Sermon — April 16, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Reading

“Although you have not seen God, you love God; and even though you do not see God now, you believe and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:8-9)

There’s a popular cliché that’s infuriating because it is, on the one hand, an insulting affront to everything our culture likes to believe about itself and, on the other, probably true. “It’s not what you know,” the saying goes, “it’s who you know.” In other words, what matters the most in getting a job or making a sale or closing a deal isn’t your skill or knowledge or qualifications, but your social network. And in a way this seems to go against our meritocratic culture, with all its ideas about hard work and raw talent winning out in the end. But time and again, anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s true.

And in fact it works out well, in a slightly different sense, for most of the disciples. Mary went early on Easter morning and saw the empty tomb. And she went and called Simon Peter and John the Beloved Disciple, and they came, and saw the empty tomb. So they all know the truth of the Resurrection for themselves. But the other disciples have no idea. They don’t get anything out of “what they know” about the Resurrection. But they’re very lucky in “who they know.” Because they spend the evening of that Easter Day together, Jesus appears and shows them his wounds.

But for Thomas, it’s different. This story is not about what he knows, and it’s not about who he knows. It’s about the idea that each half of the proverb can be inverted or reversed: In this story, “it’s not what you don’t know, it’s who knows you.”

We often talk about the story of “Doubting Thomas” as a parable of faith and doubt, of the difference between trusting what you’ve been told and needing it to be proved, and as a story in which all of us—who have not witnessed the Resurrection first hand, but merely been told about it—find ourselves in Thomas’s blessed shoes. And all of this is true. But I can’t help but pick apart the plot today, and wonder how exactly it is that Jesus knows that Thomas has his doubts.

Think about the story as it’s written. On Easter Evening, Jesus appears to the disciples in his resurrected body, one which still bears his wounds—which is itself a compelling image, for another sermon. He greets them with a sign of peace, he gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he disappears. Later, the disciples who were there tell Thomas that they had seen the Lord. And he says that unless he sees Jesus for himself, he will not believe.

A week later, they’re all together again. And again, Jesus appears, and immediately he says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” (20:27) And I find myself asking the question— How on earth did Jesus know? He wasn’t there to hear Thomas express his doubts last Sunday. If he’d been there when Thomas had arrived, Thomas wouldn’t have had the doubts to begin with. Do we think he was eavesdropping nearby? Do we think that Simon Peter called him on the phone? Is this just another instance of the Son of God knowing all things?

Or could it be something else? Is it less that Jesus knows what Thomas has said, and more that Jesus simply knows Thomas? Does he show up, and see him, and instantly know what he needs, and offer it freely, without Thomas even having to ask? Is this story really, in other words, less about what Thomas doesn’t know, and more about the one by whom he’s known?

I think part of the appeal of the story of “Doubting Thomas” is that we all wrestle with doubt, from time to time. We all find ourselves, maybe more often than not, in the position of that disciple who is not sure that he believes—who is not convinced that he can accept all the claims that other Christians make to him—who struggles with doubt and faith, but who shows up nevertheless to be with them in community on the Lord’s Day, and who finds himself meeting Jesus there.

And it’s easy to take up Jesus’ words and pat ourselves on the back: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” he says to Thomas. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” (John 20:29) Good for all of us two thousand years later who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.

But the good news Jesus has is even better than that. Because as John says somewhere else, “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) We love God because God first loved us. We seek God because God first sought us. We know God because God first knew us. It’s not our responsibility to know everything, to know who we are or who God is or where in the world this is all going to end up.

God knows what each one of us needs, and God seeks us out, and the God who loves us gives us what we need. And this story is not a story about how good we are because we believe in God, even though we haven’t seen the proof. It’s a story about how good the God is who God believes in us. It’s a story that’s not about what we know, or who we know or what we don’t know, but about the One who’s known us since before we were born, and guided us all the days of our lives.

And it’s this God—the one who seeks us, and knows us, and loves us—who has promised to save us. It’s this resurrected God, who has seen the worst humanity can do, who’s offered to rescue us. It’s this wounded God, who shows up among us still bearing the marks in his hands and in his side, who has promised to heal us. Whoever or whatever we believe or don’t believe, know or don’t know, God knows us as deeply as he knew Thomas.

Sermon — Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Now, on any other day I would start with a cute story or an illuminating anecdote that perfectly fits the theme of the sermon. But it’s Easter Sunday. And some of our younger members, in particular, may be very wired or a little tired, and if I recall correctly I actually put a couple of them to sleep with my Easter homily last year.

So let me get straight to the point, just like Jesus would: The angel of the Lord who appears to Mary and Mary at the tomb is a liar. Or at least he fibs. In any case, the angel certainly doesn’t tell the whole truth. “Go and tell the disciples,” the angel says, “‘Jesus has been raised from the dead. He’s going on ahead of you to Galilee, and you will see him there.’” (Matthew 28:7)

Now you can imagine the women’s confusion and delight, as they hurry off to find the other disciples. It’s a three-day journey on foot from Jerusalem back to Galilee, but they can’t wait. And you can imagine the two Marys composing their thoughts as they go together to find the other disciples. You might sometimes find yourself rehearsing for a big conversation like this, too: “Now, I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but while you were sleeping in, we went down to the tomb, and Jesus’ body wasn’t there. And there was an angel, and the angel told us that we should all head back to Galilee, and Jesus would appear to us there. So pack your bags, and let’s go see him!”

And while Mary and Mary are on their way, while these two apostles to the apostles are rushing along the road to share the good news of the Resurrection with Peter, James, and John, to tell them that the sooner we get to Galilee, the sooner we’ll see Jesus again, a man appears along the road, and says, “Hello!” and I like to picture one of the Marys recognizing him first, and doing a double take: “Jesus Christ!” And I did not just take the Lord’s name in vain, because there he is, the Risen Lord himself. And she stops and walks toward the one she had been running to try to find.

“Jesus is risen,” the angel says. “Go to Galilee, and you’ll see him there.” And as they hurry on along the road—before they’ve arrived at their destination or even packed their bags—he appears. Not in the tomb where they expected to find him, not in Galilee where they were told he would appear, but here instead, exactly where they are, along the side of the road.

Most of us spend most of our lives thinking about points on a map. We spend years thinking about the next step, and then the next one, and then the next one; about an education, a career, maybe a family; about our personal growth or spiritual journey or physical fitness. And at a certain point, perhaps, we begin to fear the next step: the next joint to be replaced, the next sense to start to go, the next partner or friend who starts to fail. And perhaps, in moments of reflection or of hope, we think about our final destination, about the end of the road, the place where we will finally see God face to face, and be reunited with the people we’ve loved who have gone before us.

But God appears to us along the way. Not in the places we’ve been told to look. Not at the highest holy days or in the greatest milestones or at the most abrupt turning points of our lives. But halfway down the road, while we’re on the way to pack our bags, expecting to go and meet God somewhere else.

God shows up in quiet moments along the way. God shows up in small encounters that we sometimes miss. Again and again, God shows up in our lives, and says, “Hello!” And most of the time, we miss the signs, and don’t stop and turn aside, and then God shows up again a little further down the road.

This is the true power of the story of the Resurrection: Not that Jesus came back to life, two thousand years ago, simply to impress us or to prove a point. But that Jesus lives. That God still walks among us. That the Holy Spirit is, even now, moving among us, in small and sometimes very quiet ways, surprising us with moments of love and comfort and grace. And if we want to meet God face to face, we don’t need to make it all the way to wherever we’re hurrying off to be. We simply have to stop. And look. And see the one who stands along the road.

Because God is not waiting for you up in heaven. God is not stuck somewhere in a story of the past. God is not even trapped in this church, thank God. The God who died for you and rose again is all around you, everywhere, walking beside you and inviting you into a new and better life, not just in the world to come, but in this world, here and now.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Sermon — April 2, 2023 — Palm Sunday

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two,
from top to bottom.” (Matthew 27:50-51)

There’s no symbolic barrier or divide in our world that’s more pointless than the curtain you find on some airplanes that exists only to separate first class from coach. It’s not a locked door that can prevent passengers from going to one side or the other. It doesn’t humidify the air on the first-class side while your skin dries out in coach. The same enticing odor of mingled airplane foods wafts throughout the whole cabin. It’s not even substantial enough to block the sound of a baby crying a few rows back in coach. There are real differences in comfort and treatment between the two sections of seating on the plane, and that’s fine—people paid for those perks—but the curtain itself doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way. It simply hangs there as a symbol of the distinction, as a border crossing between that part of the plane, where people are packed like sardines into a tin can hurtling through the sky at several hundred miles an hour, and this part of the plane, where we recline in relative luxury.

There’s something deep in the human psyche that loves a good symbolic barrier. You can see it as far back as our history goes. When God gave instructions to Moses on how to build the Tabernacle, the shrine that the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness, God carefully warned him to hang a curtain before the Holy of Holies, so that the inner sanctum, the most holy place in the world, would be separated from the rest. (Exod. 26:31, Lev. 16:2, et al.) And when the Temple was built, the same process was applied: at the center of the Temple building, in the inmost sanctuary, an elaborately-woven curtain, sixty feet high and 30 feet wide, divided the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, and only the High Priest himself ever crossed through that curtain, and only once a year, on Yom Kippur. The curtain stood there, every other day and for every other person, separating an imperfect and unholy world from the perfect holiness of God.

You see the same kind of thing when the crowds welcome Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. You’ll notice we’ve adapted this one slightly. We waved palm branches like they did, in celebration and joy, but you’ll notice nobody asked you to take your coat off and put it on the sidewalk. But that’s what they did. They removed their cloaks, and laid them on the ground, so that the dust and dirt of the road wouldn’t touch the royal feet; not only Jesus’ feet, but even the hooves of the donkey he rode on, were too holy and good to come into contact with the ground. They let their own coats be trampled into the dust just so they could enact a barrier between the Son of David and the dirt, between the Holy One of God and the messy realities of life—a mobile curtain between the Holy of Holies and the world.

But when Jesus dies, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two.

Now, there are several ways to understand this event. Some point to it as a foreshadowing of the destruction of the Temple, which had probably already come to pass by the time Matthew wrote these words. Others say that they reflect the fact that Jesus himself is the Temple, the place on earth in which God fully dwells, and that the ripping of the curtain parallels the tearing apart of his own body. But to me, the fact that it’s the curtain tearing and not a stone falling or some decorations crumbling is the key. When Jesus dies, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world is torn in half; the dividing barrier between creation and the glory and the holiness of God is removed. When Jesus dies, the last thing that separates us human beings from God goes away. God’s very immortality seems to have come to an end; yet we know that Easter Day is coming, and that what comes to an end this week is not God’s immortality, but our mortality.

This is some heady, theological stuff. So let me put it to you in a different way.

The story of Palm Sunday, from the Procession to the Passion, is a story in which God plays the role of an airline CEO—better yet, for anyone who’s going to be pedantic with me, he’s the owner, the sole proprietor of the airline. And God, who’s accustomed to flying on private jets, comes down among the common folk, and flies commercial—but first class, of course. He’s treated like a king. He gets to board when he wants. They come to him first with a warm blanket and complimentary drinks. The flight attendants lay down their jackets in the aisle so his shoes don’t pick up anything nasty off the carpet.

And halfway through the flight, he takes a walk down the aisle. He stands outside the bathroom in coach, waiting on line. He offers to trade seats with someone trapped between a man-spreader on one side and a nap-leaner on the other. And some of the passengers realize that hey, this is the guy who’s responsible for all this! This man is the reason we’re eating this nasty food, and sitting in these cramped seats. Let’s throw him off the plane! And as they shuffle him toward the front, he tears the curtain down. And they think that they’ve gotten rid of him once and for all, but he reappears. And he makes an incredible announcement. He doesn’t just offer a first-class seat on the next flight to anyone who believes in him. He actually starts inviting people up into the empty seats up front, people who hadn’t paid for first-class tickets at all. “There’s plenty of room up here: Enjoy.”

The curtain has already been torn down. We can already walk into first class. Jesus promised us eternal life, that we would see God face to face, and this was not a promise for the future, for heaven, for life after death. It’s a promise that’s being fulfilled even now.

“God’s desire,” writes Brother David Vryhof of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery over in Cambridge, “God’s desire is to bring us into larger life, to join us to that eternal life that the Father shares with the Spirit and the Son – not only in heaven, but now and here, in our daily lived experience… This larger life is available to us all.  God has not hidden it or made it hard. The secret lies in self-surrender, in handing ourselves over to God and in trusting God completely to do in us and through us what we cannot do for ourselves.”[1]

We all seek the peace, and the contentment, and the joy of eternal life. But try as we might, we can’t seem to achieve them for ourselves. We comfort ourselves, maybe, with the hope that we’ll find them in heaven. But the curtain has been torn in two, and the kingdom of heaven is already among us. God is already here, working in us. And the God who knows the depth of human pain, the God who knows the power of death itself, is inviting us into eternal life.

“Hosanna!” we cry on Palm Sunday, every year. In Aramaic, if you don’t know this, that’s “Save us, please!” And that’s what Jesus does. He tears down the curtain that divides us from God, and God’s holiness spills out into the world and draws us back in love towards God’s very in self.

So “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mathew 21:9)

[1] https://www.ssje.org/2011/05/29/the-secret-to-self-surrender-br-david-vryhof/#more-2721

Sermon — March 26, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a phrase in our liturgy that has a special place in my heart, and appropriately enough, it’s the one I say the most often during our service on any given Sunday morning. Think about the words that come out of my mouth during this hour of my week. What do you think I say the most? Is it “Amen”? “The Lord be with you”? Maybe “Let us pray”? No, it’s something else, and interestingly enough it’s the only thing I say to each one of you, as individuals, not to you as a collective and not to God. Can anyone guess what it is?

“The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

Now, much ink and much blood have been spilled over the phrase “the Body of Christ” in the history of the Church, with philosophers and theologians debating and sometimes armies even fighting over what exactly Jesus meant when he said those words. But it’s actually that second half that means the most to me, week after week. This is the Body of Christ, yes—and it is “the bread of heaven.”

To me, this is more than just a poetic phrase or a symbolic idea. It’s a way of expressing the alternate reality we enter in this room. It means the same thing that it means when I say, week after week, that “joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we forever sing this hymn.” These are not just pretty words. They are a statement of faith that in this Eucharistic meal, in this Holy Communion, we are united with the whole communion of saints. We gather around the altar with the whole choir of heaven. When I say “the bread of heaven,” it means that this is the bread they are eating in heaven; that there is just one eternal banquet happening with God across all of time and space, and we dip into it for a while, week after week, and we take another bite of heavenly food. And when we eat that bread, we are sharing in a holy meal with people from generations before us and generations yet to come, and even though we can’t see them or hear them, they are somehow, mysteriously, present with us here.

This is what makes these words mean so much to me. There are some people I think about every week as I give you this bread, people some of you have loved and lost, people with whom you wish you could share another meal, and as I say the words “the bread of heaven” I pray that you may feel them present with you here, sharing this bread with you across eternity. There are many more of you whose grief I do not know. But all of us, above a certain age, come to this altar bearing pain and loss, bearing the memories of people who have died or who won’t talk to us any more or who talk to us all the time, but can’t remember our names any more. And so I pray for every one of you, every week: may this bread unite you with them again, wherever they are, as we will all be reunited again in heaven.

In Christian life, we hold two things in constant tension: we proclaim our faith in a God who is good and who loves us and cares for each one of us, and we live in a world in which tragic things happen. Philosophers can debate the question of why; John the evangelist just tells a story. And it’s a story that has a few things to say about how God responds and how we can respond to all this grief and pain.

First: Mary and Martha’s story tells us that sometimes God doesn’t do the things we wish that God would do, and when that happens, it’s okay to point it out, to blame God for God’s visible absence from our world, for God’s failures to heal and cure and save us from harm. When he’s told that Lazarus is ill, Jesus inexplicably, unbelievably, delays for two days. He waits until Lazarus has died, and then he goes. And Martha and Mary blame him, as they should: “Lord, if you had been here,” Martha says, “my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) And she piously adds something to soften the blow: “But even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22) But when Mary comes, she doesn’t add all that. “Lord, if you had been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” (11:32) And Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for her lack of faith.

He does something else. He weeps. And this is the second thing the story tells us: God is a God of compassion, empathy, and love. When all our questions fail to produce any answers, when all our prayers fail to produce a result, God is not far off, distracted or unmoved. God comes to us, and loves us, and God’s heart breaks for us. Jesus loves us like he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he sees our pain, and he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And perhaps this is a part of God’s answer to our pain. Where is God in our grief and pain and loss, where is God in the midst of all our tears? God is right there, weeping with us; and in fact, God is right there, dying with us. Thomas reminds the other disciples that the powers that be have it out for Jesus, and they do. This journey to Jerusalem, in fact, is the beginning of the end: Thomas is right. Jesus is traveling toward his death. The only person who’s dead at the end of this story is God. Lazarus’s tomb is empty, and Jesus’ tomb is full.

But that’s not all that God does. Jesus does not absorb our anger as we vent it, like an infuriatingly-calm therapist. Jesus doesn’t just weep with us or comfort us, like a loving, compassionate friend. Jesus doesn’t just die with us and for us. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn’t just do it at the end of time, in the general resurrection on the last day, as Martha says. (11:24) No, Jesus says, it’s better than that. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) And he actually raises Lazarus from the dead. (11:43) And a couple chapters later, on the night before Palm Sunday, on the night before Holy Week begins, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, and they share a meal—Jesus and Martha, Mary and Lazarus—and it’s as if Lazarus and Jesus have traded places, Lazarus coming forth from his tomb, and Jesus turns toward his own. In Jesus, the two sisters and their brother who has died break bread together again, and that’s the good news: that the power of death that separates us from the people whom we love will never win in the end; that though we die, we live, and we will rise again.

We don’t get the same certainty that Mary and Martha had. We aren’t given the miracle meal. “We walk by faith,” as the old hymn goes, “and not by sight.” “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says to Martha, “even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (11:25-26) And then the question he asks her becomes the question he asks each one of us: “Do you believe this?” (11:26)

We live in the world as it is. Most of us carry with us, through our lives, a hundred small losses and a couple big ones. And there’s nothing I can say or do to soften the blow. There’s no prayer I can teach you to pray that will bring about a miraculous change. But God has promised that the story doesn’t end here. And there’s an invitation, amid it all: When your “bones are dried up,” when “hope is lost,” when you are “cut off completely” from the joy of the Lord, you are invited to share a meal, by the one who tells you he is the resurrection and the life, by the one who offers you the bread of heaven, who invites you to come and eat, and be in the presence of those who are long gone. To know that, as my favorite prayer from our funeral service goes, “to [God’s] faithful people… life is changed, not ended”; that although we cannot see them, they live, and they are here, and we will one day see them again.