Sermon — January 5, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born…
Magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking,
“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?
(Matthew 2:1–2)

The carol “We three kings of Orient are” has always been one of my favorites. It is, at once, both familiar and strange. The tune was composed by an Episcopal priest for a Christmas pageant in New York, but it nevertheless somehow evokes the mysterious East, in the classic 19^th-century Orientalist way. It was my favorite carol when I was a kid, which I guess is a prophecy of my later minor in Middle Eastern Studies. In our pageant, three of the ringers from the choir would dress up as the kings, and each one would sing one of the verses as they processed up the aisle. They were robed in rich and royal garments; but it was really just someone’s dad.

And that’s appropriate, because the Magi themselves are familiar and strange. We’re so used to them that we don’t often ask who they are. Why do they come to Bethlehem, soon after Jesus’ birth? Are they “kings,” or “wise men?” Are there three? What on earth is myrrh?

Of course, if you really want to know what the deal is with the mysterious travelers in our Gospel reading today, then I have to ask you the same thing I asked the mother of one of our Christmas pageant participants when she came to me with his question about these Three Kings: “How much does exactly he know about Zoroastrianism?” (Apparently they don’t teach that in pre-K any more.)

Most of what we say about the Magi comes from traditions we’ve built on top of what Matthew gives us in the text. They may well have been kings, but Matthew doesn’t tell us that. They certainly seem to have been wise, although that’s not really a translation, per se. Matthew simply writes that “Magi from the East came to Jerusalem.” And when I call them Magi, I’m not just being pretentious and saying some word in ancient Greek, although I count three classicists in the congregation, at least. Magi is used in Matthew’s ancient Greek, but it isn’t a Greek word. It’s a Persian word, borrowed into Greek, and it refers to a kind of priestly caste in the ancient Persian religion whose primary figure was the prophet Zoroaster, hence the preliminary question if you really want to understand the conclusion of the Christmas pageant—How much do you know about Zoroastrianism?

And if you answered, “not very much, Gregory,” then you’re on the right track! This was true in the ancient world as well. For the Greeks, Jews, and Romans, the Persians were an exotic people to the east. They were known for the splendor of their royal courts and the wisdom of their astronomers. And there were hints of something more, rumors that they had access to powers beyond what we knew—our words for magic and for mages, after all, simply come from these stories of what the “Magi” could do.

These Magi bring three royal gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh, and so we sometimes call them kings, and give them names, like Balthasar, Caspar, and Melchior. They have the astronomical insight to read the stars like an ancient GPS, and so we call them wise. But in fact, we don’t know how many there were, or where they came from, or their names; we just know they were Magi from the east.

But as mysterious as the Magi are, there’s one thing we know for sure: They’re a symbol of God’s choice to love you and me; to extend the bounds of the family of God to include not just one chosen people, but the whole world. King Herod is worried about a rival king of the Jews, someone who’s going to threaten his control over his own people in his own place. But the Magi come from afar. They’re Gentiles. They’re the mysterious, foreign Someone Else evoked by the Victorian hymn. But the Magi are us, Gentiles drawn toward the God of the Jewish people; strangers and foreigners far away from home, but invited to share in the riches of God’s grace.

This morning, we have a double baptism, as we welcome two children into the family of God. Some of our congregation today came from just around the corner. Some of us have traveled from far to the East. But all of us come here, like the Magi, on our own paths. Some of us come with a deep knowledge of one religious tradition or another, which may or may not overlap with Christianity, any more than Judaism and Zoroastrianism overlapped, two thousand years ago. Some of us come because of our own experience; because we’ve seen something shining in our lives, and followed where it leads. Some of us are just here for a child, but all of us have arrived, along these long and varied roads, to bear witness to something, because we have been drawn here by love.

The Magi offer their symbolic gifts: a chest of gold fit for a king, the incense they would offer to a god, the myrrh with which a body was embalmed. And we come bearing our gifts, too, the humbler gifts we share with one another every day, in our communities or our families or our friendships. The gifts of music, and of art; of baking, and of humor; the quieter gifts of a listening ear, or a compassionate heart, all those things that blend into the holiest gift of love.

The Magi come bearing their gifts, and pay homage, and then they go home. They wouldn’t hear what the grown-up Jesus would teach. They wouldn’t see the wonders he would do. But they returned home transformed, nevertheless. They returned, Matthew tells us in a wonderful turn of phrase, “by another road.” (Matt. 2:12) Their journey isn’t “out-and-back,” from point A to point B and back to point A, on the same route. The way home follows a different road, one they’ve never walked on before.

And so will yours.

Maybe you’re just here for one baptism or the other. Maybe like the Magi you’ll return home, and never see this place again. But the child you see today will change your life, in a small way, or a big one, and already has, and the gifts you offer him or her will become even greater gifts for you.

Or perhaps you’re here because it’s a Sunday morning and this is what you do. But the path you take when you walk out these doors still won’t be the same as the one you walked home so many times before, because you aren’t the same as you were a week or a month ago, and the world is not the same, and even though the changes seem gradual, each one of us is being led somewhere new.

There’s a famous poem by T. S. Eliot about “The Journey of the Magi.” But it’s not that poem that comes to mind today, as I think about their travels from home far to the East along a road that leads back home, but by a different way; as I think about the long journeys that we all take through life, in communities and in companionship with the people we love; as I think how familiar and how strange the Magi can be. It’s a few lines from another of Eliot’s great poems, “Little Gidding.”

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling           (he writes)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Sermon — December 29, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

So even though I’m a dad, I try not to repeat myself too often, although my cornier jokes do sometimes emerge again and again. But if you’ve known me for a couple of years, there are two things about my life that you may have heard me say more than once (or maybe not!) One is that I’ve lived my entire life within about a seven-mile radius of this point, except for the three years when I moved down south for seminary in New Haven, Connecticut. (Sorry… That’s one of the corny jokes.) The other thing that you may have heard me say many times is that I loathe—I despise—I simply cannot stand—winter in New England.

You might see this as a bit of a paradox: If you hate the winter so much, you might reasonably ask, why have you never moved? And, well… honestly, I don’t know. I think I just love the spring and the summer and the fall so much that I forget about winter, but then, inevitably, we arrive on some morning where the weather forecast tells me it feels like -3 outside, and it does, and I feel—inexplicably—both surprised and betrayed. And also very cold.

But these days, I’m lucky. I only have to deal with the shoulder-hunching, skin-drying, cough-inducing of the cold winter air and the dry winter heat; but I have an office with windows, and short walk to work. It’s the darkness that’s the worst part of winter, in a way, and for me, the darkness was never quite so bad as the year I spent commuting an hour on the subway to work in a windowless room. If you live in Boston and you spend the hours from 8am to 6pm with no windows, there will be a few months where you really just don’t see the sun.

And I actually used to count down: I’d think, on November 21^st, okay, it will only be this dark until January 21^st—we still have a month to go until the solstice, so it will be two months until we’re back to this depressing length of day. And I took great comfort in that. Because as the winter solstice approached and the days grew shorter and shorter, that time grew shorter, too, until I’d reach a day when I could say; This is the darkest day of the year. This is as bad as it gets. And every day to follow will be brighter.

Of course, this is only a trick. December 29 is still quite dark. The day is really short. There is still less light than there was back on December 1. But it feels much better to me, because by December 29, we’ve passed through so much darkness, and we’re headed in the right direction again.

“In the beginning was the Word,” St. John writes in the beautiful and famous prologue to his Gospel, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:1-5)

In the beginning was the Word, the capital-W Word, in Greek the Logos, the transcendent principle and underlying logic of the universe, through which all things were made and according to which all things operate. The Logos, the Word, is that indefinable, almost indescribable thing that artists and musicians call Beauty, that mathematicians and computer scientists call Elegance, that philosophers might identify as Truth—although any philosopher worth her salt would probably dispute everything I’ve just said. It’s what ordinary folks like us might be Joy or Love or Awe—that beautiful Thing that exists outside all things yet fills the best of things and suffuses them with goodness. The remarkable thing about the Prologue to the Gospel of John is not John’s claim that such a thing exists; that there is some divine order or structure to the universe. The remarkable thing about the Gospel is what John tells us in verse fourteen: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) Not that the Word became human, not that it walked the face of the earth, not that it was embodied, but that it became flesh, that messiest and most limited way of describing ourselves. That the Word of God took on frail flesh and lived a frail human life, coming in the world at a time of great darkness, and bringing new light. And “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

You know how this story ends. You know what’s on our calendar for the spring. You know the story from Christmas to Good Friday, and from Good Friday to Easter. If Jesus is the light of the world, and if “darkness” is John’s way of talking about the evil and the suffering of the world, then it makes sense to us as Christians to say that “the darkness did not overcome it,” because while Jesus died, he rose again, and he lives, still—and so we can understand why you might say “the light shines in the darkness,” in the present tense, “and the darkness did not overcome it,” in the past.

But the darkness isn’t only in the past. The light shines, even now, and that’s good news—but the light shines in the darkness, which is still here.

The world is still full of suffering and pain, injustice and oppression. The light has continued to grow. We’ve spread that single candle’s flame. Whatever its flaws may be, 21^st-century America is a much better place than 1^st-century Rome; in a thousand ways, from food security to medical treatments to the almost-global abolition of slavery, the world is less dark than it was two thousand years ago. And yet it’s still a far cry from an afternoon in June.

We live on December 29­—not just today, but always. We live in a world in which the days are still dark, but the light has begun to grow. God has promised brighter days ahead. God “will not rest,” as Isaiah says, “until [our] vindication shines out like the dawn, and [our] salvation like a burning torch.” (Isaiah 62:1) The light will continue grow, and the days will become less dark.

You can’t always see this trajectory day by day. To stretch the analogy just up to the breaking point, the light we see isn’t only astronomical, it’s meteorological, as well. To put it in simpler terms, a rainy day in spring can feel darker than a sunny day in late December. But the clouds come and go, and the light continues to grow. As Dr. King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Over the course of a human life, or over the course of human history, we make many wrong turns. We go down paths that turn out to be dead ends. Sometimes we can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel.

But even now, while it’s still dark, we are not alone. “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,” Paul writes, freeing us from the power of evil, and making us children of God. (Gal. 4:6) “We have his glory,” and we have seen his light. Human history since the birth of Christ looks a lot to me like the darkness in church on Christmas Eve, as what begins with a single light shining the darkness spreads and spreads. We can keep one another’s candles lit. We can shelter one another against the draft. In a thousand ways, big and small, we can share that light with the people we love, with the people around us, and with all the people of the world. And we can know that the Holy Spirit is with us, leading us toward the truth.

“For the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Sermon — December 1, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“How can we thank God enough for you?” (1 Thess. 3:9)

Advent is a season of contrasts. The sense of quiet anticipation in the Advent liturgy of the church contrasts with the frenzy and exhaustion of the Christmas Season on our calendars and advertisements. The beauty and joy that we associate with the coming of the Christ child at Christmas contrasts with the chaos and confusion of “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” on some frightful future day. The words of Paul this morning, offering his heartfelt gratitude and prayers for the Christian disciples in Thessalonica contrasts with Jesus’ words of warning and vigilance delivered to the disciples when they are in Jerusalem.

We can talk about this contrast in a number of different ways. So for example, you might describe Advent as a season in which we prepare both for the first coming of Christ, in the birth of that sweet little child on Christmas Day, and for the second coming of Christ, on some future day, when we will finally stand before the Son of Man. Or, you might think of Advent as a time when our readings and our prayers tend to emphasize the fact that Christian life is always both “now” and “not yet”; when the promises God gives us in Christ have already begun to be realized and have not yet been fulfilled. God has already now established a kingdom of peace and love on the earth, but it has not yet fully taken hold. God has already now invited each one of us to begin a new life of faith and hope and love, but we are not yet perfect practitioners of faith, or hope, or love.

It can sometimes feel strange to live suspended between these two extremes. It can be alarming to come back to church after a Thanksgiving break, or maybe longer, ready to get into the Christmas spirit, ready to remind yourself of “the reason for the season,” and to be told instead that “there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves!” (Luke 21:25) It can be discouraging, year after year, to hear prophecies of “justice and righteousness in the land,” to hear that “the days are surely coming” when “Jerusalem will live in safety,” and then to look around at our world, wondering where that justice and righteousness may be, wondering when Jerusalem, or Beirut, or Khartoum, or Kyiv will live in safety. It’s hard to be told, again and again, that we have been given the gift of eternal life, and then to say goodbye to people we have loved and be left with only the hope that we will see them again some day.

Advent is a season of contrasts, but here’s the thing: Our ordinary lives right run down the middle. Advent is the First Coming and the Second, the Now and the Not Yet, the Promise and the Fulfillment, and “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

In just a few minutes, I’ll baptize Hugo Watson. And baptism fits, in a strange way, with this “now and not yet” truth of Advent.

In the Episcopal Church we practice both adult and infant baptism. In other words, baptism is available, of course, to adults or older children who haven’t been baptized before and are beginning a life of faith. But it’s also available to infants, and to young children, who may not even be able to speak for themselves, let alone articulate their own beliefs. And that’s actually the norm, across the church, right now and for, oh… 16 centuries or so.

Of course, I could explain this to you historically. If you’d like the detailed historical account, come ask me at coffee hour. But I think that there’s a deeper spiritual truth at play. We don’t require people to come to a full understanding of faith before they can be baptized because we know that in this life, our faith, like all God’s work, is always both “now and not yet.” We are, already now, journeying along the long road toward God. And we have not yet any of us, however old or young, arrived in the place where we will see God face to face.

But we do not journey alone. In baptism, each one of us is brought into the community of the Church. And I hope you can hear the capital “C” in that. We are not only baptized into the community of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Charlestown, but into the one, holy, catholic—which just means “universal”—and apostolic Church with a capital C, the one Body of Christ of which all Christians are members. But we are also members of this particular church, because while the united life of the Church universal is not yet been revealed, we have the life of this church now.

In our baptismal prayers, we turn away from all the spiritual forces of evil in this world. We turn toward Christ. And then soon enough, we turn to Coffee Hour. And that’s no less a holy thing. Because while God’s work in us has already begun, it is not yet complete, and here we are—stuck in the middle with each other.

            So like I said at the beginning—well, like Paul said, at the beginning— “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” (1 Thess. 3:9) He writes these words to a group of Christians in Thessalonica, a church that he himself had founded during his travels spreading the good news. He’d been run out of town when he was there—as was often the case for Paul—but the people he’d gotten to know there are still in his prayers.

And I find myself feeling the same way, on this post-Thanksgiving Sunday, this baptism Sunday, this first Advent Sunday, and I find myself asking, “How can I thank God enough for you in return for all the joy I feel before our God because of you?” Not because of who you will one day be, in some heavenly reality where all our imperfections fade away. But because of you, who you are now, each one of you. Some of you I know very well. Some of you don’t really want to be known. Some of you have only stepped foot in this place for the first time. But I thank God for each one of you, for walking together for at least a little part of this journey.

Because every one of us is still a work in project. Every one of us is still waiting for God to fulfill the promises God has made. Every one of us is still praying for the strength to face the things we face right now, let alone in days to come. But we have God to accompany us along the way. And we have one another, too; to share those burdens and to celebrate those joys, to live life together as the beloved community of God.

So “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” Amen. (1 Thess. 3:12-13)