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?

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.