Sermon — February 12, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a traffic phenomenon I’ve discovered in my years driving around the Northeast. I call it “the New-England Green.” Now, a driver’s ed instructor will tell you that there are three states a traffic light can be in. Red means “Stop.” Yellow means, “Stop if safe.” Green means—not “Go,” but “Proceed with caution,” right? In New England, these work a little differently from the driver’s-ed textbook. Red means “Stop if safe and you’re not running late.” Yellow means, “Hit the gas to make it through.” Green means “Go, go, go!” (and/or “Start honking at the guy in front of you to go.”)

But in New England, there’s actually a fourth state the traffic light can be in, and it’s what I call “New England Green”: the three or four seconds when your light is red, but the other light has not yet turned to green. Now, your car is supposed to be stopped. But this time can be used for all sorts of things: a cautious right turn at 15 mph if there are no pedestrians; completing a left turn that you’d rolled out into the middle of the intersection to make; or just continuing on straight through the light because the guy in front of you was driving too slow down Main Street, and you’ve earned it.

Now: traffic engineers are the second-most-second-guessed profession in the world, after meteorologists. Who among us has not sat in traffic at an off-ramp and thought, “What kind of clown designed this intersection? But traffic engineers are actually pretty smart. And while you may sometimes doubt their skill in designing roadways, you have to admire their grasp of psychology. Because they know that people are going to take advantage of that “New England Green”—people are going to run those red lights, over and over and over again, every day—and so they build in a few seconds’ grace, between the moment that your light turns red, and the moment their light turns green, and in so doing they save what must be thousands of lives a year.

And I say all this because, believe it or not, this is one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.

“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus says, “‘You shall not murder’… But I say to you that if you are angry…you will be liable to judgment.” (Matthew 5:21-22) “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that if you even look at someone with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.” (5:27-28) “You have heard it said, ‘Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows’… But I say to you, ‘Do not swear at all.’ Let your word be, ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no.’ Anything more than this comes from the evil one.” (5:33-37)

Again and again, Jesus takes well-known and common-sense laws and makes them an order of magnitude stricter. He takes a law against murder and makes it a law against anger. He takes a law against adultery and makes it a law against wandering eyes. He takes a law against breaking the oaths you’ve sworn, and making it a law against swearing oaths in the first place. And he does it all in extravagant, even gruesome language: the hell of fire and the evil one, eyes ripped out and hands chopped off. He really wants to make his point: Jesus’ law is a very strict law.

This was a traditional technique. The ancient sages called “building a fence around the Torah.” The basic principle is the psychological insight discovered by New England traffic engineers: Whatever boundary you set, people will wander up to the edge of it, and often cross it. So if there’s something that’s very important at the center of a law—a murder, for example, or a collision—you need to build in some extra space. You don’t just make the law: you build a fence around it, so that even if someone crosses the boundary you’ve set, their behavior isn’t catastrophic.

The most famous example of this principle in action in Judaism is probably the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy. Three times, the Torah repeats the cryptic commandment, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” (Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Deut. 14:21) And I can understand why. Cooking a young animal by boiling it in its own mother’s milk seems gross. But God seems unusually disturbed, and the rabbis take note. It’s unusual for the law to contain the same commandment three times. It must be an especially important one, the ancient rabbis thought. So they built a fence around it.

You can’t really know the source of any given milk; so it’s probably best not to boil a kid in any milk. And it’s hard to judge what counts as a “kid,” as opposed to a young goat or a calf, so just don’t cook meat in milk. And if it’s so important to God that meat not be cooked in milk, then surely we surely it’s splitting hairs to say that a beef in cream sauce or a cheeseburger is all right because the milk is just on it, rather than the meat being cooked in it. In fact in a kosher household, you keep separate sets of plates and cooking utensils for meat and dairy; you don’t eat them at the same meal. And this sets the fence at the right distance from the law: you might mix up your plates, you might have some milk chocolate too close in time to a hamburger, but there’s no way you could possibly end up boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

And this is very similar to what Jesus is doing. It’s incredibly important that you not murder someone. So it’s better that you not even be violent toward them. And if you shouldn’t be violent toward them, you ought not even to be angry at them.

It’s basic traffic engineering: Jesus knows you’ll try to follow the law, that you’ll try to do what’s right. And he knows you’ll fail. So he builds in that grace period, that extra space. If you get angry with someone, okay, you’ve violated the Sermon on the Mount—but you’re nowhere close to murder. Even if your eye occasionally strays toward an attractive person who is not your spouse, you’re still far from infidelity. The further out Jesus pushes the boundaries of the law, the more likely it is you’ll break them—but the less of a life-and-death matter it is when you do.

I said this was one of the two best ways to understand what Jesus is doing here. Because the strictness of Jesus’ new law doesn’t just build a fence around the old one. It does something else, too. To the extent that we can imagine a boundary, a thin line separating the righteous from the unrighteous, us good people from those bad people, sinners from saints, Jesus has moved the boundary so that we’re all on the same side of it. And this was a theme of Jesus’ ministry. He became infamous among the respectable and righteous people of his society for hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners.” The Pharisees criticized him for it all the time. And the point is not that actually, tax collectors were good and the Pharisees are bad. It’s that there is no dividing line. There is no division into tax collectors and Pharisees, into sinners and saints, into sheriffs and outlaws; in the eyes of the Sermon on the Mount, we are all outlaws. We have all been angry. We have all made promises we can’t keep. We have all occasionally run that red light. We have all needed to forgive, and we have all needed to be forgiven. And you can tell that in a sense, what bothers Jesus more than anything else in the world is the self-righteous self-deception of people trying to convince themselves and the world that they are perfect, when instead we should be compassionate with one another, because we have all been imperfect.

In just a few more verses, the disciples will ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. And he’ll respond with a prayer that contains the famous words: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Jesus doesn’t divide the world into sinners and saints. He reminds us that we are all both sinners and saints, all the time; that the people of God are always both holy and imperfect.

I don’t need to remind you that Lent is coming again. (Actually, in a few minutes I do need to remind you that Lent is coming, because we’re planning our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper.) But Lent is coming, as it always does. And the Ash Wednesday service will include, as it always does, what’s called an “Invitation to a Holy Lent.” But this morning I also want to invite you to prepare for a compassionate Lent: to take a season in which to remember that you are imperfect. When someone around you goes astray, remember that you are imperfect. When you yourself make a mistake, remember that you are imperfect. Let Jesus’ unbelievably-strict interpretation of the law teach you that you can never be perfect, however hard you try; and let Jesus’ unbelievably-generous grace remind you that will be always be loved, even if and when you fail.

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)