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.

Sermon — April 23, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)

I don’t know whether it’s because the weather’s been so nice or because the T has been so slow, but recently I’ve found myself mostly traveling on foot. Now, because I live and work in Charlestown, this is pretty easy. But in just the last few weeks, I’ve walked over to meetings at the Cathedral and City Hall and Old North Church, all reasonable walks from here. And just this Tuesday I had a lovely walk across the city to South Station, thinking that rather than walking to Community College, taking the Orange line at a snail’s pace to Downtown Crossing, and then probably walking some more anyway rather than waiting for a second train to go one stop on the Red Line, it would be faster and much more pleasant just to walk. And it was great.

But on the way home, something really awful happened. After my meeting, as I was headed back to church, I pulled out my wireless headphones and realized that the batteries were dead. And so I was left, to my horror, to walk the several beautiful miles back to Charlestown alone with my thoughts. And I couldn’t help but notice how long it really takes to travel somewhere on foot. In terms of minutes, it wasn’t much slower than it would have been to take the T these days. But when there are no distractions, no headphones in the ears or staring down at the phone—I’m much too clumsy to do that and not trip—the time really stretches out. You hear the traffic and the birds. You see the architecture and the limping runners seeing the sights on the day after the Marathon. If you’re like me, maybe you say a little prayer for all the twenty-somethings who look like they’re gearing up for a day in the mines as they rush toward their Financial-District jobs. When you travel somewhere by foot, at a leisurely pace, you start to notice things.

Unless you’re Cleopas or the other, unnamed disciple, who walked most of seven miles with Jesus and didn’t seem to realize it was him.

Maybe they’re caught up, the two of them, discussing the incredible things that have come to pass, the trial and death and supposed resurrection of their Lord. And a man joins them on the road, and starts talking with them, as they all walk along. And they speak at great length. Luke doesn’t tell us when exactly on the seven-mile walk Jesus joins them, but their conversation clearly lasts a while. They think that he’s a traveler from abroad, and they fill Jesus in on the events of the last few days, and he replies, beginning with Moses and all the prophets and explaining to them how all of this makes sense, re-telling the whole story of the Bible until they understand that when they heard that the Messiah had come, this was exactly what they should’ve expected.

But looking at him, they don’t see that it’s Jesus walking with them. Hearing him, they don’t hear that it’s Jesus talking to them. They don’t recognize that this is a classic sermon from the man they’d been following around now for months.

And after a long walk, seven miles down the road, they reach Emmaus, and the disciples invite him in. “Come, stay with us. Have something to eat.” And he sits with them, and he takes bread, and blesses it, and breaks it, and gives it to them. And then they recognize him, and he vanishes from their sight.

And it’s only then, in retrospect, that they begin to understand. It’s only then, when Jesus has appeared to them and disappeared again, that they recognize that he was there with them along the way. It’s only then that they look back on the experience of spiritual fulfillment that they’d had, at this sense that their hearts had been strangely warmed, that they recognize it as a sign that Jesus was walking with them.

Their inability to recognize Jesus is not because they were looking down at their phones, or had their headphones in. It’s because Jesus has been transformed. The Jesus who appears to us now, on this side of the Resurrection, doesn’t look or sound quite the same. Jesus appears to us in many different ways, and we don’t always recognize him. These disciples don’t recognize him in the man who’s walking with them along the road. They don’t recognize him in the stories Scripture tells, or in the sermons that Jesus gives. They don’t recognize him when they invite this stranger to come in and eat. Jesus is present in all of those things, for those ancient disciples and for us. And sometimes we meet him there. But in this story, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread, in that first true Eucharistic meal, when he is suddenly revealed before their eyes, and then he disappears, vanishing from their sight. And they’re left to reflect on that long walk, and to realize that he was with them all the way.

Now, some of you heard me say this on Maundy Thursday, and I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I’ve been noticing more and more, recently, that huge parts of my life only make sense in retrospect, especially in my spiritual life. Does that ring true for any of you? It’s hard to know, in the moment, that God is close at hand. Most of us are, most of the time, head down in our phones, literal or metaphorical; we’re distracted by the regrets of the past and the worries of the future. And even when we’re not, even when we’re undistracted for miles along the road, Jesus doesn’t necessarily choose to be revealed. Even when we’re fully present, we don’t always recognize that God is present with us as we walk along the road on the long, slow journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

But then there may come a time, when God’s grace and mercy are revealed—when, even if it’s just for an instant, Jesus is revealed, and a whole long section of the journey suddenly makes sense.

“Ohhhhh,” we think to ourselves. “Okay.” That random guy on the road did seem to know a lot about Messianic prophecies in the Bible. I guess it makes sense, if he was really Jesus after all. Ohhhh. That burning in my heart? That wasn’t just that second helpful of extra spicy baba ghanoush. That was the presence of the risen Lord. That makes more sense.

I’m being facetious, but not really. I was walking down to South Station to talk with someone about the ordination process, and I love having conversations like this, because they give me a chance to reflect back on the last decade of my own life while I’m talking with someone about their own journey into ministry.

And like I said, over the last few months I’ve started looking back over the last few years, and everything’s started to make more sense. It turns out, strangely enough, that moving from full-time ministry out in Lincoln to part-time ministry here actually turned out to be the best possible decision for my family, before I knew I would need it to be. It turns out that, ten years ago, when I was feeling torn between two very different callings to ordained priesthood and software engineering, and I decided to answer the call to ordination—that I was really saying yes to both. (I don’t know how many of you know that in the other part of my time I maintain daily prayer applications for Episcopalians and Anglicans in the US, Canada, and Singapore, with three or four thousand users a day.)

More and more often, during this particular season, I’ve been looking back over the last seven miles of my life, as it were, and realizing that it’s almost as if Jesus had been walking with me along the way. Imagine that. It’s almost as if the Holy Spirit is actually real, as if God does in fact lead us and guide us without our knowing it, as we stumble and trip our way through life; as if, maybe, just maybe, I can give up some of my over-anxious need to be in control and trust that, come what may, God will be there with me.

And that’s a very scary thought, for someone like me. I’ll be honest with you. It’s very scary for an anxious know-it-all like me to admit that I might not be able to control it all, or even understand or recognize what’s happening in the moment. But it’s such good news, too. Because God is here, with you, whatever road you’re walking right now.

And so I close with the prayer with which this service began: “O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”