Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Prayer 1, Part 2

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As we continue using Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship 1, I thought I’d continue reflecting on pieces of that Eucharistic Prayer. Every Eucharistic Prayer is a “thanksgiving” that re-tells the story of salvation. After blessing God for creation, the prayer takes us into the spiritual betrayal of the Garden of Eden:

But we failed to honor your image
in one another and in ourselves;
we would not see your goodness in the world around us;
and so we violated your creation,
abused one another,
and rejected your love.

This is as good a definition as any other of “sin.” God created us human beings in God’s own image, as bearers of the divine characteristics of compassion, creativity, and love. But we have, in oh so many ways, failed to honor that image, in ourselves and in one another. This is what “sin” is. Sin is not, as the grocery-store checkout magazines would have you believe, a matter of pleasure; there’s no such thing as a “sinfully-good chocolate cake.” Nor is sin a matter of moral rules and regulations, of things A, B, and C that you must do, and things X, Y, and Z that you must not do. “Sin” is an unfortunate reality of the human condition, an affliction and a distortion in which we do not treat ourselves, or one another, or creation, or even God the way they ought to be treated. I love Billy Joel as much as the next guy, but “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints” just makes no sense, at least from a Protestant point of view: every one of us is, as Martin Luther used to say, simul iustus et peccator; simultaneously righteous and a sinner. Especially in a world in which our future is threatened by climate change and our clothes are made in sweatshops, all of us are inextricably caught up in systems of human invention that violate God’s creation and abuse one another… and that’s not to mention our dozens of daily, petty sins, our gossip and resentment, our rudeness and self-centeredness and all the rest. (You can’t tell me that these aren’t real; I drive around Boston, too.)

And yet God continues, always, to love us and guide us. As the prayer continues:

Yet you never ceased to care for us,
and prepared the way of salvation for all people.

In it all and through it all, God continues to care for us, to love us, and to lead us toward a different reality. God plants the seeds of a kingdom among us that’s different from the kingdoms of the world, and waits for it to grow. God gives us the good news that there is another way, and invites us to follow it. God forgives us all our sins, small and large, and draws us into wholeness of life.

The story of the prayer doesn’t end here, with this frank admission of our failings. The Christian story should never end here, with judgment or condemnation. And the way we talk to and talk about one another should never end there either. We are not simple creatures. We are always mixed. We are, each one of us, both laughing sinners and crying saints; full of good intentions and inevitable failings, and always, always loved by God.

Baptized into the Trinity

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Sermon — Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, you might think that scheduling a baptism on Trinity Sunday is just a clever way of getting out of preaching a sermon on the Holy Trinity. You might even appreciate the effort. After all, Trinity Sunday, this Sunday after Pentecost every year, has something of a reputation for rough sermons. Preachers tend to either go very theological, regurgitating large chunks of seminary classes into fifteen-minute discourses featuring words like “perichoresis” and “hypostatic union”; or they tend to veer a bit in the other direction. I once heard a sermon on Trinity Sunday, the day that happened to mark the end of the church “program year,” which started by calling the Trinity a fourth-century political compromise, then proceeded to just list all the wonderful things that the church had done that year, before concluding, “And that’s

So, A baptism might seem like a fitting escape from this dilemma. There’s no better antidote to a dry exposition of fifth-century theological philosophical and theological debates, after all, than a really cute baby. But I’m sorry to tell you that the Trinity and baptism go hand in hand.

Our readings this morning, you may be surprised to hear, were not chosen because we had a baptism. They’re simply the readings for Trinity Sunday. These aren’t baptism readings and yet we begin, just as the Thanksgiving over the Water later in this service will begin, with the image of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of the deep, as God prepares to bless the new life that is coming forth. (Gen. 1:2) These aren’t baptism readings and yet we end with Jesus’ final words to his disciples, taken from the Gospel according to Matthew, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:16)

The Trinity, an abstract, technical, dry topic, seems quite different from Baptism, a hands-on, messy, and rather wet practice, and the two can’t be separated from each other. And the reason for this, it turns out, is that the Trinity is not actually an abstract theological claim. And the Trinity is not really a fourth-century political compromise. The Trinity is a person—or, three persons, anyway, I guess that’s the point. The Trinity isn’t an idea about God, the Trinity is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and this tells us everything about the meaning of Baptism.

To say that God is Trinity is to say that God has always existed and will always exist as a relationship, a community of love within God’s own self. And to say that we are baptized “in the name of the Trinity” is to say that we are invited into that relationship; that each one of us is drawn into that community of love. One of my favorite little New Testament facts is that the preposition Matthew uses here means “in” in the sense of “into,” not in the sense of “by.” In other words, we baptize people “into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” not “by the power invested in the name.” All of us who have been baptized have been baptized into a new identity, a new name, a new family. Baptism adopts us into the family of God, and incorporates us into a community of love.

In one sense, baptism incorporates us into the community of the Church. When a child is baptized she is no longer the sole responsibility of her parents or grandparents; they are no longer her only family. She becomes our sister in Christ, a member of all our family, under God. And we take that as seriously as we can. In a few minutes, everyone in this room will make a promise, on behalf of the whole Church throughout the world, to do everything in our power to support her. And, God willing, when she need us, we will. Wherever she goes, whoever she becomes, she will always have a home in the family of God.

But baptism does more than just invite us into the Church. Baptism makes us part of the Body of Christ, baptism brings us, in a sense, into the very heart of the life of God. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, every person who is baptized is made a spiritual member of the living Body of God the Son, and God the Father looks on her with the same love that has existed within God’s own being from before time, the same love that led God’s voice to boom out from heaven at Jesus’ own baptism and say, “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” God looks at each one of you and sees a beloved child, in whom God delights and is well pleased. And wherever you go, and whoever you become, God’s love and compassion and care will follow you. And God sees you as you see a sweet and beloved little child: indescribably beautiful, unbelievably frustrating, incomprehensibly messy, and loved beyond anything that could ever be imagined.

So, to all who are baptized, welcome into the family of God. May God the Father bless you with the knowledge and love of God, and of God’s love for you. May God the Son inspire you to walk in the way of love for your neighbor. Maybe God the Holy Spirit guide you and comfort you as you grow in stature and in faith. And may you remember that God is “with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

Amen.

Dissolved

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Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.
There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.

Psalm 104:26-27

Alice couldn’t stop laughing at me this Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the shade under a tree, enjoying a picnic by the beach, feasting on chicken fingers and ice cream from the snack bar while Alice read aloud from Ramona the Pest, and I could not stop myself from repeatedly exhaling huge, loud sighs of relief, each one prompting another round of giggles. For the first time since September, I’d been swimming in salt water. Summer was almost here. And with every minute I sat there, a day’s-worth of stress was dissolving into the sea as the long winter washed away.

It’s the power of water to dissolve nearly anything that makes it such a potent symbol in baptism. Water is a symbol of life, for plants and animals alike; with it we water our plants and quench our thirst. Water is a medium through which we travel, on journeys toward new places or to escape, like the Israelites at the Red Sea, from old ones. Perhaps more than anything, water is the “universal solvent,” the substance in which more things can be dissolved than anything else: the dirt and sweat that cover our bodies; the minerals that give the ocean its buoyant tang; and even, yes, sometimes even the anxiety of a minister at the end of a long year.

The water of the baptism we’ll celebrate this Sunday, and which all of us have ourselves received, does all these things. The water of baptism begins our new life in Christ, and continues to refresh us through our whole lives. It invites us into a journey with God across the often-stormy sea of our lives in this world, toward a distant and more promising shore. And yes, it cleanses us from sin; not just once, on the day of our baptism, as if babies were somehow notorious wrongdoers, but every day of our lives, as we look back on our various missteps and are reminded that we have already been given.

And maybe, just maybe, baptism gives us just a hint of that sigh of relief. In baptism, and at baptisms, we are constantly reminded that we have been made children of a God of infinite compassion and unconditional love, and God looks at us as we look at a beloved child. God looks at our greatest accomplishments, the triumphs and successes of which we are most proud, with the genuine delight of a grandparent being presented with some new refrigerator art. God looks at our failures and mistakes with the tranquility of a parent weathering yet another tantrum, albeit with divine, and not human, patience.

The stresses and strains of an ordinary life are real, but compared to the depth of God’s love, they are small, and in baptism, God washes them away. God dissolves them in the waves, and sends them out into the sea. And if that vague and spiritual thought is not quite enough to comfort you, amid the actual, concrete realities of life, then, well…

That’s why God made the beach.

Faith in Translation

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Faith in Translation

 
 
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Sermon — Pentecost, May 28, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

The last year or so has seen a huge explosion in the field of “large-language models,” artificial-intelligence technologies that can be trained to process text and produce things we never thought they could: art and music and entire conversations, all in response to a paragraph of text. These tools are a little frightening, raising questions about “deep fakes” and plagiarized papers, about the future for copywriters and graphic designers and software engineers in a world where AI is starting to do parts of their jobs. But last week MetaAI—the artificial-intelligence research branch of the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta—released something new, which I’m shocked to say may actually be good for the world.

It’s a service that uses AI to transcribe speech to text, and text to speech, in over 1,100 different languages from all around the world, ten times more than any other speech-recognition approach. These sorts of tools make life better for real people in some very specific ways. Text-to-speech software, for example, lets people who are blind read emails or search the web without the need to see. Speech-to-text software provides automatic closed-captioning, so that Deaf people, for example, can watch cooking recipe videos or church services and be able to read the text. (In fact, if you watch the video of this service on Facebook, you’ll see that it provides closed captioning for the whole service, free of charge!)

And multilingual translation software unlocks even more power. In the very near future a single app on your phone could handle a whole conversation between two people with no language in common at all. Imagine how much easier it would be to be a refugee, or an immigrant, or a tourist, if you could speak into your phone, and have it transcribed, translated, and spoken out loud again, back and forth, all by artificial intelligence.

There’s just one problem. Large-language models depend on having access to, well… a large amount of language. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just really good at recognizing patterns. So what the model needs to learn a language, is to digest and analyze a huge amount of language; and what the model needs to be able to translate between languages is to have access to texts that mean the same thing, in a lot of different languages.

And last week, Meta’s engineers unveiled a great discovery. They discovered a single text that has been translated into more languages than any other and is widely available in a digital form online. Even better, audio files of this text and closely-related bodies of literature are also available online. Their discovery was so big that they just had to put out a press release. “Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge,” they wrote in their announcement this week, “To overcome it…”—and maybe you’ve already guessed where this is going—“to overcome it, we turned to…the Bible.”

There is no institution in the entire world, after all, that believes more deeply in “translation” than the Christian Church. Meta’s machine-learning engineers were able to gather a language-learning dataset based on text and audio recordings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, with an average of 32 hours of audio data per language.

We heard our readings this morning in our familiar English. But thousands of translators have worked for thousands of years translating these same readings into thousands of languages, spoken all around the world. Not just the big ones like English and Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. And not just the languages that seem obscure to you or me—Gujarati or Burmese or Lingala—but are in fact spoken by tens of millions of people. The dataset from Meta includes languages like Muria, spoken by 15,000 people in south-central India, and Kilivila, spoken by 20,000 in Papua New Guinea, and Itelmen, which is down to 82 native speakers at the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Siberia. The New Testament has been translated into all of these languages from Greek, and this is no accident.

The story of Pentecost, after all, is a story of translation. The rushing wind is amazing. The tongues of fire are impressive. But the miracle of Pentecost is, above all else, the miracle of translation. It’s a common tradition in some churches to have this story read aloud in many languages at once, perhaps beginning in English and then having readers join in speaking Spanish and French, Creole and Dutch, German and Arabic and whatever other languages their members speak.

But Pentecost itself, as you may notice, happens the other way around. “Devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) are gathered in Jerusalem for the great Feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. And the apostles begin to speak. They’re used speaking the Galilean dialect of Aramaic; perhaps a bit of Hebrew, perhaps a bit of Greek. But when they open their mouths on this day, “the Spirit gave them ability” “to speak in other languages.” (Acts 2:4) The people gathered from across the world hear them speak and are amazed, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6) The disciples are recognized as Galileans by their dialect; yet the Parthians hear them in Parthian, the Cappadocians in Greek, the Phrygians in Phrygian, the Egyptians in Egyptian, the Arabs in Arabic, the Romans in Latin. (Acts 2:9-11) Each one hears the disciples speaking in a foreign language and thinks it’s drunken babbling. Then they hear themselves addressed in words they understand, and they’re amazed, saying, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12)

What it means is this: the Christian message is, and has always been, and will always be, a message in translation.

This is true, of course, on the literal and historical level, and it’s important to remember. Christianity is not native to our culture. It’s not an American religion, or an English one. The Christian tradition doesn’t belong to us, any more than it belongs to anyone else. With the exception of that small band of Galilean-Aramaic speaking Jews, Christianity comes to every culture as a translation, as a gift or an imposition brought by someone else. It’s important sometimes to remember that our own traditions and understandings are not the whole truth of our faith. And it’s important sometimes to remember that our religion is one of constant change and reinterpretation: that the traditions handed down by the generations before us might sound different from the ones being created by the next, and that’s okay. They’re speaking different languages, is all.

But it’s true on the individual level as well. The Christian message doesn’t only need to be translated from Greek into English, from ancient Mediterranean cultures into a modern American one. The Christian message needs to be translated for each and every one of us, so that what seems at first to be nothing more than random babbling becomes, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a “river of living water,” (John 7:38) an encounter with the living God who is pouring that same Spirit out on us.

We come to this place seeking some way to experience God. And we’re confronted with language. Paragraph after paragraph of language. Some of it comes from the Bible, written thousands of years ago in Hebrew and Greek. Some of it comes from pieces of our liturgy written in Latin a thousand years ago, or in English five hundred years or fifty or twenty years ago. Some of it is set to music, having been composed in verse. Some of it comes out of my mouth, and some of it you hear from one another. But none of it flows directly from God’s mouth to your ears. Most of it isn’t addressed directly to you. All of it needs to be translated from its original language and context and meaning into the circumstances of our lives, because every word that’s ever been spoken loses something as it passes between two minds. (Unless, of course, you’re talking to yourself, which I do, almost constantly.)

And the fact that it makes any sense at all, the fact that some verse or prayer or lyric in this service might touch you somehow, that it might move you, comfort you, maybe even change you, is the miracle of Pentecost happening again. If there is anything in this hour of your Sunday morning that makes sense to you at all, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing you to hear the babble of a thousand voices speaking to you in the words you understand and need to hear. “Would that all the Lord’s people are prophets!” Moses said, “and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them all!” (Numbers 11:29) And he does. God gives the Holy Spirit to us all, God pours out the Spirit on all flesh, (Acts 2:17) God does the work to translate the good news to each and every one of us, so that across the millennia we too, can understand God’s power—not just in the stories of the past, but in all the wonders of the present—and be amazed. (2:12)

Enriching Our Worship

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We rotate some of the prayers in our liturgy seasonally, using certain forms for a time, then switching to another. This summer we’ll be using some of the prayers provided by the book Enriching Our Worship 1, which—although it was published nearly a quarter century ago—is still not as familiar as our slightly-older Book of Common Prayer.

I thought I’d spend a few weeks this spring reflecting on some of the new prayers, in the hopes that these reflections might, well, enrich your worship when you hear them on a Sunday morning.

The Eucharistic Prayer we’ll be using begins as they all do, with the opening dialogue (The Lord be with you. And also with you. Lift up your hearts… and so on), a preface, and the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord…”)

Then it continues, like all Eucharistic prayers do, by telling the story of salvation, of our creation, fall, and redemption.

I’m struck by that first paragraph, by the words about our creation:

Blessed are you, gracious God,
creator of the universe and giver of life.
You formed us in your own image
and called us to dwell in your infinite love.
You gave the world into our care
that we might be your faithful stewards
and show forth your bountiful grace.

The prayer begins as traditional Jewish blessings and some early Christians prayers begin: with some variation on the phrase “Blessed are you, O God, creator of the universe.” The Eucharistic Prayer is, more than anything else, a prayer of thanksgiving. (That’s what Eucharistia means in Greek, “Thanksgiving,” and indeed if you travel to Greece today and order a sandwich, you can tell the cashier Efcharisto when they give you your change. “Thank you,” the same word in modern pronunciation.) And what we being by thanking God for is simply being God: “You are blessed, O God, creator of the universe,” could be an entire prayer.

But out of God’s goodness and grace flows something else. God, of God’s goodness, chooses to give us life. It’s in God’s very nature to share that life with us. So God “forms us” in God’s own image, giving us life. You don’t have to adopt some kind of creationist view to think that this is true; it’s all perfectly compatible with evolutionary science. To say that God forms us in God’s image is not about biology: it’s to say that on the moral and spiritual plane, we are creatures built to show forth the nature of the God who is Love, to be visible images of God’s own self-giving love.

Like a potter, God is shaping and forming us for a purpose. And like lumps of clay, we can sometimes be hard to work with. God has a very clear vision for the things we are becoming, but God works with and through the material of our lives to do it.

So what’s that shape?

Just as God forms us into new shapes, I sometimes like to form words into new shapes; so here’s a paraphrase, reorganized a bit:

God formed us and called us
            to dwell in God’s infinite love.
God gave the world into our care, that we might
            be God’s faithful stewards
            and show forth God’s bountiful grace.

God does three things, and we do three things. God forms us, calls us, and gives us the world. We dwell in God’s love, practice faithful stewards, and show forth God’s grace. God’s action and our response are in a continuous interaction, a constant shaping and reshaping like a bowl-to-be on the potter’s wheel, always beginning with what God does for us.

God formed us in the shape of love; may we dwell in that love.

God gave the world into our care; may we care for the world in love, treating it as stewards and not owners, as people who have the responsibility to tend to God’s garden but not the right to destroy it.

God calls each one of us by name, speaking to us in love; may we share that love with the world, showing forth the signs and telling the stories of God’s grace in our lives.

And what God has done for “us” as a human species, God does for each one of us. So may each one of you reading this know that you are the beloved child of God, being gently and carefully formed, day by day, into a vessel of God’s love for the world; into the very image of God.