Sermon — March 26, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a phrase in our liturgy that has a special place in my heart, and appropriately enough, it’s the one I say the most often during our service on any given Sunday morning. Think about the words that come out of my mouth during this hour of my week. What do you think I say the most? Is it “Amen”? “The Lord be with you”? Maybe “Let us pray”? No, it’s something else, and interestingly enough it’s the only thing I say to each one of you, as individuals, not to you as a collective and not to God. Can anyone guess what it is?

“The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”

Now, much ink and much blood have been spilled over the phrase “the Body of Christ” in the history of the Church, with philosophers and theologians debating and sometimes armies even fighting over what exactly Jesus meant when he said those words. But it’s actually that second half that means the most to me, week after week. This is the Body of Christ, yes—and it is “the bread of heaven.”

To me, this is more than just a poetic phrase or a symbolic idea. It’s a way of expressing the alternate reality we enter in this room. It means the same thing that it means when I say, week after week, that “joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we forever sing this hymn.” These are not just pretty words. They are a statement of faith that in this Eucharistic meal, in this Holy Communion, we are united with the whole communion of saints. We gather around the altar with the whole choir of heaven. When I say “the bread of heaven,” it means that this is the bread they are eating in heaven; that there is just one eternal banquet happening with God across all of time and space, and we dip into it for a while, week after week, and we take another bite of heavenly food. And when we eat that bread, we are sharing in a holy meal with people from generations before us and generations yet to come, and even though we can’t see them or hear them, they are somehow, mysteriously, present with us here.

This is what makes these words mean so much to me. There are some people I think about every week as I give you this bread, people some of you have loved and lost, people with whom you wish you could share another meal, and as I say the words “the bread of heaven” I pray that you may feel them present with you here, sharing this bread with you across eternity. There are many more of you whose grief I do not know. But all of us, above a certain age, come to this altar bearing pain and loss, bearing the memories of people who have died or who won’t talk to us any more or who talk to us all the time, but can’t remember our names any more. And so I pray for every one of you, every week: may this bread unite you with them again, wherever they are, as we will all be reunited again in heaven.

In Christian life, we hold two things in constant tension: we proclaim our faith in a God who is good and who loves us and cares for each one of us, and we live in a world in which tragic things happen. Philosophers can debate the question of why; John the evangelist just tells a story. And it’s a story that has a few things to say about how God responds and how we can respond to all this grief and pain.

First: Mary and Martha’s story tells us that sometimes God doesn’t do the things we wish that God would do, and when that happens, it’s okay to point it out, to blame God for God’s visible absence from our world, for God’s failures to heal and cure and save us from harm. When he’s told that Lazarus is ill, Jesus inexplicably, unbelievably, delays for two days. He waits until Lazarus has died, and then he goes. And Martha and Mary blame him, as they should: “Lord, if you had been here,” Martha says, “my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) And she piously adds something to soften the blow: “But even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22) But when Mary comes, she doesn’t add all that. “Lord, if you had been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” (11:32) And Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for her lack of faith.

He does something else. He weeps. And this is the second thing the story tells us: God is a God of compassion, empathy, and love. When all our questions fail to produce any answers, when all our prayers fail to produce a result, God is not far off, distracted or unmoved. God comes to us, and loves us, and God’s heart breaks for us. Jesus loves us like he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he sees our pain, and he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And perhaps this is a part of God’s answer to our pain. Where is God in our grief and pain and loss, where is God in the midst of all our tears? God is right there, weeping with us; and in fact, God is right there, dying with us. Thomas reminds the other disciples that the powers that be have it out for Jesus, and they do. This journey to Jerusalem, in fact, is the beginning of the end: Thomas is right. Jesus is traveling toward his death. The only person who’s dead at the end of this story is God. Lazarus’s tomb is empty, and Jesus’ tomb is full.

But that’s not all that God does. Jesus does not absorb our anger as we vent it, like an infuriatingly-calm therapist. Jesus doesn’t just weep with us or comfort us, like a loving, compassionate friend. Jesus doesn’t just die with us and for us. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn’t just do it at the end of time, in the general resurrection on the last day, as Martha says. (11:24) No, Jesus says, it’s better than that. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) And he actually raises Lazarus from the dead. (11:43) And a couple chapters later, on the night before Palm Sunday, on the night before Holy Week begins, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, and they share a meal—Jesus and Martha, Mary and Lazarus—and it’s as if Lazarus and Jesus have traded places, Lazarus coming forth from his tomb, and Jesus turns toward his own. In Jesus, the two sisters and their brother who has died break bread together again, and that’s the good news: that the power of death that separates us from the people whom we love will never win in the end; that though we die, we live, and we will rise again.

We don’t get the same certainty that Mary and Martha had. We aren’t given the miracle meal. “We walk by faith,” as the old hymn goes, “and not by sight.” “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says to Martha, “even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (11:25-26) And then the question he asks her becomes the question he asks each one of us: “Do you believe this?” (11:26)

We live in the world as it is. Most of us carry with us, through our lives, a hundred small losses and a couple big ones. And there’s nothing I can say or do to soften the blow. There’s no prayer I can teach you to pray that will bring about a miraculous change. But God has promised that the story doesn’t end here. And there’s an invitation, amid it all: When your “bones are dried up,” when “hope is lost,” when you are “cut off completely” from the joy of the Lord, you are invited to share a meal, by the one who tells you he is the resurrection and the life, by the one who offers you the bread of heaven, who invites you to come and eat, and be in the presence of those who are long gone. To know that, as my favorite prayer from our funeral service goes, “to [God’s] faithful people… life is changed, not ended”; that although we cannot see them, they live, and they are here, and we will one day see them again.

Sermon — March 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Page

Last week, a thirty-five-year-old man was released from the prison where he had spent the last eighteen years after being convicted for a murder he did not commit. In 2004, Sheldon Thomas was arrested after a witness recognized Sheldon Thomas’s picture in a photo array provided by police officers, and identified him as one of the men who’d been in the car at a drive-by shooting. But there was one problem. The Sheldon Thomas in the photo wasn’t the Sheldon Thomas who was arrested. In fact, there were two different Black men named Sheldon Thomas living in the precinct at different addresses, and the one in the photo was not the one the police picked up. What’s worse, as the district attorney’s office reported this year, the detectives, prosecutors, and judge in the original trial knew that the Sheldon in the photo array was the wrong Sheldon Thomas. The one who was arrested had been involved in a confrontation with the police earlier that year, and when the shooting occurred, they leapt into action, prompting a witness to identify the photo of one Sheldon Thomas and arresting the other.

The defense commissioned a study in which 85% of law students of color who examined the photo array accurately reported that the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested wasn’t in it. The lead detective admitted on cross-examination that he had provided false testimony about the photo array. But the witness who’d identified one Sheldon Thomas in a photo array then identified the other in three in-person line-ups, and despite his claims of innocence, the Sheldon Thomas who’d been arrested—who does not look very much like the Sheldon Thomas whose photo had been used, apart from his age and the color of his skin—was sentenced to 25 to life, and the years that I spent, aged 14 to 32, going to high school and college and getting married and going to seminary, he spent aged 17 to 35, in jail.[1]

Now, it’s possible the witness was entirely unaware of what was happening. The FBI itself recognizes that even law enforcement officers’ unintentional actions can actually distort eyewitnesses’ memories. For example, if an officer says, “I know that was hard for you, but you did a good job” at the end of the session, the witness actually becomes more likely to identify the same person again in the future.[2] Human eyes, it turns out, are not cameras, objectively capturing a scene: our vision is shaped as much by what we expect to see as it is by what’s actually in front of us. The stories we tell about someone shape our memories of the past and even our perception of reality in the present.

Just ask the man born blind.

The characters in this story think they see the blind man for who he is. Both the disciples and the crowd treat the man as though his blindness is a judgment from God, a punishment for sin. The disciples ask Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) But Jesus says, “Neither.” The underlying premise of their question is completely false. The man’s impaired vision is not a punishment for sin. No disability or impairment or illness, in fact, is a punishment from God. Later, the crowd repeat the same idea, in less polite tones. After the man points out that surely, Jesus must come from God, or he couldn’t have done this miraculous healing, they dismiss him. “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34) They think they know the man’s story. They take their own prejudices for granted, and use them to tune him out. “You were born blind, and therefore you must be a sinner”–what? he was sinning in the womb?—“and therefore we don’t have to listen to a word you say.” The story is settled. The case is closed. Ironically, the people who’ve been able to see their whole lives fail to see what’s happening right in front of them. If the man’s blindness was a judgment from God, then surely his healing must be a blessing. But the people refuse to consider the evidence of their own eyes. The ones who can see become, metaphorically, the ones who are blind.

In fact, some of them become almost literally blind. After the man washes his eyes and is healed, John writes, “the neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’” And some of them said, “Yeah, it’s him!” But others said, “No, it’s just someone who looks like him.” And he kept saying, “I am.” “I am.” “It’s me!” (John John 9:8-9) But some of them just won’t believe him. They are so convinced that this man’s story is already set in stone that they literally can’t see that it’s the same man. It’s the neighbors who’ve always been able to see who have never seen him for who he is, who literally can’t recognize his face or his body because they only recognize him as “that blind beggar.”

Their vision is so warped by their preconceptions that they can’t even see their own blindness. Jesus says that he’s come into the world “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39)Some of the Pharisees hear Jesus’ say this and ask, “We’re not blind, are we?” (9:40) Look at this man, Jesus says, and look how you’re treating him. If you admitted you were blind, it would be okay. But if you tell me that you’re seeing him as you dismiss him as one was born in sin, it’s clear that your sin remains: you are still deceiving yourself. (9:41)

The stories we tell are powerful. They shape how we see one another. They shape how we see ourselves. They can put a man in jail for half his life. They can convince us that a man we’ve seen every day in the street asking for change must be a different man from the one we see now, healed of his impairment. They can convince us that people can’t ever change, that we can’t ever change, that we are trapped in our circumstances or our situations and there’s nothing that we can do about them. We look at one another through eyes of judgment, or distrust, or fear, and our minds warp our vision.

But as God says to Samuel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) And this goes deeper than “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “don’t treat people different even if they look different.” Those are the negative commands, the things that the disciples and the crowd do that we should not do. But there’s a positive command, an invitation, something that we really ought to do. And that’s what modeled for us by the man who was born blind himself: a humble recognition of our own ignorance, and the integrity to admit it. The Pharisees call the man back to testify before them that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, and they ask him—actually they tell him—“We know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.” (9:24) And the man simply says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner.” Maybe he is, maybe he’s not. “One thing I do know: that though I once was blind, now I see.” (9:25)

So what are the stories you tell that shape the way you see things? What are the stories you tell about people from __________—from this side of the neighborhood or that one, from Texas or Nebraska or San Francisco or DC or wherever, that stop you from seeing them as your siblings in Christ? What are you the stories you tell about someone who wronged you ten years ago that stop you from seeing how they’ve changed? What are the stories you tell about yourself that stop you from being able to change? What are the things you know for certain that simply aren’t true? What are the places in your life, in your own mind, where God is inviting you into the humility of the man born blind, to say aloud in public, “I do not know.”

These are hard, hard questions to ask and to answer. Almost by definition, we can’t answer them for ourselves. We don’t know the things we don’t know. We can’t see the things we can’t see. We need somebody to spit in the mud and rub it in our eyes, and tell us to go and wash it off. And if that seems gross—that’s about as uncomfortable as it can be, to have to break apart those preconceptions that we have. It’s an unpleasant thing. But it’s an incredibly important thing.

So may God rub the mud in all our eyes, so that we may see things as they truly are; may God give us the wisdom to recognize the places where our own assumptions divide us from the truth; and may God give us the courage to admit our own ignorance, and trust in God’s guidance, all our lives. Amen.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/nyregion/brooklyn-exoneration-sheldon-thomas.html

[2] https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/perspective/perspective-the-photo-lineup-an-important-investigatory-tool