Sermon — January 22, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When I was a kid we used to spend every Fourth of July down in New Jersey, at my grandparents’ house, in the town where my parents lived as teenagers. The town is built around a big lake with beaches and docks all around the perimeter, just a short walk from my grandparents’ house. And on the Fourth of July, after we’d had a big hot-dog cookout and eaten our traditional American-flag cake, my cousins and my grandparents and my family would all load ourselves into Granny and Grandpa’s boat, and head out onto the water to enjoy what I like to think was northern New Jersey’s finest fireworks display.

And then the next day, sometimes, we’d do something very special. We’d take Grandpa’s fishing rods, and go down to the dock, and we’d take the leftover hot dogs that we’d cut up into bait-sized chunks, and we’d cast our lines into the lake, trying to see what little fish we could catch and release.

This is pure Americana: fishing off the dock with Grandpa on the Fourth of July, with leftover hot dogs for bait. And this is what a lot of people love about fishing: standing together by the water, hanging out, passing the time in leisure and reflection in the great outdoors while you wait for something to bite, immersed in that ancient dance between fish and man, as the fish wonders whether this time, the hot dog might really be a worm. (Fish are really not that smart.)

This is not what life was like for Peter and Andrew and James and John, these soon-to-be-famous “fishers of men.” Commercial fishing is a very different beast, even in the ancient world. It’s “they cast their nets in Galilee,” not “they cast their lines.” When Jesus calls James and John, they aren’t cutting up bait or comparing lures; they’re mending their nets. In this kind of fishing all the romance is gone. They sail out into the Sea of Galilee and cast their nets into the lake, and then they drag up whatever they can drag up and haul it on board. It’s hard, sweaty work. And it’s smelly work; you’re not just hoping to catch a couple fish, you’re surrounded by fish, all day long, in the sun.

It’s to this kind of work that Jesus is calling the apostles when he tells them that soon, they will be “fishers of men.”

Now, to be clear, I don’t think this is so much about the sweat and the smell of things. While anyone could tell you that church leadership, lay or ordained, can sometimes get a little messy, you’d hope that nothing too fishy is going on, especially as we approve our budgets and prepare our Annual Reports. No, I think what’s more interesting is the distinction between the line and the net. In our spiritual lives, are we like the fish I used to catch, engaged in a back and forth dance with God, intrigued by the shimmering lure or the nice fat chunk of hot-dog on the hook but cautious about getting too close? Or are we like the fish that John or Peter caught, trapped in a net with a few dozen others and dragged onto the boat, with no say in the matter at all?

Our gospel reading this morning is strange. It seems to combine two very different images. In the first section, there’s this motif of darkness and light, which Matthew draws from the same passage of Isaiah that we just heard. In the second half, we shift from light and darkness to fish and nets, and it’s such a change that some scholars have actually identified the middle of this passage as one of the great transition points in the gospel, suggesting a gap in time and a transition in the scene with the words, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim,” (Matthew 4:17) such that everything before those words—from Jesus’ birth to his move as an adult from Nazareth to Capernaum—forms the beginning of the story, and everything after it the middle, as Jesus’ ministry really begins.

But I think there’s more to it than that. These two, very different halves of the story are in fact united by the theme of sudden and radical change. Jesus travels from the inland town of Nazareth where he was raised in the Jewish heartland of Galilee, to Capernaum by the sea, a lakeside town on the border of Jewish society, with the Gentiles just on the other side of the lake. He comes to these two pairs of brothers, who’ve spent their lives preparing to take on the trade of their fathers and their fathers before them, to pass their days hauling nets in the sun, and he calls them to a very different life, “and immediately, they left their nets and followed him.” (Matt. 4:19) These young fishermen would become the bishops and martyrs and visionaries of the church, and their lives would never be the same: “Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless, in Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.” Jesus comes to these disciples-to-be and suddenly drags them out of their ordinary lives, and it is as though they are the fish whom they’re accustomed to catch, suddenly transferred from the murky depths of ordinary life into the brilliant presence of the God who is walking among them.

Now, there’s always been a certain tension between the abruptness of these conversion stories and the ordinary rhythms of life in a parish church. Not many of us have had such radical moments of transformation in our lives, and many of us never will. In fact, there’s a pretty profound irony: the more faithful a member of any given church community you are, the less your faith seems like a sudden and transformative change in your life. If you’ve been a pillar of the church for decades, as some of you have, you’re probably not exactly the leaving-your-nets-and-immediately-walking-away type. And even if you’ve only been in one place for a few years the abruptness of these transitions, from darkness into light, from fishing for fish to fishing for men, from ordinary life into radical discipleship, probably seems strange, even irresponsible. I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who can or should drop everything and go off somewhere else to follow Jesus, without leaving a trail of ruined relationships behind.

But I wonder whether that’s really just a matter of your perspective on time. Because these sudden changes aren’t really so sudden after all. When you are sitting in darkness, as Isaiah says, and day breaks, it isn’t really such a sudden thing; there’s a long, slow change before that sudden light. When you are a fish, and you are dragged out of the sea, it isn’t by teleportation; it’s by the slow-but-steady hauling of a rope. And with God, as Peter himself would later write, “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day,” (2 Pet. 3:8) and we are all being transformed, in God’s own time. We are all being brought out of darkness into light. We are all slowly being reeled in toward God.

The metaphor isn’t perfect, and that’s very good news. In fact, in some ways, it’s reversed. God has no plans to salt or cook you, that I know of. Quite the contrary: life is better up there on the boat. You do not have gills, you have lungs, and it turns out you’ve been holding your breath all this time. We are not like fish, we like scuba divers caught in a net, slowly but surely being drawn up out of the depths into a way of life that’s even better for us than the one we leave. You can spend your whole life treading water, convinced that nothing is happening, as God slowly reels you in. Or you can turn and start to swim toward the light.

So what is it, I wonder, that God is dragging you out of this year? Or what is it that God is dragging out of you? What are the murky depths you’re swimming in, from which you need to be removed? Or what are the dark corners of your own soul, that need the benefit of a little light?

Whatever they are, God with you. Jesus has left his hometown to come down by the sea. He has come to you and called you by name. He has cast his net into the waters of your life, and he is drawing you toward himself, however slow and steady that may be. And you may find, when you are hauled up on that boat, whenever it is, that finally, you can breathe.

For “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them, light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — January 15, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)

If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d be willing to wager about three dollars that 95% of you, when you hear this verse from the Gospel of John, have one of the three following gut responses:

1. “What on earth is he talking about?” In other words: John the Baptist declares Jesus twice to be “the Lamb of God,” with no further explanation at all. And to many of us, who live an ocean and a half away and speak a completely different language and are unfamiliar with the religious practices of first-century Judaism, which were quite different from the practices of twenty-first century Judaism, it just makes no sense. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?” What on earth is he talking about?
2. “I’m not sure I like that very much.” As in: I have these half-remembered verses bouncing around in my head about lambs and slaughter and blood and sacrifice and sin, and I feel vaguely or even very uncomfortable about them. Maybe you’re familiar with the use of this image in the Book of Revelation; maybe you’re as big a fan of The West Wing as I am, and you recognize the name of a fictional cult, “The Lambs of God,” who gruesomely harass President Bartlett’s daughter. Whatever it is, I suspect some of you might have this instinctive queasiness about the image of “the Lamb of God” and so your first response is: I don’t like that.
3. Or maybe you have the third and maybe most common response to this verse: (singing) “‘Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.’ I’ve sung that.”

You may have a different response and I apologize if I’ve left you out, but I think these three capture the paradox of John’s words in the gospel today. The mysterious title “lamb of God” appears only twice in the entire Bible, and they’re both right here in this morning’s reading from John. John the Baptist doesn’t explain it. Nobody else seems to use it. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul know nothing about it. And yet there it is, right in the heart of our liturgy, so central a part of the mass that even secular students of classical music know its Latin name, Agnus Dei, “Lamb of God,” because there have been—what—probably thousands of musical settings composed to sing these words over the last two thousand years.

So this morning, I’m going to preach on Isaiah. (Just kidding.) No, I want to talk a little bit about that question: What does it mean to say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God”?

First, I think we have to start with the fact that for John’s audience—and this is true both for “John the Baptist” speaking to his disciples and for the later and different “John the Evangelist,” writing this gospel for his community—for either John’s audience, the primary symbolic connection would have been with Passover, with the ritual slaughter of lambs as part of the preparation for the Passover meal. The Passover sacrifice commemorated the people’s flight from Egypt in the Book of Exodus, when the blood of a lamb painted on their door-posts turned away the angel of Death from their doors, and it was one of the major feasts for which most of the population traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem.

John the Evangelist, writing the gospel, clearly sees this as one of the primary roles of Jesus: he is not just a teacher, not just a healer, not just a leader or a religious reformer; he is the Lamb, with a capital L, the ultimate Passover sacrifice who will, by his own death, drive away death, not just on one night but for all eternity. And this symbolic connection is so important to John that John, alone of all the gospels, places Jesus’ death on Good Friday not on the day of the Passover, but on the day before, the day of preparation for the Passover, so that at the very moment when the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple, Jesus is dying on the cross. Jesus is “the Lamb of God,” the ultimate Passover sacrifice.

But the words of John the Baptist evoke a second kind of sacrificial lamb, because Jesus is not just “the Lamb of God,” he is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” This is not what the Passover lamb does. In the story of the Exodus, the Passover lamb drives away death. The Passover feast is a time to celebrate this deliverance. But the Passover sacrifice is not what the Bible calls a “sin-offering.” The practice of animal sacrifice is very foreign to our experience of worship, but it was the main part of religious ritual in the ancient Mediterranean world. The Bible lays out a whole system of sacrifices that could be offered in the case of various sins, and sacrificing a lamb was a perfectly reasonable way to make amends with God. Especially if you had inadvertently sinned, the sprinkling of the animal’s blood around the altar of the Temple would purify the Land itself, ensuring that God wouldn’t be driven out by the accumulated impurity of all the people’s sins. And, again, if this doesn’t sound very familiar to you, it’s because animal sacrifice hasn’t been practiced in either Christianity or Judaism in nearly two thousand years, since the destruction of the Temple few decades after Jesus’ death made it impossible; but it would have made perfect sense at the time.

And so what John is saying is interesting: Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is not just yet another lamb, clearing away the effects of yet another sin. He is the Lamb, singular, taking away the sin—singular—of the world. As the Book of Hebrews would point out, he is not a priest who offers sacrificial victims again and again, year after year. In Christ, we no longer offer continual sacrifices to make amends with God. In Jesus, God sacrifices God’s own self, once and for all, to take away the sin of the world.

But finally, there’s a third meaning to the idea that Jesus is the “Lamb of God,” and that’s the idea of feasting in celebration and thanksgiving, and this is what connects the Passover sacrifice to what we do today. If you had come and offered a lamb as a sin-offering, by the way, parts would be offered to God, being burned on the altar, and parts would be given to the priests to cook and eat; but none of it came back to you. But if you came to celebrate the Passover, the lamb would be slaughtered by the priests in the prescribed way, but then you would take it home to cook it and eat it, just as the Bible prescribed, with your family and whole household, and you celebrate and rejoice for your deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and ultimately, from the power of Death itself. And it’s this literal feast of thanksgiving that our liturgy evokes in those other common words at the breaking of the bread: “Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia!”

Jesus is the Lamb of God, who not only offers himself as a sacrifice to drive away the power of death, who not only offers himself as a sacrifice of sin, but who gives us his own flesh and blood to feed us and nourish us. And this is kind of gross. And Jesus knows. And it’s no accident that it’s this very Gospel of John, where Jesus is the Passover Lamb of God, that reckons most practically with the vaguely-grotesque notion that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ, because a few chapters later, when Jesus teaches his disciples that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” they are scandalized, and many of them leave him behind, and never look back. (John 6:56, 66) And fair enough.

So what does all this mean for you and me, who do not offer animal sacrifices and do not celebrate Passover, at least not in that same way?

What it means is that in Jesus, God chooses to do the sacrificial work of reconciliation for us, and invites us to celebrate and give thanks in response. The burden is no longer on us—or on our lambs—to make things right with God, to offer sacrifices to drive away the power of death or to make amends for sin. The burden is not on us, in other words, to earn God’s forgiveness by giving money to the church or by doing good works or by saying the right prayers. God has freed us, at least in theory, from the shame of sin and from the fear of death, and to the extent that this freedom isn’t free, God has paid the price. And God is strengthening us in this life, while we still face this very real shame and fear, with the gift of God’s presence in the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Communion and in the holy Body of Christ in the church, sitting all around you.

And God has invited us to respond—to be fed and nourished by the riches of God’s grace, in this eucharistic feast and in our spiritual lives—to be strengthened by God’s presence in our lives, and to live lives of gratitude and celebration, so that we may truly “keep the Feast.”

So Alleluia! Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, Alleluia!

Sermon — January 8, 2023 — The Baptism of Jesus

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)

I sometimes wonder how different the world would be if we really, truly believed those words.

I don’t mean that I wonder what it would be like if everyone in the world were a believing Christian, if all eight billion of us believed the theological proposition Jesus were the beloved Son of God. I mean that I sometimes wonder how different our world would be if every one of us truly believed in a closely related but very different theological idea, not about Jesus’ baptism but about ours. In baptism, it’s often said, we have been made members of the Body in Christ, and this is not just a squishy metaphor. By virtue of our baptisms, we participate in the baptism of Christ. When you were baptized, the Church has always taught, you went down into the waters of the river Jordan with Christ, and you emerged, and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and alighted on each you, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased,” and you were invited into the eternal relationship of Love that we call the Trinity.

And so what I mean to say is that I sometimes wonder what the world could be if every human being truly knew, truly felt, that they were loved, not for anything they had or anything they’d done, but simply for who they were: the beloved child of God.

Maybe it’s idealistic, but I wonder, sometimes, how many wars could have been prevented if we truly knew that our nation’s standing in the world or our people’s greatness is not what makes us worthy of love. I wonder how many people would not have been enslaved, how many people would not have died in factory fires, how many millions of tons of carbon dioxide would not have been pumped into the air if we truly knew that the worth of a share in our company was not determined our value of our lives. I wonder how much agony we would be spared if we really understood that no college admissions process, or athletic tryout, no promotion or performance review, angry memo from our boss or angry comment on our Facebook page, had anything to do with whether we were good enough to love.

And maybe I’m just an optimist, but I kind of think the answer is: a lot. I really do think that the “good news” of God’s love for us is not just an abstract theological claim, it is the answer to the problem lying at the root of so many problems: we are not convinced, as individuals or as communities, that we are loved unconditionally.

“At the very heart of our experience of being human,” the psychologist John Welwood once wrote, “each of us has an intuitive sense of the value of unconditional love.” There are few things we crave more deeply than the sense that we are truly known and truly loved for who we are, not in the abstract but in practice; and there are few things that are harder to really feel. Nearly all of us have learned, consciously or subconsciously, that love is something to be earned; that to be loved, we must be worthy of love, that to be loved we must be good enough to be loved. And so we work very hard, in healthy and unhealthy ways, to make ourselves worthy of love. And yet there’s almost always a gap between the way that we want to be loved and the way that we feel we are loved, and that gap causes shame and anger and pain, and that pain has nowhere to go, and so we turn it inward, or we turn it outward. And for many of us, there’s always the lingering suspicion that if we are not loved, it must be our fault.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not the way God thinks about the world. It couldn’t be! “It’s my fault that I’m not loved” is not the way of the God whom Peter knew, of the God who became human in Jesus Christ, who “went about doing good and healing all,” as Peter says, but whom we “put to death by hanging him on a tree.” (Acts 10:38-39) God knows it’s not our fault if we’re mistreated or misunderstood, because God knows what it is to be mistreated and misunderstood.

At the worst moment of your life, when the world has let you down or when you have let the whole world down, God looks at you with the eyes of love, and in the words of Isaiah, “thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you.” And God looks at you, as God looks at Christ, and says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” (Isaiah 42:6, 1)

God looks at you on the worst day of your life, God sees you as you truly are, an imperfect and fragile human being who has nevertheless been baptized into the baptism of Christ, and marks with the sign of the Holy Spirit itself, and says, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased.”

It’s sometimes said that this kind of unconditional love will spoil us, as if, once we truly understood that God would love us no matter what, we’d simply stop trying to be good. But I suspect you know as well as I do that that isn’t really true. When you’re told that you are loved, exactly as you are, it doesn’t cause you to start behaving badly. If anything, it frees you to start behaving better. So many of our rough edges are there for our own defense, or for our own self-justification; so many of our most difficult tendencies are attempts to cope with our own fear and shame. And to be loved is to be freed to grow, unencumbered by all those burdens.

So what would it mean for you if your baptism were today? What would it mean for you to go down into that water and have all the muck and mud of a lifetime washed away? What would you be free to do, who would you be free to be, if you could stand up before God exactly as you are, and hear the words of God, addressed to you again: “This is my Beloved Child, in whom I am well pleased”?