Watertight for Now

It may seem strange, but I imagine that decades from now, some of my fondest memories of St John’s will involve water, in all its troubling and inconvenient forms: Talking on the phone with Doug from my summer vacation in Long Island as he scrambled around the church setting up tarps and buckets to prepare for the hurricane that was on its way; Priscilla showing me how water poured through a particular hole in the outer kitchen ceiling from the windows upstairs, and hearing Tom and John drilling holes in the windowsills to let the water flow through; seeing the look on Louis’s face as our Search Committee chairs showed me around the church for the first time and realizing how badly the paint on the arch in the balcony had peeled; seeing that same arch sanded and painted for the first time as I stood at the altar; watching Simon and the kids scooping shovels’-worth of water out of that vexatious puddle in the Garden; watching half the congregation shovel snow out of the Harvard Mall so we could have an outdoor Christmas service.

This morning (Tuesday), I walked into the building as rain poured down and the nor’easter pummeled the city. I took off my rain pants and jacket, folded up my umbrella, and walked around. Not a sound of gushing water, not a drip-drop anywhere. “Hm,” I thought to myself. “I guess we’re watertight, for now.”

And then the second thought, as I looked up at the ceiling over the stairs. “Was that water damage always there?”


Because I’m a preacher, I live in a three-year lectionary cycle. So I’ve been reflecting recently about March 2020, the last time we heard this set of readings on the Second and Third and Fourth Sundays in Lent, Year A. The crisis and the emergency of the pandemic are over, although the virus and sickness remain. Our lives are mostly watertight, for now. But I can’t help but find myself looking at my life, from time to time, and thinking, “Huh. Was that damage always there?”

You may find the same thing has happened in crises in your life. When the emergency is over, and you’ve made it through to the other side, when you finally have the space to look around, you may see that the damage is still there, that you’re still carrying pain or worry or grief from that time. And that’s okay. Healing is a process that takes much longer than being hurt. (Heaven knows sanding and repainting can take much longer than fixing the leak.)

I’m reminded often of the fact that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection, he did so still bearing his wounds. He appears to them, and he says, “Peace be with you,” and then he shows them his hands and his side. (John 20:19-20) The promise of the Resurrection is not that our wounds will disappear and be forgotten. It’s that they will be transformed, that we will be transformed, still bearing them. For better or for worse, they have shaped us into the people who we are. But there will come a day when they don’t hurt any more, when the storm has passed and the drainage has been fixed and the damage has been repaired; when we can finally look back on all our crises and see the presence of God’s love, working in and through them, despite it all.

Living Water

Living Water

 
 
00:00 / 10:42
 
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Sermon — March 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

This year I’m serving as a chaplain to the Episcopal Service Corps program in Boston. Every two weeks, I drive down to St Mark’s in Dorchester and spend the morning with a community of six young adults who live in a house there together, who’ve given a year of their lives to work in churches and non-profit organizations around greater Boston. And they’re wonderful people, and they’re very hospitable people, but they’re not always all on time for our 9:00 am meetings in their living room, and I’m usually there a little early, so I often arrive when people are still shuffling around, and making breakfast, and so on, and they kind of trickle in. And so it’s very common for me to have the experience I had on Friday—three separate times over the course of ten minutes or so, one of the six walked into the room, and said, “Hi, Greg! Do you want anything? Some tea? Coffee? Water?” And I said, each time, “No, no thanks, I’m all set.”

These offers of hospitality are common for us. You probably have the same interaction pretty often. And they’re easy offers to make or accept. If I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d love a glass of water,” someone would go to the sink and fill one up. But imagine how different it would be if you went to visit someone, and they said, “Can I get you a glass of water?” And you said, “Yes.” And they said, “Great. Let’s go down to the well. It’s only a couple blocks away.”


This has been the way life works for most people, for most of history. Maybe you wouldn’t literally have to walk down to the well together to get a drink, but to offer someone a drink isn’t a matter of turning a faucet. It’s to offer something you hauled out of the earth and carried home. This is the world in which Jesus finds himself today. This Gospel is a strange story. It’s a long story. In fact, it’s the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels. But it’s not just the length that’s strange, and it’s not just this unfamiliar scene of a woman drawing water at a well. What makes it surprising to me is the sheer number of things about which Jesus seems simply not to care.

Some of them are things we also aspire not to care about, and so we applaud Jesus for them. Jesus doesn’t care, for example, who you are, your ethnicity or nationality or ancestry. “‘How is it that you, a Jew,’” the woman asks, “‘ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9) Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He deflects. But even simply ignoring the question is remarkable. Samaritans and Jews really were unhappy neighbors. There really was ethnic tension. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality or race; he reaches out across those divides, and we can and we should applaud him for it.

It may be more surprising that Jesus doesn’t care what your religion is, or where you worship. This is, after all, the primary thing that distinguishes Samaritans from Jews, and I say in this in the present tense because a small community of Samaritans does still exist: Samaritans and Jews live in neighboring regions, worship the same God, read the same Torah, but while Jews believe that the Temple in which God needed to be worshiped was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe this was incorrect and that the Temple God had chosen was actually the one on Mount Gerizim, just to the north. So the Samaritan woman tries to draw him out: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain”—until the armies of the Jewish high priest destroyed it, a century or two before—“but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:20) Now, Jesus is a good Jew. He acknowledges that his people, not hers, are right. But then he says that it’s irrelevant: “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (4:21, 23) It’s not where you worship that matters, Jesus says. (And the Vestries and the welcoming committees of a thousand parishes recoil in horror.) It’s in what Spirit you worship.

But what may be the most surprising is that Jesus doesn’t care what you have done. He says to the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” And she answers him, “I have no husband.” “You’re right,” Jesus says, “for you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband at all!” (4:17-18) But Jesus simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t condemn her serial monogamy, he doesn’t wag his finger at her extramarital cohabitation. Even though this is Lent, there’s no call to repentance or offer of forgiveness. Jesus offers no moral judgment at all, simply an observation, and the only role this seems to play in the story is that it convinces the woman that Jesus is a prophet, and sends her back to the city to tell other people what he’s said. This is not like the stories of the repentant tax collectors in the Gospels who promise to amend their ways. it’s simply a surprising and most-likely not-so-public fact, which Jesus seems miraculously to know. But Jesus doesn’t respond in a moralizing tone. What’s surprising is not just that Jesus doesn’t care about her nationality or her religiosity; he doesn’t even seem to care about her personal morality.

He’s there for something else. Not to avoid her because she’s a Samaritan, not to warn her that she’d better start worshiping at the right Temple, not to condemn her for having a man who is not her husband hanging around the house. No, he’s there to ask for a drink from the well, and to offer her something in return: a “gift of God,” something better than any water she could draw, “living water,” a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” so refreshing that those who drink from it “will never be thirty.” (4:10, 14) That’s the only reason Jesus is there: to offer something that can quench her thirst.

And the woman responds in the only way you could imagine, if you had to draw your own water out of the well and carry it back home with you: “Sir, give me this water.” (4:15) She goes back to the city, and tells her neighbors and her friends, and many of them believe her, and they go out to Jesus too, and ask him to come for a visit; and he stays with them for two days. (4:39-40) And when they encounter Jesus face to face, they say to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)


It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you worship, or what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t even matter that much what you do. And it certainly doesn’t matter what anyone else has told you about God. It matters whether your thirst has been quenched, whether you yourself drunk from the living water that gushes up to eternal life; whether you have invited Jesus to come, and stay with you for a while.

And this can be good news, or bad news, or sometimes both.

It can be especially good news if you sometimes feel like the Samaritan woman. “I don’t have right background.” “I didn’t grow up in the church.” “I’m fumbling with the prayer book.” “I don’t like these hymns.” “I’m not sure I believe.” “I’m not sure I’m really that good.” If you ever feel this way, then I’m happy to say that Jesus doesn’t care. Not about you—God cares about you very much—but God doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t bother him a bit. And that is pure good news.

But for some of us on the other end of it, it can be tempting to lean on the very things that Jesus doesn’t seem to be so worried about. “I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life,” or “my family have lived here for eighty years.” “I go to church twice a month,” or maybe twice a year. I’m a good, upstanding, respectable person. I’ve put in hard work. I’ve given back to the world. And I’ve held onto the faith my family taught me, and I’ve passed it on. I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake! (I’m on the Vestry! I’m in the choir!) Isn’t that enough?

And all of this is good. Don’t get me wrong.

But there’s something more at stake—or maybe something less, or simply something else.

We come before Jesus without any of the labels and stories that define us, as thirsty people in a dry place. We come before Jesus, as the Psalmist says, “athirst for the living God,” (Psalm 42:2) and he offers us a drink. We come with souls that are heavy-laden, bearing great burdens, and he offers us rest. We come before him, feelings like there’s also more work to be done, and he sends us out to “reap that for which we did not labor.” (John 4:38) When we come before God we don’t do it as cradle Episcopalians or half-traumatized Catholics, as skilled musicians or as silent hymn-mumblers, as perfect people or notorious sinners. We come as people who are too worn down to imagine drawing that bucket full of water up from the well and carrying it all the way home, and he gives us something to drink.

So “Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
    let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
    and raise a loud shout to him with psalms…
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” (Psalm 95:1-2)

Three Years

There’s a preaching podcast I listen to most weeks while I’m walking up or down Main Street to church, early in the week; two preachers reflect on the readings for the upcoming Sunday and what’s speaking to them this week. It’s always nice to have another perspective on the texts.

This week, one of them mentioned that this Sunday’s psalm is the Venite, Psalm 95, a psalm I know quite well. And I was suddenly overcome by a memory: the memory of preaching on this very psalm on the Third Sunday in Lent three years ago, March 15, 2020, the very first Sunday of remote digital worship.

We’ve made it through the lectionary cycle, once more.

Since I was at a different parish that Sunday, and since I won’t be preaching on the psalm this Sunday, I thought I’d share with you an excerpt from my sermon on that day. I’ll preface it by saying that as I read it, I was reminded of a lesson I’ve learned again and again over the last few years: what is true of God in the great and global crises of our lives is also true of God in our smaller, more personal crises.


Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.

Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.

For the Lord is a great God, *
and a great King above all gods.

In his hand are the caverns of the earth, *
and the heights of the hills are his also.

The sea is his, for he made it, *
and his hands have molded the dry land.

Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, *
and kneel before the Lord our Maker

For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. *
Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

            I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said these verses of Psalm 95. These words, known as the Venite, are the default opening prayer of Morning Prayer in our prayer book, which I’ve said more or less every day for more or less eight years, and so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation—to be honest, I did a type-it-into-the-computer calculation—and realized I must’ve said these words about 2,500 times. [2023 note: Add another thousand or so over the last three years.]

Okay, let’s say I took off Saturdays for most of that time and skipped a few weeks on vacation and used a different psalm occasionally, and so I’ve said them, what—2,200 times? [Say, 3000…]

And they’ve never felt more true to me than they do today.

I feel right now as though we’re the residents of a seaside community who’ve just been warned that a tsunami is coming. The local university’s seismographers have detected a massive earthquake far out in the ocean, and we’ve been given a couple hours’ warning that something big is coming. So we’ve packed our bags and gathered our families and fled to higher ground, and now we’re sitting behind our sandbag walls and waiting for the waves to come.

Some of you, like Garrett [the Rector of St Anne’s] and I, have spent the last week inundated with emails and phone calls and meetings as you try to figure out how to prepare for what’s coming. Some of you have probably not seen that behind-the-scenes activity. Maybe you wonder what all the fuss is about. In any case, as a society we’ve pooled our wisdom and our resources and settled on our plans, and now we settle down to wait.

I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. Confusion, or fear? Anxiety, or panic? Exasperation that we’re all overreacting to something that might just flop? To be honest, I’m praying that it flops. I’m praying that the coronavirus-skeptics are right, in the same way that I pray that climate-change deniers are right. I hope that in 50 years we look back and laugh at the climate catastrophe we thought we coming, and I hope that in six months we look back and laugh at how silly we were for canceling all these events. Because if we look like fools in six months, it will be because we took the right precautions today. [Alas.]

Whatever you’re feeling, though, God is right there with you. If you can’t “shout for joy to the Rock of [your] salvation” right now, then wail in lamentation. If you can’t “come before [God’s] presence with thanksgiving,” then “raise a loud shout” of fear or frustration. Trust me, there are plenty of psalms for that.

“For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” God is with us when we’re down in the darkest caverns of the earth, and she’s with us up on the highest hills of joy. The tumult of the sea is his, for he made it; and her hands have molded the driest wildernesses of our lives.

If you ask me where God is a global pandemic, I can’t in good conscience just quote St. Paul in this morning’s epistle and say that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4) Maybe that kind of thing is helpful to you; it’s cold comfort to me. But I can tell you that wherever you are today—not only literally, on this Sunday of live streams, but emotionally—wherever you are, God himself is there, right beside you.


There’s so much to say about the events of the last three years, more than I can put in any newsletter article. We are, in nearly every way, “back to normal.” But we will never be back to normal. There are people we lost—who died, or moved away, or became strangers to us—to whom we never had the chance to say goodbye. There are memories of fear, or hope, or joy that have reshaped how we think about our lives. For many of us, there is unexamined pain inside those three years that we’ve never had the time to really let heal.

This was not the first global pandemic, and it will not be the last. It was not the first crisis that upended our daily lives and shook the Church, and it will not be the last. It was a new and an extraordinary experience for all of us, in a way that I hope we’ll never encounter again. For a time, we all experienced many of the same experiences of grief, anxiety, fear, loss, and hope; now, we’ve returned to experiencing these things in our own cycles and our own ways. But whatever any one of us encounters in our lives, God is there.


I pray, this week, for the nearly seven million people who have died during the course of this pandemic. May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

The Rescue Diver

The Rescue Diver

 
 
00:00 / 11:03
 
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Sermon — Sunday, March 5, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)

There are many hard jobs in the world, but without any doubt “rescue diver” is in a category of its own. You may remember the story from about five years ago of a group of young Thai men—a soccer team and their coach, in fact—who were found alive and rescued nine days after intense rains had cut them off fresh air. They were found by a team of volunteer divers, a mix of international expats and Thai Navy special forces, one of whom lost his life in the process. To reach the stranded team, the rescuers had to traverse nearly a mile of the cave, much of it underwater, too narrow in some places to wear a scuba tank. And then they had to do the same thing, in reverse, while pulling another person behind them.

It must have taken an incredible amount of courage to be the rescuers: to jump into that water, knowing that you were already safe and dry on this side. But it took courage to be rescued, as well: to go from being trapped in a place that was dark and scary but at least warm and dry into the danger and darkness of the water, and to try to make it through to freedom and safety on the other side. One is the courage of self-sacrifice, of risking danger to yourself solely for the benefit of another person. And one is the courage of taking a leap of faith, of seeing some British guy in a wetsuit emerge out of a hole in the ground, grabbing the rope he gives you, and hanging on for dear life.


If you were here last Sunday at Coffee Hour, you may remember that we gave some of our younger members “Saint John’s Bingo” cards, to ask questions from some of our adults. One of the questions one of the kids asked me was, “What’s your favorite Bible verse???” And as my life flashed before me, and I desperately willed myself to remember even a single verse of the Bible, the words “John 3:16” flashed into my mind. And how could they not? If you’ve watched a football game, seen a bumper sticker, been handed a tract in the street, you’ve probably seen this verse cited, even without its text as an almost self-contained description of the gospel. “John 3:16,” somebody’s poster says in the stands, urging you to go and look it up. And if you do, you find the words: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16) I’ve even seen it flown across the sky on a banner by one of those planes.

I didn’t say “John 3:16,” by the way. I said “1 John 4:7,” a little different. Feel free to look it up. But you can understand why John 3:16has become the go-to citation when some people want to point you to a single verse to read. Standing on its own, it sums up one very common understanding of the gospel, one typical idea of what’s “good news” about Christianity. You might hear variations on this idea referred to by slightly different names; one version is called the “ransom theory,” another is “penal substitutionary atonement.” It’s the almost-transactional idea that human sin had left us in debt, and God paid the price; or that we were liable to some punishment for our misdeeds, and Jesus took the punishment in our place. God would have been entitled to destroy the world, to foreclose on our account or to punish us as we deserved; but “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son; so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” You can almost hear the economic language in the words. It’s as if God gave Jesus as the payment to purchase something—from the Devil? from himself?—so that we would have eternal life. And this is actually the root of the word “redemption.” As any of our Latin scholars in the congregation could tell you, redemption means “buying back.”

And that is one way to understand this verse, John 3:16. But it does very little to help us understand what on earth Jesus is talking about in the other sixteen verses we just heard. And so I want to suggest a slightly different understanding of where Jesus is coming from here. Not the “ransom theory” or the “penal substitutionary theory” but the “rescue diver theory of the atonement.”


Jesus tries three times to convey to Nicodemus the sense that Jesus’ own life is a kind of process, a journey from a place far off to a place that is near and back. “You must be born from above,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus misunderstands. He misinterprets Jesus’ “from above” as meaning “again,” which is the same word in Greek. And he asks, “Can anyone enter a second time into the womb?” But Jesus is talking about a different kind of birth, from a different watery place: the new birth, perhaps, of baptism, by water and the Spirit. (John 3:3-5) And his emphasis is on the “for above,” the sense that this new birth must be from heaven.

And so Jesus says again, using a different image, “The wind blows where it chooses… but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.” (3:8) The wind, the Spirit—again, the same word in Greek—travels an enormous journey, across the face of the earth, and blows where it will. And Nicodemus is baffled. “How can these things be?” (3:9)

So Jesus says to him, again talking about a journey through space but in slightly-more-concrete terms, “No one’s ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” (That’s Jesus.) “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”—perhaps a story for another time—“so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world…” and so on. (3:13-16)

Each of these is a different way of describing what is happening in Jesus’ own life on this earth. It’s Jesus who was born above, Jesus who came down from heaven. It’s Jesus who’s like the wind, and you, Nicodemus, don’t understand where he came from or where he’s going. He descended from heaven, and he will ascend into heaven again, and as he says in another verse, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32)

 Again and again, Jesus emphasizes the motion: from above to below, from here to there, descending and ascending and being lifted up. For John, and for us when we hear the words of the Gospel of John, the phrase “lifted up” always means three things. It means when Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross on Good Friday, and dies. It means when he is “lifted up” from the grave on Easter Sunday, and rises again. And it means when he is “lifted up” from the earth on Ascension Day, when he returns from earth to heaven. I came down to earth from heaven, Jesus tells Nicodemus, and I am going back up there soon. “And when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself”; I will bring you up there with me.

And that’s the most remarkable thing. Because when you read it in this context, Jesus’ life and death look less like a transaction, and more like a rescue mission. Jesus comes down from heaven, not (at least not, not only) to pay the price for our redemption or bear the punishment for our wrongdoing, but to save us, actually save us from the dark, damp cave in which we’re trapped. He dives down into the dark waters of this world, and swims toward us, and brings a rope to try to drag us with him back to heaven.

And he gives us a choice. Not the choice of whether to “believe” or not, in an intellectual sense. But the choice to trust. To trust, as Abraham had to trust, to leave behind “[his] country and [his] father’s house,” to leave a place where he was comfortable and follow God toward the promise of something better. (Gen. 12:1) To trust, as those Thai soccer players had to trust, to hold onto the rope and follow, to make the leap of faith out of the dark cave and into the darker waters, so that we might emerge into the fresh air on the other side.

Jesus is somewhere on a journey from heaven to earth and back again, on a mission to save you, to heal you, to rescue you from whatever is afflicting you, to bring you out of whatever darkness surrounds you and return you to the light. Where are you? Are you hiding somewhere in the cave, convinced things aren’t so bad in there? Are you somewhere in the water, cold and wet and afraid you’ll never get out? Are you clinging to the rope, trusting God to bring you through it all? Or are you somewhere on the other side, finally breathing fresh air?

Who Are We?

This week plays two very different roles in our church calendar. On the one hand, it’s the first week of Lent. On the other, it’s the due date for our annual Parochial Report, the preparation of which is more often dreaded than enjoyed. Most years, this involves cracking open the big red Service Book and tallying up total attendance for the year, filling out financials and summing up spreadsheets. This year, for the first time the Parochial Report asked for some demographic data about the congregation, which amplified both the dread of those who resent the added tallying, and the delight of those who—like your Rector—are total nerds. So who exactly are we, Saint John’s?

Well, you might be a little surprised to find out.


Before I tell you, I want to take a small step back. It’s not secret that, statistically, the Church is in decline. I don’t mean Saint John’s Church in particular, or even the Episcopal Church, or even the traditional mainline Protestant churches. Generally speaking, in terms of membership and engagement and finances, Christianity is in decline in North America, although this is not at all true around the world. And one of the most common anxieties you’ll hear in churches around the country wraps around the question of the magical, elusive, and highly-valued “young families,” a phrase that’s become so common in church conversations that I’m inclined to give it its own capital letters.

“How do we attract Young Families to our church?” members wonder, in towns and city neighborhoods across the country. “Will this new pastor attract Young Families?” a search committee might ask. Young Families are, it seems, the solution to a huge variety of struggling ministries, church conflicts, and financial woes—never mind that they have no time to spare and even less money.

I don’t mean to sound resentful. It’s nice to feel wanted. But the focus on one demographic or the other in the church obscures what matters in the church and what makes for a strong church. It’s not the number of Young Families: it is the love and the respect and the care for one another that we show every person, as a sibling in the family of God. Young Families are great, and so are Old Singles, and Empty Nesters, and People Who Wish Their Families Would Come to Church But They Just Won’t, and I’m The Only One I Know Who Even Believes in God…ers. And everyone can tell—from 2 years old to 92 years old—whether you’re treating them as a human being, or as a representative of a group, desired or not.

And I guess very few of you would be surprised to hear me say that… You know I spend as much time chatting with some of our younger members at Coffee Hour as I do with some of our older ones. (Well, sometimes a little more…)

So who are we, Saint John’s? Well, just to keep it to the question of generations and stages of life— We’re pretty much like Charlestown.


The Parochial Report asked us to count people in certain categories — children (0-12), youth (13-17), young adults (18-34), middle adults, (35-64), senior adults (65 and older). (Their categories, not mine!) So I thought, after looking through the parish directory and adding numbers up, that I’d compare to some recent Census data for our little neighborhood. (Those data are from 2017.)

Saint John’sCharlestown
22% children12% children
6% youth6% youth
7% young adults30% young adults
40% middle adults40% middle adults
24% senior adults10% senior adults

This is really astounding, to me. Sure, we all know that 20-to-30-somethings are unusually unlikely to go to church in general, and retirement-age folks are much more likely. But overall, these numbers are astounding: generationally, if not racially and ethnically, our church reflects our neighborhood really well.

I loved the Parochial Report this year. But what I loved the most was not the discovery of how many children are in our church, or how many middle adults, or how many seniors or anyone else. It was reading through the list of names, thinking about and praying for and remembering each one of you, the beloved children of God.