that God will not let us sink. And there are times when we need to trust that, however rough the waves, we will weather the storm, and that sometimes, the best thing to do is to endure it, for now, with faith that God will not abandon us.             It’s genuinely hard to know which of these is right, at any given moment, in any given situation. It takes discernment, and prayer. It takes the effort to slow down, and listen; to wait through the roaring noise of the wind and the earthquake and the fire and to listen for God in the “sound of sheer silence,” in the “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-12); to hear Jesus saying to us, wherever we are, and wherever we are going, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” (Matthew 14:27)

Sermon — August 6, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a paradox at the heart of Feast of the Transfiguration, which we celebrate today. On the one hand, it’s one of the most glorious events in Jesus’ life, the moment at which it’s clearer than any other that Jesus truly is the Son of God. Christmas is a baby lying in manger, like billions of other babies have. Epiphany is impressive, but people have been given royal gifts before. Sure, there’s a voice from heaven at the Baptism of Jesus, but no “raiment white and glistening.” In terms of splendor and brilliance and glory, in terms of the raw special-effects “wow factor,” only Easter and the Ascension come close to the Transfiguration, and even then, it’s hard to say. If you’re trying to make a splash, the vision of a man transformed into a beacon of God’s own uncreated light is hard to beat.

And yet the Transfiguration is one of the least celebrated days in our calendar. It’s always on August 6, so six years out of seven, it falls on a weekday. Even when we observed it on a Sunday, it’s a Sunday in August. And the humid air, laidback style, and low attendance numbers of summer worship don’t exactly lend themselves to embodying the awe and wonder the disciples must have felt when they say Jesus transformed in this way.

But this isn’t just a quirk of our climate or our summer lifestyle. In fact, this contrast is part of the Transfiguration itself. These stories we read on Transfiguration Day—of God’s light revealed to Moses, God’s light shining through Jesus—are not big, public, triumphant stories. God doesn’t appear in these stories with a display of power before the whole nation, or the whole world. God appears to one person, or to three. God was perfectly capable of making public appearances. In Moses’ day, God led the Israelites in the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; but God was only fully revealed to Moses, alone. Jesus could preach a sermon to a crowd or feed five thousand people with a few fish and couple loaves of bread. But God’s full presence in Jesus is revealed only now, and only to these three, the closest disciples. And after he was revealed, “they kept silent…and told no one any of the things they had seen.” It’s a big event—the moment in the Gospels in which God’s glory most clearly is revealed—and yet for everyone else in the world, it’s as if it never happened. The Transfiguration was even more sparsely attended two thousand years ago in Galilee than it is this August morning in our small neighborhood church.

But there’s something even stranger about this big event. After the Transfiguration, nothing really seems to change. This is not the moment at which Jesus changes course, beginning the transition from an obscure ministry around his hometown toward a more glorious career in the big city. It’s the very opposite. Jesus leaves Galilee, to be sure, and heads for Jerusalem. But he’s heading toward the cross, not toward glory. This is the “departure” that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah discuss, his exodos, Luke says in Greek; the paradoxical events of Holy Week in which defeat is transformed into victory, and the way of the Cross becomes the way of life, the beginning of a new Exodus leading us to freedom. This moment on the mountain reveals God’s presence in Jesus’ own person, but that makes the events to come even stranger, because Jesus doesn’t take the Marvel-Comic route. He doesn’t use his super-power of divine light to blind Pilate and make his escape from the soldiers. He reveals God’s presence in the midst of human life, in all the good and bad; but he doesn’t change what’s about to happen.

The Transfiguration doesn’t change what’s about to happen. But it does show it in a completely different light.

I’m reminded sometimes of an ad that used to run on the Red Line and buses. I think it was by Hope Fellowship Church, over by Porter Square. I can picture the big orange background of the banner, with the C. S. Lewis quote: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

I think of how important the Transfiguration must have been to these early apostles, to Peter and John and James. They keep silent about what they’ve seen, for now; but they’ve seen it. And after Jesus goes to Jerusalem, and he dies, and their hopes of his glorious kingdom are temporarily dashed, they still remember. And decades later, when Peter writes this letter that we read, after Jesus has gone away again, he still holds onto the memory of that light. And through the long, dark night of life in this world, that light becomes for him “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19) Peter can believe, not only because he saw Jesus’ glory, but because he sees everything else differently in its light.

I said that the Transfiguration is the least-observed Christian holiday. But that’s only true in the West, in the Catholic and Protestant traditions that grew out of Western Europe. In the Eastern Orthodox churches, it’s very different. If you think about the visual art of churches, you might say that Catholics make pictures of Good Friday, Protestants make pictures of Easter, and the Orthodox make pictures of the Transfiguration: so that there’s no symbol more Catholic than a crucifix; nothing more Protestant than a plain, empty cross; and the background of every Orthodox icon is filled with light reflected off gold.

The Transfiguration is, in fact, at the heart of Orthodox spirituality. The great monks and theologians of the East have taught for centuries that we can see this light, that it can enlighten our hearts and our minds, that by meditating on this light, by paying attention to this light, as Peter says, we can become more like the divine light. Our end, our purpose in life, is not to be saved from hell or to go to heaven; it is to be slowly transfigured ourselves, until we shine almost as gloriously as Christ did. We, too, can slowly be infused with this divine light, until our faces, like Moses’, shine.

So I wonder where you’ve seen that light. I wonder what lamp is shining in the darkness for you. I wonder what experience you’ve had that’s changed the way you see everything else, what person, or place, or relationship is that beacon of light for you. I wonder what memory it is you can turn to when it seems that hope is lost, what it is that reminds you that the night doesn’t last forever. I wonder what habits you have, or you’ve lost, that helped you grow closer to the light of God. It’s probably nothing big. It might be something only you, or you and two friends, saw. It might be something that happened once, years ago, and that you’ve never forgotten. It might be as simple as starting the day with thirty seconds’ silent prayer.

But whatever it is, I wonder what it means to do what Peter says and “be attentive” to that light “as to a lamp.” What would it mean to turn your attention to that memory or that practice or that place, to focus on it? What would it mean to cultivate it, so that its strength could grow, so that you could see even more of your life in its light? What would it mean for your light to grow, so that you might share that same light with the world?

What would it mean for the Transfiguration to be, not just some day in August, but the purpose and the goal of every day, and the lamp shining through every night?

Sermon — July 16, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

From time to time in my ministry, I’ve had a certain kind of conversation with a parent who’s concerned about their child’s spiritual life. It’s usually about how they wish their kids found the same joy and peace in a church community or practice of prayer like the parent did. I’ve never had a conversation like this about a young child, by the way; occasionally about teenagers, sometimes about young adults. But the overwhelming majority of these conversations have been parents in their 70s and 80s, even 90s, who wish their sweet little middle-aged children would go to church. Marion Wood, for example, once promised me $10 if I could get any of her kids to come to church.

In every one of these conversations, I’ve found myself offering some variation on these words: You know, they’re still young. They’ve got plenty of time. You’ve planted the seed of faith; there’s no way to know if or when it’s going to sprout.

It’s the Parable of the Sower, over and over again.

Parables are an interesting literary genre. They’re not fables, with talking animals acting out a folk tale that ends with the moral of the story, tied up in a bow. They’re not allegories, where each character is a thinly-veiled reference to someone else, like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm who each stand for a different figure in 1930s Soviet politics. The question of a parable is not, “Okay, who’s the sower? Is it me? Is it God?” That’s the question of an allegory. And the question of the parable isn’t “So what’s the moral of the story? What’s the bottom line?” That’s the question of a fable. A parable simply tells a story in a mostly-realistic way. It points out something that’s true about the way the world works. And then it invites you to grapple with the question of what it actually means in your situation.

Jesus doesn’t always explain his parables, at least not to the general public. In fact, if you look at the verse numbers for our Gospel reading today, you’ll notice there’s a jump, from verse 9 to verse 18. And we skip some important narration. Jesus tells the parable, the story itself, to the crowd, and ends with the enigmatic phrase, “Let anyone with ears listen!” (Matthew 13:9) In other words: “Now think about that for yourself.” Then, in verse 10, his inner circle of disciples come to him and ask, “Why do you speak in parables?” Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah to the effect that he’s destined to teach in a way that people will hear, but not understand. And then he interprets the parable in the second half of our reading, not to the whole crowd who heard it, but just to that inner circle. The rest of them are left sitting by the sea, wondering: “Huh. What was that all about?”

In the parable itself, Jesus doesn’t even give us a clue. Some of the parables begin with something like, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” But no. Here, Jesus simply says, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” (Matt. 13:3) There’s no allegorical meaning. There’s no fable with a neat moral. There’s just an observation about agricultural: Here’s what it’s like when someone is sowing seeds. Sometimes birds eat them up. Sometimes the soil is too shallow. Sometimes there are weeds. Now think about that. And then he sits down.

I’d like to think that some of them spent their whole lives thinking about that story, especially after Jesus died and his fame and glory, paradoxically, grew. A fable gets boiled down to its moral and then forgotten. An allegory is decoded once, and understood. But a parable is never over. From time to time it floats back into memory, and you have to think to yourself: Huh. I wonder what this parable means today. Because that’s the key: not to try to figure out “what the parable means,” as if a parable only ever meant one thing, but to use it to make meaning of the situation at hand.

There are a few things I notice whenever the Parable of the Sower comes back into my mind.

The first thing I notice about this parable is that there’s a big difference between the most meaningful change and the most obvious change. Every new gardener planting their first vegetables wants to see something sprout up, as quick as it can. But the more experienced gardener knows this isn’t always a good sign. Sometimes, as Jesus says, seeds fall on rocky ground, and spring up, and look amazing at first—but when the sun comes out, they shrivel up and die, because they have “no depth of soil.” (Matthew 13:5) It’s the kind of thing we sometimes call a “flash in the pan”: something that flares into sudden brilliance, and just as quickly fades away. And you’ve probably seen this before: The new road bike or home gym equipment bought in a burst of enthusiasm that soon lies forgotten somewhere in the basement or garage. The new member who joins a church or a book club or a community group, full of energy and opinions only to burn out or leave in a huff after their first year. Literally every mid-life crisis, in which that which is shiny and new seems fantastic compared to the hard work of the long term.

In fact, if you think back to the reading from Isaiah, you can take this observation a step further, because the deeper the soil, the slower the cycles of change and growth seem to be. I think of Isaiah’s description of what my middle-school science classes called “the water cycle.” The prophet is right. The rain and the snow fall from the heavens, and they do, actually, return again. But not until they’ve watered the earth. Water falls from the sky, and sinks into the earth, and then it does one of two things. It drains down through the soil and out into rivers, lakes, and seas, where it evaporates and rises back into the air. Or it’s sucked up by the plants, which use it to live but also breathe it back out, like we do. When rain falls on asphalt, it either evaporates quickly or causes flash floods. But when rain falls on deep soil, it’s forgotten, but present; unseen, unnoticed, but making the earth “bring forth and sprout.” (Isaiah 55:10) The less visible the water is from the outside, the more work it’s doing within.

And this leads me to the third thing I notice about this parable: if you took a snapshot, at any instant, you wouldn’t know which seeds were going to thrive. Maybe you could guess that the seeds lying out on the road were sitting ducks for the birds. But how could you know which were the seeds that had fallen on too-shallow, rocky soil? They look so good, sprouting up so soon! How could you know which seeds were about to be choked out by weeds? That’s the whole problem with weeds—you never know where exactly they’ll appear. There’s no way of knowing, at any given moment, which seeds are which. You don’t know whether the incredible excitement you’re feeling for something right now has any depth of soil. You don’t know whether your attention is going to be choked up by the cares of the world. You don’t know if the seeds you’ve planted over a lifetime in the world around you will one day bear fruit. All you can do is hope and trust and pray.

It’s the perfect parable for the rector’s last Sunday before a couple weeks’ vacation. Ministers all across the country are having existential crises in the pulpit this week as they realize that they’ve been scattering seed, preaching good news to their people, week after week after week, and they’re not sure if it’s going to bear fruit. But it’s also the perfect parable for the parent who wonders whether the love of God and neighbor they’ve tried to plant over six or sixteen or sixty years will grow into a child’s living faith. And in fact, it’s a parable for every one of us.

Every one of us walks through the world, scattering seeds. Every conversation we have, with a stranger or with a friend, every chance encounter and every life-long relationship, bears within in the potential for joy and love to grow. If you’re like me, you probably remember things a teacher or a mentor said to you, long after they’ve forgotten. They never knew that that little patch of soil would turn out to be so deep. And neither did we. Only God knows. But it’s God who is the Sower, in the end. It’s God whose word of love is the seed from which our love grows. Every day, all around us, God’s word goes forth, God sows the seeds of hope in us and through us; and some of those seeds will bear fruit— who knows which ones, and who knows when—but they will bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.

Amen.

Sermon — July 9, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There are certain phrases that evoke a whole story. One of my favorites is “I just couldn’t resist…” As in, “I’m trying to cut down on caffeine, but an iced coffee sounded so good on a day like today, and I just couldn’t resist.” “I know that Sue didn’t want me to tell anyone about her new boyfriend, but my friends started gossiping, and I just couldn’t resist…” Or, my favorite, from a blog post about someone’s visit to the British Museum, captioning a photo of an ancient Assyrian column—“I know it says ‘Kindly do not touch the displays,’ but I just couldn’t resist. I just kind of had to hug them.” I just couldn’t resist. I knew the thing I was about to do was the wrong thing to do. But I did it anyway.

It’s a feeling the Apostle Paul knew all too well. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:15, 17-18) Has this ever happened to you? I suspect it has. Maybe it’s a vice you can’t give up, or a New Year’s Resolution you inevitably fail, or the simple daily reality of procrastination. But it’s clear that sometimes, even when we know what the right thing is to do, we just can’t make ourselves do it. And even when we know that something’s wrong, well, sometimes… we just can’t resist.

Now, Paul isn’t writing to his therapist. This isn’t a confession to a trusted friend. In fact, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is his only letter to a congregation that he hadn’t founded himself, the only letter where he didn’t know the readers face to face. It’s his summary of the good news he was proclaiming for the churches in the great imperial city, and so his writing is less concerned with the practical questions and conflicts of the small-church life in Thessalonica or Corinth, and more with the big and universal themes of theology.

So this isn’t a description of a personal problem that only affects Paul. It’s his great reflection on psychology, and particularly on the human will. He describes a pattern that we all know to be true: That there’s a big difference between thinking you should do something or wanting to do it, and actually doing it; that knowing something is wrong doesn’t always stop you from choosing it.

It’s what Martin Luther called “the bondage of the will.” It’s as if our willpower, our ability to actually do the things that we want, is in bonds, chained up. And this sense of unfreedom, feels like a struggle with an external foe. We tend to identify with the part of ourselves that knows what’s right and wants to do it. And this other part, this part that struggles against it, feels like a foreign object, like something else that is inside us, but is not us; Paul calls it “sin that dwells within me,” something separate from his “inmost self,” and he experiences the struggle as a kind of “war” between “the law of my mind” and “another law,” the “law of sin” to which he is captive. (Romans 7:22-23) And he faces this struggling with bafflement. I know what’s right, he says. I just can’t do it. Something comes over me, and I just can’t resist it. And so “I do not understand my own actions.” (Romans 7:15)

This is a pretty pessimistic view of human nature. But in a paradoxical way, if this is the central Christian theological claim about the power of “free will,” it’s actually good news for all of us.

Because if you find yourself thinking that this sounds an awful lot like you—if there’s some unhelpful behavior you find yourself repeating again and again and again, however much you try to snap out of it, or some words that come out of your mouth that you immediately regret—I hope you realize that it’s not just you. It’s not just you who struggle with whatever you struggle with. It’s me. It’s Paul. It’s everyone around you, and every human being who’s ever lived. We may all struggle with different things at different times, but we all struggle with this divided human will, this gap between what we know and what we want and what we do. And when you fall into that gap, it’s not your fault, per se. It’s a pre-existing condition.

This is what allows Paul to write from a position of empathy, not judgment. In fact, this colors everything else that Paul has to say about sin and righteousness, grace and forgiveness. He doesn’t write like the preacher who stands in the pulpit pointing down at the pews, “You do not do what I want.” No. He stands, facing God, and lets us in on his prayers: “I do not do what I want!”

But at the same time that Paul claims that we are imperfect, that our wills are held captive, he continues to proclaim that we are fundamentally good. I don’t love Paul’s dichotomy between “the mind” and “the flesh,” the “will and the members,” as if the body were the source of sin; this has been a sexist trope since before Christianity even began. But I respect what I think Paul is trying to express, which is the goodness of the true self, of the “inmost part” that delights in God, despite the presence of this countervailing force. He does not condemn you and you as miserable sinners because we “just couldn’t resist”; he acknowledges our collective struggle against the universal “law of sin.”

And so far, at least to me, this is good news. It’s potentially life-changing news. If you are convinced that you’re the only one who struggles with temptations or regrets, then the natural shame response is to hide things away, to pretend everything’s fine, to suffer alone. But there are few things in human life that benefit from being hidden away. And to be reminded that everyone has struggled in a similar way, from the Apostle Paul himself down to the present day, is to be invited into the kind of honesty and compassion that come from this very human solidarity.

But that’s not all. It’s wonderful to be freed from the shame of being the only imperfect person in the world. But we need more. We want more. We don’t just want empathy when we mess things up. We want to stop messing up! We want to be more free to be the people we know we can be. We’ve learned over time that we can’t do it on our own, no matter how hard we try, and so we’re left asking the question of Paul, “Who will rescue me?” We need someone to save us from this mire.

And in he comes, riding on a donkey.

Now, it’s a core conviction of the Christian faith that Jesus is, in some sense, the ultimate answer to this problem; that he will “rescue” us from the power of sin and death, (Romans 7:24) that he will “set us free from the waterless pit,” as Zechariah says (Zechariah 9:11); that one day, all that has been hidden will be revealed, and we will know God face to face, Amen.

But in the meantime, this work has already begun. Jesus has come, and taught us, leaving us with a deeper understanding of what is good and right, what it means to love. Jesus has died and risen, breaking evil’s ultimate hold over us, although that victory is not yet complete. Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit, to be our advocate and guide. And just as Paul imagines that “sin dwell within me,” so Jesus has promised that the Holy Spirit will dwell within us. We are not alone in our struggles. In fact, to the extent that we do anything right, that we even try to resist, it’s because our will is moved and strengthened and led by the very spirit of God.

And through it all, God treats us with compassion, supporting us when we need strength and forgiving us when we fail. Jesus looks at each one us, knowing us more deeply than anyone else, knowing the things about us that we’ve never told a spouse, or parent, or friend. Jesus listens to all our inner turmoil, and replies,

“Come to me, all you that are wearing and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from m; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30)

Amen.