Sermon — February 26, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

If you want a master class in the self-justifying half-truth, you don’t need to look any further than the Congressional testimony of one William Campbell, then President & CEO of Philip Morris, USA. In April 1994, Campbell and six other tobacco-industry leaders were called before the House to provide testimony regarding their companies’ role in covering up research indicating the danger of smoking. And in the midst of his lengthy testimony, Campbell delivered the most subtle half-truth I’ve ever heard: “Phillip Morris research,” he said, “does not establish that smoking is addictive.”

Consider how carefully worded that is. First: to say that “Phillip Morris research does not establish that smoking is addictive” is quite different from saying that “Phillip Morris research establishes that smoking is not addictive.” Second: he only says that “Phillip Morris research doesn’t establish that smoking is addictive,” even if a hundred scientific studies do. And third, the word “establish” is just a brilliant choice: well, Phillip Morris research might “suggest” that smoking is addictive; it might “indicate” or it might “demonstrate” it, but surely a few studies can’t be said to “establish” that smoking is addictive. That’s not how science works. Campbell works himself up into a self-righteous rage, responding to the allegations against the cigarette companies with the indignant claim: “Our consumers are being misled.” It’s more than a little ironic.

Bill Campbell’s subtlety was impressive, but unconvincing: just two years later, all seven of the executives who’d testified that day had lost their jobs amid a perjury inquiry and a settlement costing hundreds of billions of dollars. But I want to suggest to you today that while most of us won’t go down in history as stalwart defenders of Big Tobacco, all of us are prone to that same pattern of self-justification, rationalization, and half-truth—that this is, in fact, a central part of the human condition—and that there’s no better time than Lent to take a look at how this all-too-human pattern ends up working in your own life.

The story of half-truths begins with Adam and Eve. Actually, really it begins with Adam—after all, Eve wasn’t even around yet when God tells Adam not to eat the fruit. If you look at the citation for the reading in your bulletin, you’ll see that it skips from Genesis 2:17 to Genesis 3:1. And what happens at Genesis 2:18? Well, God creates Eve.

So anyway, God creates Adam. God tells Adam not to eat the fruit. Then God creates Eve, who apparently gets the commandment not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil second-hand. And immediately after Eve is created, in comes the serpent, more crafty than other animal—the character whom our children’s Bible calls “The Sneaky Snake.” The Sneaky Snake comes, and it speaks with all the hair-splitting logic of a tobacco-company exec: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1) the serpent asks Eve. And Eve says, Well, no; “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden…” just not “the fruit of the tree that’s in the middle of the garden,” or we will die. (3:2) And the snake says, “You will not die.” (3:3) And this is half-true. God told Adam that “on the day that you eat of it, you shall die.” But they eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they do not die, yet. And yet they die. And maybe you can understand God’s words best as a kind of metaphor: “on that day, you will become subject to death; on that day, you will become mortal, so that one day you will die.” But the serpent’s words are simultaneously true and false: “You will not die (at the moment that you eat the fruit)” is true. “You will not die (period)” is not.

Nevertheless the serpent’s words provide Eve with all the truth she needs, and she begins to rationalize things what she’s about to do: This tree is good for food, and it’s a delight to the eyes, and eating it will make me wise. Why not? And so the serpent’s half-truth wins: Eve and Adam eat the fruit.

For his part, Paul doesn’t blame Eve, by the way. His point is all about Adam, because he watns to set up all these parallels between the old Adam and Jesus as the New Adam, the one through whose obedience Adam’s disobedience is undone. God gave humankind the Law in Adam, and Adam disobeyed, and brought sin and death into the world. God gave humankind Jesus as a gfree ift, and Jesus’ goodness gave us new life. And Paul doesn’t specifically name this story of the temptation of Christ, but you can hear it in the background. Just as the serpent comes to Eve in the Garden, the devil comes to Jesus in the wilderness. Just as the serpent speaks in half-truths, so too does Satan, saying to Jesus, “Surely if you’re the Son of God, the one through whom all things were made, you can just make these stones into bread.” And he could. But Jesus says there’s more to life than bread. (Matthew 4:3-4) The devil quotes Psalm 91: you can throw yourself off the top of the Temple, because “they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone,” and it’s an accurate quote. But Jesus says he’d rather not put God to the test. (4:5-7) He takes him to a high-up mountain and says he’ll give him all the kingdoms of the world, if only he falls down and worships him, and Jesus doesn’t deny that this is something the tempter could do—Jesus doesn’t say that only God can give a person worldly power—he simply says that it would be wrong to worship him. (4:8-10) Everything the devil says to Jesus in this scene is true, at least half-true; and yet where Eve and Adam are fooled by the deception, Jesus sees right through it. And the devil goes away.

Which brings it back to you. There are many different ways to observe Lent. I’ve heard from people this year giving up alcohol, and social media, and novels, people taking on a daily devotional reading or ten minutes of silent prayer, or simply setting an intention to slow down or do one thing at a time. I even know someone whose publicly-stated Lenten discipline is to get through an interstate move and leaving his church and searching for a new job with all family relationships intact.

And here’s the thing: it genuinely doesn’t matter what you do this Lent. In fact, that’s part of the point. Because in most cases, with every one of these things there will come a moment when you start to rationalize ignoring your choice. I do this every year. “Well, yes, I’ve given up alcohol for Lent—but not on Sundays, which are always a feast day, when Lenten disciples never apply. And today is a Friday, but it’s also St. Patrick’s Day, so surely the same rule applies and I can have a beer.” (And indeed, if you’re curious, so far 80 Catholic dioceses have announced that it’s okay to eat corned beef this St. Patrick’s Day this, even though meat wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed on a Friday in Lent.)

At some point, you may say to yourself, “I know I’m fasting from gossip this year, but… I only talk to this friend once a month and she’ll never believe what Sue just said.” “I know I was giving up social media, but I’m sitting here waiting for the dentist to come in… What harm could a little scrolling do?” “I know I was supposed to journal in the morning, but I’m tired today. Why don’t I take a little break?” And that’s fine, in a way. You’re all right. It’s not the end of the world. But it is a rationalization, a justification, a half-truth, and it’s the kind of thing our brains are really good at: coming up with reasons after the fact for things we’ve already decided to do.

And if you find yourself telling yourself half-truth this Lent, take it as an opportunity to reflect. When is it that that little, rationalizing voice starts up? When is it that I begin to justify things to myself? Is it when I’m tired, or hungry, or frustrated, or bored? Is it early in the morning or late at night or in the middle of the day? What is the moment when the sneaky snake comes to me, and how do I respond? Because the point of Lent is not only to give up the things we give up or to take on the things we take on, but to learn something about ourselves, in and through our imperfect attempts to give them up or take them on; so that by learning how we respond to small temptations, we might be better equipped for the big ones. It doesn’t matter whether you successfully abstain from chocolate or manage to journal every day. What matters is that you try, and fail, and learn something about how hard it is to try to grow closer to one another and to God, knowing throughout it all that God already knows our weaknesses, and loves us all the same; and that God is drawing nearer to us than we could ever know.

Sermon — February 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The writer Dave Zahl tells the story of a visit he paid to a friend of his, a priest who’d burned out terribly during his first call at a small, underfunded Episcopal church in New York City. (Don’t worry— This story is not meant to be autobiographical.) “There had been moments of joy,” Dave writes of his friend’s ministry, “but when he finally left the city, it was more of a tail-between-the-legs situation than a choice.” He wasn’t even sure he’d stay in ministry for much longer. So when Dave went out to visit his friend in his new hometown, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. Things had been hard for a long time, and a sudden change to a new environment isn’t always the solution to your problems. Sometimes it just accelerates the downward spiral.

But when they met up, Dave “noticed right off the bat how rejuvenated he seemed.” He was full of energy and excitement. He was spiritually engaged in his work. It was clear that the last few years since he’d left New York had been a kind of “mountain-top experience.” And Dave wondered about the source. Was it the growing congregation or the new building project? Was it the warmer weather? Had he discovered some kind of prayer practice that had brought him closer to God? So Dave asked him what accounted for the change. And it turned out Dave was right. His friend had had one of those mountain-top experiences with God. But not the kind Dave was expecting. “He laughed,” Dave writes, “and, without skipping a beat, [he] told me, ‘Dave, the honest truth is, I’ve gained a lot more compassion and patience for people since I realized that everyone is pretty much insane, myself included.’”[1]

There are, after all, two kinds of “mountain-top experience.”

You may have had the first kind of mountain-top experience, one like Moses had, like the one that Dave wondered if his friend had had, the kind of intense spiritual experience that probably only happens once in a lifetime, if that: that moment when you find yourself wrapped in the overwhelming presence of the living God. Perhaps God reaches out to you, with an inviting word: “Come up to me on the mountain.” (Exod. 24:12) Or perhaps you set out to go there on your own, seeking after God. But you go up on that metaphorical mountain—in worship or meditation, a group retreat or private prayer—and suddenly, the cloud wraps itself around you, and you are in the presence of the Lord, and the appearance of God’s glory is like a devouring fire, and you dwell there in rapture for forty days, or forty minutes, or forty seconds; the time really makes no difference. But you come down from that mountain and like Moses, your face is shining: you have been transformed, and your life will never be the same.

Or perhaps you may have had the second kind of mountain-top experience, an experience more like Peter’s: the sudden realization that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s long past time for you to shut your mouth. Peter’s up there on the mountain with his friends and spiritual companions, with Jesus and James and John, and Jesus has been transfigured before him, his face shining like the sun, his clothes dazzling white, and ancient prophets have appeared in their midst, and Peter finds himself completely fumbling the response: “Oh, Jesus, thank God we’re here! Okay, I’ll build three houses if you want: you can be here and Moses can be here and Elijah could be over here, and…” and God essentially just says, “You know what, Peter, I’m gonna stop you right there. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Matthew 17:5) Peter has completely missed the point. In his desire to get everything right, to try to manage this whole experience and maybe even preserve it, he’s missed what’s going on. He’s taken so much time to speak that he hasn’t realized that he’s supposed to be listening. And this is one of a handful of stories that the Gospels tell to show us Peter, once again, missing the point: this most central leader of the disciples failing to understand what God is doing right in front of him, failing to understand who Jesus really is.

Moses’ time on the mountain-top is an experience of the glory and the sweetness of the presence of God. It’s an inspiration, an invitation, as the Psalmist says, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8) In Peter’s mountain-top experience, the only thing you’re tasting is humble pie. If Moses’ experience is an ascent to the heights of spiritual experience, Peter’s is a descent into the depths of humility. He literally throws himself onto the ground and tastes the dust. And yet Peter doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. In just a few weeks, the same Peter who’s all too ready to praise Jesus with unnecessary words on the mountain-top will find himself at a loss for words on Good Friday as he warms himself by the fire; the very one who proclaimed Jesus as Lord at his transfiguration will deny even knowing the man as he journeys toward his crucifixion. Peter is no superhero. He’s been humbled once by the realization of his own limitations, and he will be humbled again and again.

And it was this kind of mountain-top experience that had turned Dave’s friend’s life around. It wasn’t an extraordinary spiritual experience or a profound moment of prayer that had loosened the grip of his despair or healed his burned-out soul. It was the realization that he was like Peter—just a human being trying to do his best, but “pretty much insane,” lacking the words or the courage or the wisdom to know how what to do—and so was everyone else around him. And as soon as he stopped expecting perfection from himself or anyone else, he was no longer consumed by frustration with himself and everyone else.

I don’t know which mountain-top you’re on right now, or what mountain-top experience of the past casts its shadow over the valleys through which you walk. I hope that at some point in your life you taste the sweetness of the experience of the presence of God in your life. And I hope that at some point, you learn that you are a human being, fragile and limited in scope. But I do know that Lent can be a good time to get a taste of either of these things.

In Lent, we can set aside a little extra time for prayer or for worship, for reading the Bible or taking up a new practice of meditation, for spending an extra hour a month serving the community or spending an extra day a month with family or friends. And every one of these things can lead us deeper into the cloud that’s wrapped around the presence of God. In Lent, we can take on practices that set us up to experience the goodness and the glory of God.

And in Lent we can be humbled. We can fail in our fasts. We can find ourselves just going through the motions of prayer. We can discover that forty days is a long time to do anything, let alone to spend with God on the mountain-top or being tempted in the desert. And even if you don’t do anything differently for Lent, you may find that a forty-day season of rain and mud will simply grind you down.

But there is as much wisdom to be found in our failures as there is our most joyful experiences. These two mountain-tops are part of the same range, part of the same process, part of the same journey deeper into the heart of God. And whichever experience we have—however glorious or however humbling it may be—God is there. Jesus is there, and when Jesus comes to us, he speaks to us in the same words he spoke to Peter: not with judgment or with anger or even with congratulations, but simply with the courage we need to face another day: “Get up,” he says, “and do not be afraid.” (Matt. 17:7)

[1] Dave Zahl, Low Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 71.

Sermon — February 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a traffic phenomenon I’ve discovered in my years driving around the Northeast. I call it “the New-England Green.” Now, a driver’s ed instructor will tell you that there are three states a traffic light can be in. Red means “Stop.” Yellow means, “Stop if safe.” Green means—not “Go,” but “Proceed with caution,” right? In New England, these work a little differently from the driver’s-ed textbook. Red means “Stop if safe and you’re not running late.” Yellow means, “Hit the gas to make it through.” Green means “Go, go, go!” (and/or “Start honking at the guy in front of you to go.”)

But in New England, there’s actually a fourth state the traffic light can be in, and it’s what I call “New England Green”: the three or four seconds when your light is red, but the other light has not yet turned to green. Now, your car is supposed to be stopped. But this time can be used for all sorts of things: a cautious right turn at 15 mph if there are no pedestrians; completing a left turn that you’d rolled out into the middle of the intersection to make; or just continuing on straight through the light because the guy in front of you was driving too slow down Main Street, and you’ve earned it.

Now: traffic engineers are the second-most-second-guessed profession in the world, after meteorologists. Who among us has not sat in traffic at an off-ramp and thought, “What kind of clown designed this intersection? But traffic engineers are actually pretty smart. And while you may sometimes doubt their skill in designing roadways, you have to admire their grasp of psychology. Because they know that people are going to take advantage of that “New England Green”—people are going to run those red lights, over and over and over again, every day—and so they build in a few seconds’ grace, between the moment that your light turns red, and the moment their light turns green, and in so doing they save what must be thousands of lives a year.

And I say all this because, believe it or not, this is one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “‘You shall not murder’… But I say to you that if you are angry…you will be liable to judgment.” (Matthew 5:21-22) “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that if you even look at someone with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.” (5:27-28) “You have heard it said, ‘Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows’… But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all.’ Let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no.’ Anything more than this comes from the evil one.” (5:33-37)

Again and again, Jesus takes well-known and common-sense laws and makes them an order of magnitude stricter. He takes a law against murder and makes it a law against anger. He takes a law against adultery and makes it a law against wandering eyes. He takes a law against breaking the oaths you’ve sworn, and making it a law against swearing oaths in the first place. And he does it all in extravagant, even gruesome language: the hell of fire and the evil one, eyes ripped out and hands chopped off. He really wants to make his point: Jesus’ law is a very strict law.

This was a traditional technique. The ancient sages called “building a fence around the Torah.” The basic principle is the psychological insight discovered by New England traffic engineers: Whatever boundary you set, people will wander up to the edge of it, and often cross it. So if there’s something that’s very important at the center of a law—a murder, for example, or a collision—you need to build in some extra space. You don’t just make the law: you build a fence around it, so that even if someone crosses the boundary you’ve set, their behavior isn’t catastrophic.

The most famous example of this principle in action in Judaism is probably the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. Three times, the Torah repeats the cryptic commandment, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” (Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21) And I can understand why. Cooking a young animal by boiling it in its own mother’s milk seems gross. But God seems unusually disturbed, and the rabbis take note. It’s unusual for the law to contain the same commandment three times. It must be an especially important one, the ancient rabbis thought. So they built a fence around it.

You can’t really know the source of any given milk; so it’s probably best not to boil a kid in any milk. And it’s hard to judge what counts as a “kid,” as opposed to a young goat or a calf, so just don’t cook meat in milk. And if it’s so important to God that meat not be cooked in milk, then surely we surely it’s splitting hairs to say that a beef in cream sauce or a cheeseburger is all right because the milk is just on it, rather than the meat being cooked in it. In fact in a kosher household, you keep separate sets of plates and cooking utensils for meat and dairy; you don’t eat them at the same meal. And this sets the fence at the right distance from the law: you might mix up your plates, you might have some milk chocolate too close in time to a hamburger, but there’s no way you could possibly end up boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

And this is very similar to what Jesus is doing. It’s incredibly important that you not murder someone. So it’s better that you not even be violent toward them. And if you shouldn’t be violent toward them, you ought not even to be angry at them.

It’s basic traffic engineering: Jesus knows you’ll try to follow the law, that you’ll try to do what’s right. And he knows you’ll fail. So he builds in that grace period, that extra space. If you get angry with someone, okay, you’ve violated the Sermon on the Mount—but you’re nowhere close to murder. Even if your eye occasionally strays toward an attractive person who is not your spouse, you’re still far from infidelity. The further out Jesus pushes the boundaries of the law, the more likely it is you’ll break them—but the less of a life-and-death matter it is when you do.

I said this was one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing here. Because the strictness of Jesus’ new law doesn’t just build a fence around the old one. It does something else, too. To the extent that we can imagine a boundary, a thin line separating the righteous from the unrighteous, us good people from those bad people, sinners from saints, Jesus has moved the boundary so that we’re all on the same side of it. And this was a theme of Jesus’ ministry. He became infamous among the respectable and righteous people of his society for hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners.” The Pharisees criticized him for it all the time. And the point is not that actually, tax collectors were good and the Pharisees are bad. It’s that there is no dividing line. There is no division into tax collectors and Pharisees, into sinners and saints, into sheriffs and outlaws; in the eyes of the Sermon on the Mount, we are all outlaws. We have all been angry. We have all made promises we can’t keep. We have all occasionally run that red light. We have all needed to forgive, and we have all needed to be forgiven. And you can tell that in a sense, what bothers Jesus more than anything else in the world is the self-righteous self-deception of people trying to convince themselves and the world that they are perfect, when instead we should be compassionate with one another, because we have all been imperfect.

In just a few more verses, the disciples will ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. And he’ll respond with a prayer that contains the famous words: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Jesus doesn’t divide the world into sinners and saints. He reminds us that we are all both sinners and saints, all the time; that the people of God are always both holy and imperfect.

I don’t need to remind you that Lent is coming again. (Actually, in a few minutes I do need to remind you that Lent is coming, because we’re planning our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper.) But Lent is coming, as it always does. And the Ash Wednesday service will include, as it always does, what’s called an “Invitation to a Holy Lent.” But this morning I also want to invite you to prepare for a compassionate Lent: to take a season in which to remember that you are imperfect. When someone around you goes astray, remember that you are imperfect. When you yourself make a mistake, remember that you are imperfect. Let Jesus’ unbelievably-strict interpretation of the law teach you that you can never be perfect, however hard you try; and let Jesus’ unbelievably-generous grace remind you that will be always be loved, even if and when you fail.