Sermon — February 5, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last week, Alice Krapf sent me a copy of the Rev. Philo Sprague’s sermon on the 50^th anniversary of St. John’s: the Sunday fifty years to the day after the first service this church celebrated on January 5, 1840. On that first Sunday, that first congregation was made up of about 75 people, and the church’s first year of ministry was supported financially twenty-four “subscribers,” what we would now call 24 “pledging units,” who were able to employ a part-time priest. This would suggest to me the old saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” with the caveat that the operating budget those subscribers set for that first year—in addition to the money raised to build this church building—was $345.00. It was, I guess, a less expensive time.

Now of course, St. John’s has had multiple Golden Ages since then and multiple periods of struggle and decline. Already by 1890 we’d had our ups and downs. Like many churches, our history has been a rollercoaster—or, if you like math, a sine wave—a story of alternating highs and lows, of times when the church had multiple mortgages on the building without realizing it and times when the Sunday School was full; years when the place wasn’t watertight, let alone warm, and decades when you couldn’t walk down the street without meeting one of the Rev. Mr. Cutler’s devoted disciples.

But throughout it all, there has been one constant fact: No matter how full or empty St. John’s has been, this church has only ever been a tiny fraction of our community, and I can guarantee you that people asked themselves, in 1840 and in 1890, and in 1940 and in 1990, the same question that some of you may have asked yourselves, in moments of reflection: “What can little St. John’s ever do?”

To which Jesus has an answer that is, for once, refreshingly straightforward: “So let your light shine before others,” he tells his disciples, “that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

When Jesus says this, and when he tells them that he hasn’t come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them, he’s thinking of the great Biblical passages he’d grown up reading, like the words of the prophet Isaiah in our first reading today:

“If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,” Isaiah prophesies, “then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will says, Here I am.” (Isaiah 58:9) “If you offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:9-10) “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt, and you shall raise up the foundations of many generations.” (58:12)

“If you remove the yoke from among you… then your light shall rise in the darkness.” Isaiah says. “In this way,” Jesus adds, “let your light shine,” not hidden under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and let it give light to all the people of the world.

Now there’s a way of reading these words from Isaiah that’s about big, societal systems. And it’s not wrong. Isaiah is writing to the people of Israel, to a nation and a society, and he’s talking about their national economic life, not about their personal morals. No, he tells them that God’s own divine favor depends on the quality of their national life. If they “let the oppressed go free,” if they “break every yoke,” if they share their bread with the hungry and let the homeless poor into their homes, then their light shall break forth like the dawn. But if not… A people newly-returned from decades in exile don’t need to hear the “but if not” part of the sentence. They know what it means to walk in darkness. God is addressing the Israelites as a nation, God is demanding social justice and the end of oppression, and all of that is true.

And it is also true, at the same time, that this kind of a reading can be discouraging once you’ve been around as a church for 183 years. Because we, the people of St. John’s, are too small and too few to set much of an agenda for the life of our neighborhood, let alone our commonwealth or our nation. The prophet Isaiah is speaking to the whole people of Israel; but even if you add up all the churches in our neighborhood, all the people who might hear Isaiah speaks these words to us, we are just a few of the people of Charlestown or of Cambridge or of Somerville. And it can be frustrating, or maybe overwhelming, to hear all these demands. We would love to feed every hungry person in our community. We would love to house every unhoused person we see. But we cannot. Even if we pooled all our resources, we could not.

And yet neither Jesus nor Isaiah lays the burden of responsibility for the entire world on us. If you remove the yoke “from among you,” Isaiah says, and those three words make all the difference in the world. It would be nice, I’ll admit, if we could “break every yoke,” as Isaiah says. But we can at least remove the yoke “from among us.” It would be nice if we could feed every hungry person in the world. But we can at least help feed a hungry person who is in our midst. While we always need to keep our sight on the ultimate goal, on the ultimate justice and righteousness of the kingdom of heaven, we cannot let ourselves be immobilized by a sense of being powerless, because there is always something we can do: in our neighborhood or in our church, in our families, or simply within our own selves, to live a little more justly, to share a little more generously, to “let our light shine,” a little more brightly.

And it’s that image, most of all, that I love. Because Jesus doesn’t tell us to become light, when we are something else. And Jesus doesn’t tell us to shine more brightly, or to spread our light throughout the world. He simply tells us to let our light shine. To remove the things that obscure our light. Not to hide it under a basket, but to put it on the lampstand, and to give light to everyone in the house.

Our light is, for the most part, pretty bright. There are always yokes that can be removed from among us, hungry people who can be fed, fingers that are pointed that maybe should not be, but for the most part, our light is bright. Jesus doesn’t tell us that our church is broken. Jesus doesn’t tell us that we’re doing it all wrong. Jesus tells us to let our light shine, to let the world see what a good and a beautiful community this is. And this is the only way that we can change the world: by becoming a community of justice and of peace and of love, by removing the yoke from among us and letting God’s light rise upon us, and letting that light shine into the world.

So, dear people of Saint John’s: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one lights a lamp and hides it under a basket, but puts it up on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

Amen.

Sermon — January 29, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
(1 Cor. 1:18-31)

There’s nothing in the world that’s more holy than a good waste of time.

Now to be clear, before you all pull out your phones and start scrolling through the social media of your choice, I said a good waste of time. Not every waste of time is good. Perhaps it’s actually better to put it the other way around, so I’ll say this instead: the most holy moments in this life almost always look, when judged my modern standards of efficiency and success, like a total waste of time.

These seemingly-wasted hours take a variety of forms. Sometimes they mean canceling a meeting or so you can attend a mediocre school play, watch a bunch of small children somehow strike out repeatedly even though they’re playing T-ball. Sometimes it means spending forty-five minutes on the phone listening to an old friend, when you have ten other things on your mind that you need to get done that day. Sometimes it means sitting by the bedside of a parent or a grandparent or a spouse, who’s too deep in their dementia or too close to the end to have any idea you’re there, for hours and hour at a time. Sometimes it means sitting in silence, in meditation or in prayer, simply doing nothing in the presence of God as the seconds tick by.

The most holy moments in life, if you try to measure them in terms of productivity or efficiency, their contribution to the national economy or to your own job performance or physical fitness, almost always seem like a waste of time. And yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. They are the most holy things in life.

I want to step back for a moment and set the scene for our Gospel reading today. You may know that our readings are assigned by a three-year cycle called the “Revised Common Lectionary,” which is shared by Catholics and Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists and many other denominations, not only here but around the world. And each year we read through one of the gospels: this year it’s Matthew.

I said last week that last week’s story, in which Jesus calls his first disciples to leave their fishing nets and follow him, marks the end of the stories of Jesus’ birth and adolescence and the beginning of his adult ministry. And today’s Gospel reading marks the beginning of Jesus’ most famous speech, the “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus had been traveling throughout Galilee, teaching and preaching and healing people from every disease and sickness he could find, and a huge crowd from all over the place had started to gather around him.

And when Jesus saw the crowd, “he went up to the mountain… [and] his disciples came to him.” (Matthew 5:1) And, in words that will set the tone for the entire Gospel—in other words, in words that will be at the heart of everything we hear from Jesus this lectionary year, from now to next December—Jesus begins to lay out his vision of the kingdom of heaven whose arrival he is proclaiming.

Everything that Matthew’s told us so far suggests that Jesus is launching a political campaign. He is the Messiah, the successor to King David. He’s begun proclaiming a new kingdom. And he’s gathered a crowd of followers, from among all the people of his nation. This is the moment for his first great speech, the moment when he’ll lay out his vision for the future, his manifesto for what his kingdom will be, and that’s exactly what he does, in words that are now familiar to us but still haven’t lost their power to surprise:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad. (Matt. 5:3-11)

Jesus turns to his disciples, in other words, to his closest followers, and he points to the crowd, to the multitude of the sick and the tired and the hungry who’ve come looking for healing and for peace, and he says to his disciples, “You’re looking for the kingdom of heaven? Here it is.”

If what you want is a Messiah’s Messiah, a man’s man, a strong, tough leader, this ain’t it. If what you want is an army who’ll throw out the Roman invaders and make your nation great again, this ragtag crowd looks pitiful. If what you want is health, and wealth, and esteem, then Jesus has nothing to offer you in these words. You can already tell, up front, at the very beginning of his ministry, that by any reasonable measure of success, this guy is going to fail—and fail hard. The idea that a movement of the poor and the meek and the mourning, the merciful peacemakers who are pure in heart, is going to throw out the hardened veterans of the Roman legions, is ridiculous. You might even call it foolish.

And indeed it is foolish, and it’s always been foolish, and we’ve always known that it’s foolish, from the earliest days of the Church. “For the message about the cross,” as Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us… it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18) The ancient Greek culture in which these Corinthians lived and in which they’d all grown up valued “the one who is wise…the scribe…the debater of this age.” (1 Cor. 1:20) But Paul’s proclamation was a foolish one: that the Messiah had come, and he had not thrown out the Romans, he had failed and had been executed on the cross, and that this failure had been the moment of his victory. Paul’s message is a foolish one, an incredible one, but “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,” (1 Cor. 1:25) and in you, my beloved parishioners—Paul writes, in the ultimate back-handed compliment—in you, who are not, on average, wise, who are not powerful, who are not of noble birth, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27)

God has taken a good hard look at the things we human being strive for—wealth and prestige and the eternal appearance of youth—and God has chosen instead to bless the things we fear, our poverty and persecution and pain. God has considered the ways we spend our time—the ones that are productive and valuable in the eyes of the world, and the ones that are unproductive in the eyes of the world—and God has chosen to rank them in a different way. God has chosen the sick and the tired and the poor, the weak and the meek and the mourning, the persecuted and the peaceful and the pure in heart, the children and all those who can’t “contribute” to society. God has chosen to bless us in all our suffering, to be alongside us in our suffering, and to bless us in our presence with those who are suffering.

God has chosen to bless the time we waste on holy things, and declared it to be the most important time of all. God has chosen to bless us, not when we achieve and succeed and excel, but when we sit, and watch, and wait, and most especially when we sit with the old, and the young, and the sick among us, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs, and the kingdom of God is there.

I suspect that many of you feel, as I sometimes do, that you don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything you need. (Some of you may have too many hours in the day, and maybe that’s a problem for another sermon.) But if you ever find yourself wondering whether what you’re doing is a waste of time, I’d invite you to ask yourself whether that’s just the wisdom of the world talking, to wonder instead whether what you’re doing with that time is in line with the wild vision God lays out for the kingdom of heaven, a vision that values the meek and the humble and the hungry. For “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

Sermon — January 22, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When I was a kid we used to spend every Fourth of July down in New Jersey, at my grandparents’ house, in the town where my parents lived as teenagers. The town is built around a big lake with beaches and docks all around the perimeter, just a short walk from my grandparents’ house. And on the Fourth of July, after we’d had a big hot-dog cookout and eaten our traditional American-flag cake, my cousins and my grandparents and my family would all load ourselves into Granny and Grandpa’s boat, and head out onto the water to enjoy what I like to think was northern New Jersey’s finest fireworks display.

And then the next day, sometimes, we’d do something very special. We’d take Grandpa’s fishing rods, and go down to the dock, and we’d take the leftover hot dogs that we’d cut up into bait-sized chunks, and we’d cast our lines into the lake, trying to see what little fish we could catch and release.

This is pure Americana: fishing off the dock with Grandpa on the Fourth of July, with leftover hot dogs for bait. And this is what a lot of people love about fishing: standing together by the water, hanging out, passing the time in leisure and reflection in the great outdoors while you wait for something to bite, immersed in that ancient dance between fish and man, as the fish wonders whether this time, the hot dog might really be a worm. (Fish are really not that smart.)

This is not what life was like for Peter and Andrew and James and John, these soon-to-be-famous “fishers of men.” Commercial fishing is a very different beast, even in the ancient world. It’s “they cast their nets in Galilee,” not “they cast their lines.” When Jesus calls James and John, they aren’t cutting up bait or comparing lures; they’re mending their nets. In this kind of fishing all the romance is gone. They sail out into the Sea of Galilee and cast their nets into the lake, and then they drag up whatever they can drag up and haul it on board. It’s hard, sweaty work. And it’s smelly work; you’re not just hoping to catch a couple fish, you’re surrounded by fish, all day long, in the sun.

It’s to this kind of work that Jesus is calling the apostles when he tells them that soon, they will be “fishers of men.”

Now, to be clear, I don’t think this is so much about the sweat and the smell of things. While anyone could tell you that church leadership, lay or ordained, can sometimes get a little messy, you’d hope that nothing too fishy is going on, especially as we approve our budgets and prepare our Annual Reports. No, I think what’s more interesting is the distinction between the line and the net. In our spiritual lives, are we like the fish I used to catch, engaged in a back and forth dance with God, intrigued by the shimmering lure or the nice fat chunk of hot-dog on the hook but cautious about getting too close? Or are we like the fish that John or Peter caught, trapped in a net with a few dozen others and dragged onto the boat, with no say in the matter at all?

Our gospel reading this morning is strange. It seems to combine two very different images. In the first section, there’s this motif of darkness and light, which Matthew draws from the same passage of Isaiah that we just heard. In the second half, we shift from light and darkness to fish and nets, and it’s such a change that some scholars have actually identified the middle of this passage as one of the great transition points in the gospel, suggesting a gap in time and a transition in the scene with the words, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim,” (Matthew 4:17) such that everything before those words—from Jesus’ birth to his move as an adult from Nazareth to Capernaum—forms the beginning of the story, and everything after it the middle, as Jesus’ ministry really begins.

But I think there’s more to it than that. These two, very different halves of the story are in fact united by the theme of sudden and radical change. Jesus travels from the inland town of Nazareth where he was raised in the Jewish heartland of Galilee, to Capernaum by the sea, a lakeside town on the border of Jewish society, with the Gentiles just on the other side of the lake. He comes to these two pairs of brothers, who’ve spent their lives preparing to take on the trade of their fathers and their fathers before them, to pass their days hauling nets in the sun, and he calls them to a very different life, “and immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” (Matt. 4:19) These young fishermen would become the bishops and martyrs and visionaries of the church, and their lives would never be the same: “Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless, in Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.” Jesus comes to these disciples-to-be and suddenly drags them out of their ordinary lives, and it is as though they are the fish whom they’re accustomed to catch, suddenly transferred from the murky depths of ordinary life into the brilliant presence of the God who is walking among them.

Now, there’s always been a certain tension between the abruptness of these conversion stories and the ordinary rhythms of life in a parish church. Not many of us have had such radical moments of transformation in our lives, and many of us never will. In fact, there’s a pretty profound irony: the more faithful a member of any given church community you are, the less your faith seems like a sudden and transformative change in your life. If you’ve been a pillar of the church for decades, as some of you have, you’re probably not exactly the leaving-your-nets-and-immediately-walking-away type. And even if you’ve only been in one place for a few years the abruptness of these transitions, from darkness into light, from fishing for fish to fishing for men, from ordinary life into radical discipleship, probably seems strange, even irresponsible. I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who can or should drop everything and go off somewhere else to follow Jesus, without leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind.

But I wonder whether that’s really just a matter of your perspective on time. Because these sudden changes aren’t really so sudden after all. When you are sitting in darkness, as Isaiah says, and day breaks, it isn’t really such a sudden thing; there’s a long, slow change before that sudden light. When you are a fish, and you are dragged out of the sea, it isn’t by teleportation; it’s by the slow-but-steady hauling of a rope. And with God, as Peter himself would later write, “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” (2 Pet. 3:8) and we are all being transformed, in God’s own time. We are all being brought out of darkness into light. We are all slowly being reeled in toward God.

The metaphor isn’t perfect, and that’s very good news. In fact, in some ways, it’s reversed. God has no plans to salt or cook you, that I know of. Quite the contrary: life is better up there on the boat. You do not have gills, you have lungs, and it turns out you’ve been holding your breath all this time. We are not like fish, we like scuba divers caught in a net, slowly but surely being drawn up out of the depths into a way of life that’s even better for us than the one we leave. You can spend your whole life treading water, convinced that nothing is happening, as God slowly reels you in. Or you can turn and start to swim toward the light.

So what is it, I wonder, that God is dragging you out of this year? Or what is it that God is dragging out of you? What are the murky depths you’re swimming in, from which you need to be removed? Or what are the dark corners of your own soul, that need the benefit of a little light?

Whatever they are, God with you. Jesus has left his hometown to come down by the sea. He has come to you and called you by name. He has cast his net into the waters of your life, and he is drawing you toward himself, however slow and steady that may be. And you may find, when you are hauled up on that boat, whenever it is, that finally, you can breathe.

For “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them, light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.