Sermon — April 18, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him,
came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?”

Jesus is surrounded by pathetic people.

His disciples are failures, almost to the man. Judas betrays him for thirty silver coins, handing him over to people who want him dead. Nine of the other eleven disciples simply flee at his arrest. Peter had said that he would lay down his life for Jesus. But now, when he’s merely asked if he’s one of Jesus’ disciples, he vociferously denies it, three times: “I am not!”

His disciples are a failure. His accusers are a disgrace. When Pontius Pilate asks them, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” they answer, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” This is a favorite fallacy of tyrants: that criminals or terrorists or enemies of the state don’t deserve due process, that by the horror of their crimes they’ve forfeited their rights. In a just society, the only way to prove that someone has committed a crime is for them to stand trial; to say that “if this man were not a criminal, we wouldn’t have arrested him” is perhaps the most despicable example of the logical fallacy that called “begging the question.” His accusers have the courage to convict him without a trial for a crime they refuse to name, but they’re too cowardly to punish him themselves; “We’re not allowed to put anyone to death.” They’ll break the law of their own people, but they don’t dare break the law of Roman rule, and so they come to try to push a Roman execution through.

Pontius Pilate takes his part with an abdication of his role that rings through history. You can tell he’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else, enjoying all of the benefits of power without having to handle the responsibilities. He dabbles in philosophy—“What is truth?” He feigns ignorance—“I’m not a Jew, am I?” How am I supposed to know what’s going on? Again and again, he tries to pass the buck—”Look, I find no case again him.” He suggests they ought to break his own laws. “Take him yourselves and crucify him,” he says, when they’ve already said what he knows to be true: only the Roman governor can put someone to death. And then, his final words of throwing in the towel, “What I have written, I have written.” Pontius Pilate, in this story, makes me sick.

The Beloved Disciple and the Marys, the mother of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea, these characters are noble and good. But they are bystanders here. They no real part in the story until it’s much too late to do anything but bear witness to the suffering of the one they love.

And then there’s us. All of us, who bear witness with them, here. This small nucleus of the church, that stands at the foot of the cross, unable to do anything to change what’s going on.

And it’s easy to point our fingers today, at Peter or Pilate, at the chief priests or Judas Iscariot, at the disciples who run or stand by impotently while a horrifying injustice is done.

But we’re no different from the rest. And even as Lent draws to an end, my mind drifts back to its beginning, to our Ash Wednesday prayers, to the Litany of Penitence in which we confess not big, earth-shaking sins, but the small ones that afflict us every day: “all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives… our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves… our negligence in prayer… and our failure to commend the faith that is in us… uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors… [and] prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” I don’t know about you, but I am an imperfect person, and these small ins from which we repent year after year are still my daily bread. And so I stand here, listening to this story, and I don’t find myself up there on the cross with Christ—I’m in the crowd of imperfection standing all around him. (That’s why I always claim the privilege of playing Pontius Pilate in the Passion gospel.)

But in a story of cowardice and helplessness, of betrayal and abandonment, of injustice and irresponsibility, Jesus still takes my breath away. Think again about those opening words: “Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’”

This is the Son of God. He could disappear without a trace. He could flee into the night, like his disciples do. This is the eternal Word of God made flesh, through whom all things were made. He simply says, “I AM” and the police go tumbling to the ground. I’m pretty sure that he could fight them off.

But that isn’t what he does. Knowing that they’re looking for him, he comes forward and asks, “Whom are you looking for?” And John the narrator adds that this was to fulfill the promise he had made, not to lose a “single one” of those whom God had given him.

This is the courage of Christ: to step forward, knowing full well what that means; to sacrifice himself to save people he already knows will not live up to his love; to give his life to protect the very people who will let him down, people who are imperfect at best, and downright disgraceful at worst.

He looks at the people around him, imperfect as they are. He looks at Judas, who has already betrayed him, and Peter, who is going to deny him; he looks at the disciples who will abandon him and the close friends who do nothing to help him; he looks at the soldiers who arrest him and at you and me, who still remember him—at all these people living human lives, sometimes good but not never perfect, not by any means—and he takes a step forward, to die to for us.

It’s easy to understand what that meant on that night. He was arrested, they went free. It’s harder, sometimes, to make sense of what it means for us. There are a dozen different ways to understand the meaning of the crucifixion, and the sense in which Jesus dies for us; you may have read four or five different options written down on Michael’s purple cards, this Lent.

But tonight, we don’t have to understand the effects of that act. Tonight, we can simply feel the love behind it. Tonight, we can simply stand at the foot of the cross, looking on the courage of Christ, who chose to die for each one of us, and we can think about what the choir sang during communion last night—one of my all-time favorite hymns:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
to lay aside his crown for my soul, for my soul,
to lay aside his crown for my soul!

Sermon — April 13, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Every year, when we reach this moment, I’m struck again by the emotional weight. It’s one thing to sit down and write a Palm Sunday sermon at my desk, knowing in theory that we will have just read the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. But it’s another thing entirely to hear that story read aloud, and then to open my mouth to speak. Palm Sunday has an extraordinary emotional range: it plummets all the way down into the depths of human suffering from the heights of a parade.

A parade. Or a procession. Or maybe a protest. What Jesus and the disciples did on Palm Sunday contains elements of all three. Each of these things is different from the others, and yet there’s something that’s the same: processions and protests and parades all do something to form us into a people who have a shared past and belong to a certain place, and for one reason or another, human beings love a good parade.

So this spring, for example, our neighborhood will host an extra-exuberant Bunker Hill Day parade, commemorating the 250^th anniversary of the battle. Like any patriotic march, Bunker Hill Day remembers the past, but it’s really about the present. It’s forms a shared identity, for the people who live in the neighborhood today. It maintains a connection for people who grew up here and come back for the day. It connects us all to the events of the past in a way that speaks to the present: this is the home of a people who fight against tyranny.

Religious processions work in a similar way. In the English countryside, on a “Rogation Day,” the whole community would gather to process around the borders of the parish, asking God’s blessings on the land, and tying the people to the land. In August you can attend processions three days in a row, in honor of Saints Lucia and Leonard and Anthony, in which their societies process around the streets of the North End, connecting the stories of the saints of the past to the identity of their people in the present and, maybe more important, laying claim to the neighborhood in which they or their ancestors lived. And just this morning, you joined in a procession around this very church, a reenactment, in a way, of that day on which Jesus entered Jerusalem as he prepared to face his death.

Jesus’ Palm Sunday ride has the celebratory feel of a parade. It has the religious elements of a procession. But really, it was more like a protest. After all, a parade is an official celebration. A procession gathers a whole community. But Palm Sunday was a divisive, political act.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that it’s not the crowds or the people as a whole who cry out and chant along the way, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” It’s the disciples in particular, Jesus’ own supporters. And they’re making a political claim. Blessed is the king, they say. But Jesus isn’t on the throne. Only Rome could appoint a king within the bounds of its empire. And for a crowd of Galileans to declare Jesus a king was a political act, a rebellion against the rule of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. Not everyone is on board. There are counter-protestors! The Pharisees tell Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop!” (Luke 19:39) They know how the Romans will react.

But Jesus doesn’t stop them. Nothing can stop them. They’re saying what they say because they believe it to the core. And if they were silent, the very stones would shout out. (19:40)

The disciples’ rally may seem pointless. Protests often do, especially in a one-party state like ours, where liberals and conservatives alike often sense there’s no use trying to persuade politicians. And that’s in our society, where “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” is constitutionally guaranteed. How much more pointless would protest seem in an empire like Rome, where the only guarantee is that the powers that be will come down hard on anyone who dares oppose the empire?

But protest isn’t pointless. It wasn’t pointless then, and it isn’t pointless now. Because an act of protest, like a parade, or a procession, isn’t only about what it does out there. It’s also about what it does in here. It’s not only about changing the world, it’s about changing the people who participate.

In the short term, you might say the disciples’ protest doesn’t do much. It’s counter-productive, really. The disciples’ claim that Jesus is King leads directly to his death. It’s the very charge that the Romans put over his cross. And the group of people brought together by this movement seems to fall apart. Their peaceful protest on the road leads to violence in the Garden. The people who gather with Jesus around the Table abandon and betray him by the next day. He faces his last moments alone, except for the bandits hanging on either side and the faithful women who have followed him to the end. And it seems that all that energy and momentum, all those chants and songs and cloaks laid on the road, have gone nowhere. Jesus dies on the cross, and the movement ends, and on the Sabbath they rest.

But the story doesn’t actually end there. I’m not going to jump ahead to next Sunday’s events; I don’t want to spoil them for you. But even when Jesus is dead, the movement isn’t gone. On the day after the Sabbath, the women return to the tomb together. They hear remarkable news and they go and find the apostles, who are together. The community that they built out on the road hasn’t scattered to the four winds. They came all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem together, and they are together still, even though Jesus is gone. The group of individuals who walked, and sang, and chanted all that way have become a people. A people who will go on, even after their darkest days, to do incredible things.

Those individuals who laid their cloaks down on the road have become a people, and this is the place in which the memories of the past will become a new reality in the present. And we, who processed around this church, have become a people, and this is our place. So may the same Spirit who drew them together on the road and sent them out into the world draw us together today, and send us out as well, to love God with all our hearts and souls and strengths and minds; and to love our neighbors as ourselves; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon — April 6, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples… said,
‘Why was this perfume not sold…and the money given to the poor?’” (John 12:5)

I have to say, I’m pretty sympathetic to this question. Leave aside, for a minute, the parenthetical remark about Judas, and imagine yourself in the room.

Jesus and his disciples have come to dinner with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. They’re reclining around the dinner table, as ancient people did for formal meals. It was a normal thing to do to offer water for your guests to wash their feet before the meal, or to have a servant wash them, or even to offer to wash them yourself. In a dusty place where people wear sandals, this is a basic way of making people comfortable as a host, the local equivalent of asking “Can I take your coat?”

In a place and time without commercial soap production, oil was often used to wash or bathe. washing the feet with oil might be a step above washing with plain water, but it was probably a normal thing. Using perfumed oil would be even more luxurious, but not bizarre.

Mary does do something a little strange. Rather than scraping off the oil with a metal scraper like you might see in a museum, or with a cloth or a towel, she wipes the oil from Jesus’ feet with her hair. Which is odd. But in another way, it’s perfectly in character, because this is Mary we’re talking about, and this Mary—not the mother of Jesus, but the sister of Martha and Lazarus—this Mary is known for her single-minded, almost over-the-top devotion to Jesus, which sometimes comes at the expense of the practicalities of life. You might recall the other story of Mary and Martha, in which Mary leaves Martha alone to do all the work of hosting Jesus and his other disciples, while Mary sits attentively at his feet. (Luke 10:38–42)

And so perhaps it comes as no surprise that Mary acts this way. She doesn’t offer a bowl of water to Jesus to wash his feet. She doesn’t have a servant carry out the task. No, Mary’s going to wash his feet herself, and to wipe them off with her own hair; this kind of whole-hearted attention has Mary written all over it.

And she does it lavishly. And that’s where the grumbling begins. Mary doesn’t dry Jesus’ feet with her hair because she can’t afford a cloth. She doesn’t offer him a bowl of plain water with apologies for her frugality. No! She anoints his feet with perfume, she washes his feet with a whole pound of oil infused with nard, an exotic aromatic plant. Try to picture a pound of perfumed oil. 16 ounces or so, about a pint. That’s a very high perfume-to-foot ratio. By Judas’s reckoning, this is 300 denarii worth of foot cream—ten months’ wages for a laborer like one of the disciples—and there it is, poured out on Jesus’ feet, and dripping onto the floor.

People often criticize churches for spending money less than immediate needs. Rather than feed the hungry, we repair bells, and refurbish organs, and restore stained glass. There’s an answer for this: These things last for decades, and they enrich our community with beauty. There are neighbors who never walk through these doors who’ve told me that they love to hear our bell ring again. There’s a caretaker who visits a parishioner who likes to stop and look at the stained glass, even from the outside. Anyone can come and hear a brilliant organist play a beautiful instrument any time, free of charge.

But this perfume? It’s poured out on Jesus’ feet, and the fragrance fills the house for a night, and then it’s gone. 300 denarii down the drain, never to be smelled again; that’s ten months’ wages of operating money, not a capital expense. (If you’re laughing and you haven’t served on the Vestry yet, I’ve got a great opportunity for you.)

So I’m sympathetic to what Judas has to say: ‘Why was this perfume not sold…and the money given to the poor?’” Some of you might be sympathetic as well. This isn’t good stewardship of the gifts that Mary has been given. Having heard everything that Jesus has to say, wouldn’t you think that he would want that money to help someone else, rather than be poured out on his feet? But no, Jesus says, “Leave her alone… You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:7–8) And thereby he provides an easy quote, which the Church has used for two thousand years to justify spending money on itself, in sometimes frivolous ways. It leaves me with a little bit of an ick.

I’m pretty sure that John the Evangelist felt that ick as well. Because while stories like this appear in all the Gospels, it’s only in John that we get the details about Judas’s motives. In Matthew and in Mark, the disciples in general criticize the waste. And Jesus responds in the same way: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” But I get the sense that John isn’t totally convinced. And so he notes that it was Judas who asked this question, and, oh, by the way, it wasn’t in good faith—Judas is just going to steal the cash. Jesus gives a theological response, and it reads as if John thinks it’s a little weak, so he bolsters it with an ad hominem attack.

But I don’t think Jesus is giving us an excuse. It just doesn’t make sense that the Jesus who begins his ministry in the Gospel of Luke by saying that “the Spirit of the Lord has anointed [him] to bring good news to the poor” would end it by being anointed by Mary in order to deliver the dismissive bad news that “you’ll always have the poor with you,” so you don’t need to lend a helping hand. But if that’s not what it means—then what’s going on instead?

Something like a thousand years before, the rise of the great King David had begun with his anointing by the prophet Samuel. Samuel goes to try to figure out which of the seven sons of Jesse God has chosen to be king, and one by one the Spirit rules them out, until the youngest is called in from where he’s been keeping the sheep. Samuel takes a horn of oil, and pours it on his head. He anoints him. In Hebrew, he yimshah him; and this is where we get the word “Messiah,” “anointed one.” In Greek, he echrisen him, and this is where we get “Christ,” “anointed one.” David is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed King. And ] people in Jesus’ day were hoping for a new Messiah, a new Christ, a new Anointed King.

And now, six days before the Passover, before the great national feast, which celebrates the people’s liberation from an oppressive Pharaoh’s rule, Mary anoints Jesus. And the very next day, what we call Palm Sunday, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem takes place. It’s as if Mary is Samuel, and this anointing is the beginning of Jesus’ rise to power.

Except… it’s an anointing turned upside down, the anointing of a king who will turn the whole idea of kingship upside down. Samuel sought out David, but Jesus comes to Mary instead. Samuel needed the Spirit’s guidance to recognize the future king, but Mary is full of single-minded devotion. Samuel anoints David’s head, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet. David’s anointing begins his ascent to the throne, Jesus’ anointing begins his ascent to the Cross. David’s is a royal ritual; Jesus’ is a preparation for burial.

“I am about to do a new thing,” God says. (Isaiah 43:18–19) And Jesus is a new thing indeed. He’s going to be a new kind of king, he’s going to make the people around him a new kind of people.

We often think, in our democracy, that people hold certain ethical beliefs, and these lead them to political views, that then lead them to support certain leaders. I’d suggest to you that it really works the other way around: people choose to follow a charismatic leader, a person they come to trust, whose own priorities can reshape their views about policy or morality. And I often worry that the church sounds too much like Judas or the other disciples who scold, who tell people, with good intentions, what they ought to do in the name of Christianity; and too little like Mary, who lets her whole life be transformed and restructured by the choice to follow Christ.

Mary doesn’t sell the perfume to feed the hungry or clothe the naked. It’s true. She wastes it all to express her devotion to a king who bends the knee to wash his people’s feet; who tells her that she’ll meet him when she feeds people who are hungry, and visits people in prison; whose followers, in the Book of Acts, would sell not only a jar of perfume but everything they had and distribute the money to those who were in need. (Acts 2:44) It’s an anointing turned upside down for a man who turns kingship upside down, and whose people the Romans would one day accuse of turning the world upside down. (Acts 17:6) May God give us the strength so to pour out the perfume of our hearts in service to God’s love, that we may one day stand accused of turning the world upside down. Amen.

Sermon — March 30, 2025

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

It may come as no surprise that I, your seminarian, was a bit of a “church kid” growing up. I was in church pretty much every Sunday up until the age of fifteen, when I got confirmed. After I got confirmed, my attendance was sporadic but still pretty steady. Even so, I was still going to youth events around the diocese and to Christian summer camp. My point being, I have been around the block a few times. 

My whole childhood and adolescence I had gone about with the assumption that Lent was certainly somewhere in the Bible. Maybe we just read it in church during the summers when I was away at camp. Or that we read it on a Sunday that I just happened to miss every three years. Maybe it was in part of the Bible that wasn’t in any Bible study type curriculum. It was never something pressing enough for me to go and check in about it with anyone. I was very content knowing that it was in there somewhere. 

Eventually, I got to seminary and began my classes in the Bible, with this pondering about Lent somewhere in the back of my mind. My first semester, I get through my class on the gospels…and, no Lent. No big deal, it is probably in the other part of the New Testament, which we were taking in the second semester. I get through the second half of the New Testament and…weirdly enough….no Lent. A bit strange, but maybe it is in the Old Testament. Got through that class too, and you may have already guessed….still no Lent. You can fact check me on this one, Lent does not *strictly speaking, appear anywhere in the Bible. 

So if not the Bible, where does this whole season of great importance come from? It seems that the very earliest Christians observed a kind of fast in the days immediately preceding Easter Sunday, but it was only a few days long. Eventually it would get a bit longer, and then at some point it was lengthened to mirror the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness. 

Lent would eventually take on a few different meanings. One important ancient Lenten tradition was that those who had committed notorious sins would be restored to the Christian assembly around Easter; Lent was a period of time for them to make amends and repent of what they had done. In this way, Lent became a time when Christians would try their hardest to work out their differences and overcome any strife within their community. 

However, even those who were not guilty of notorious sins would still take time during Lent to take a good look at the way they were living their lives. Maybe they did not do something notoriously bad, but maybe there are ways in which they would like to live differently. These people would take on practices that many people retain today: fasting, reading scripture, and self-examination. Lent became, in big and small ways, about repairing your relationship with God and your fellow Christians. 

And so, our gospel lesson today is quite timely. We are smack in the throes of Lent, and there is a wonderful sermon in this story about the younger son. This younger son repents of the bad ways he decided to live his life–a very appropriate Lenten story. In many ways, we are the younger son, and Lent is a time where we recognize our affinity to the younger son. It is a time where we intentionally take a look at our lives; a time of fasting, repentance, and sometimes even lamenting. Our own practices of Lent mirror the son’s words and actions when he turns from the error of his ways and goes back to his home. 

Just as we have this similarity to the prodigal son, we are the recipients of the same kind of love of God that he receives from his father. In the parable, the father seems to be a stand-in for God, and the father welcomes back his son with a celebration that is almost unthinkable in its scope. He brings out a fine robe–which is soon-to-be soiled, since his son has just been working in a pig sty; he brings out a ring to put on his son’s finger, and sandals for his feet–totally unnecessary at the moment; and he summons up a fatted calf to be killed–one of the most prized foods available to him. He easily could have given his son a normal robe and regular food and it would have been a kind gesture. 

Moreover, the father pays no attention at all to anything his son wants to say about the bad things he has done. If you noticed, the son begins his apology speech to his father, and is interrupted by his father’s requests for the fine robe, and the fatted calf. The father does not care, seemingly at all, what the son wants to say in apology for squandering his inheritance and ending up in such a sorry state. 

And this is the same love with which God treats our mistakes. In this story, we recognize that there is nothing we can do that will ruin God’s love for us. We recognize that God is always ready to run out to meet us on the road, and excited to kill the fatted calf for us. It is a reminder, during this season of repentance, that God loves us in a way that is practically unimaginable. 

And, there is another brother in this story. The very angry, very responsible older brother. To really capture the anger of the older brother, I think it is important to revisit what is actually happening. The younger brother: 

• gets some kind of advance on his inheritance
• leaves his older brother and father to manage the family business
• loses his share of the inheritance
• comes back, and is welcomed back by his father

And the cherry on top. The fatted calf–as with everything else the father gives to the younger son–rightfully belongs to the inheritance of the older brother. The older brother’s anger has many justifications. He is the responsible one, who works to maintain what he is given. In the story, if he did what his younger brother did, then both of them would be starving and out of luck. The younger son has something to come back to only because his older brother did the responsible thing.

I suspect that, many of us here, at some point, have been in the position of the older brother. Whether that is dutifully doing your job while your coworkers seem to slack off; taking the time to volunteer to help the community when other people do not; keeping the house clean while whoever it is that you live with continues to be a slob; or maybe something closer to the actual story of the parable. Examples abound of moments when we play the role of the responsible older brother. 

And so, our gospel lesson today is quite timely. We are smack in the throes of Lent, and there is a wonderful sermon in this story about the older brother. In this kind of sermon, we are invited during this time of Lent to a time of forgiveness. It is an incredibly difficult kind of forgiveness. So hard in fact that we do not actually get to see the older brother achieve it in the story. It is not an easy invitation to respond to, but it is a timeless kind of Lenten invitation none the less. 

In this sermon about the older brother, I think it is important to point out two things. The first, the father actively seeks out his older son when he realizes he is not at the party. The father goes to his older son, who is angry, and is standing in the field outside the party. Just as the father meets his wayward younger son on the road, he goes out to find his angry older son standing in the field. It is a different kind of example of God’s love for us. It is a reminder, during this season of difficult forgiveness, that God will constantly seek us out to be with us, even when we are angry and refusing to go into the party. 

The second thing I want to point out is what the father actually says after his older son is finished yelling at him. The father would be within his rights to reprimand his son, to tell him he is being selfish, to get angry back and yell back at his older son. He does none of these things. He does not return his son’s anger with anger, or even express disappointment about how his son is acting. Rather, he responds with a calmness and love for his older son. In a way, he even gives his older son what he wants. The chief complaint of the older son is, essentially, “you didn’t even give me a young goat to celebrate with my friends”. His father seems to tell him in response “you never even needed to ask for a young goat, it was yours this whole time”. There is a deep love for his older son even when his older son is yelling at him and overwhelmed by anger. 

And so our invitation for Lent remains much the same as it did for the earliest of Christians. We should repent, take stock of the ways we might consider living differently, and turn back to our Father–much like the younger son in our lesson today. We should also try and forgive, even though it is incredibly hard, just like the earliest Christians did during Lent, and just like the older brother is invited  to do in our lesson today. All of this, with the knowledge that in our repentance, God is already running to meet us. With the knowledge that in our trying to forgive, God is already there with us. In the name of the one who loves us first. Amen.