Sermon — February 19, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The writer Dave Zahl tells the story of a visit he paid to a friend of his, a priest who’d burned out terribly during his first call at a small, underfunded Episcopal church in New York City. (Don’t worry— This story is not meant to be autobiographical.) “There had been moments of joy,” Dave writes of his friend’s ministry, “but when he finally left the city, it was more of a tail-between-the-legs situation than a choice.” He wasn’t even sure he’d stay in ministry for much longer. So when Dave went out to visit his friend in his new hometown, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. Things had been hard for a long time, and a sudden change to a new environment isn’t always the solution to your problems. Sometimes it just accelerates the downward spiral.

But when they met up, Dave “noticed right off the bat how rejuvenated he seemed.” He was full of energy and excitement. He was spiritually engaged in his work. It was clear that the last few years since he’d left New York had been a kind of “mountain-top experience.” And Dave wondered about the source. Was it the growing congregation or the new building project? Was it the warmer weather? Had he discovered some kind of prayer practice that had brought him closer to God? So Dave asked him what accounted for the change. And it turned out Dave was right. His friend had had one of those mountain-top experiences with God. But not the kind Dave was expecting. “He laughed,” Dave writes, “and, without skipping a beat, [he] told me, ‘Dave, the honest truth is, I’ve gained a lot more compassion and patience for people since I realized that everyone is pretty much insane, myself included.’”[1]

There are, after all, two kinds of “mountain-top experience.”

You may have had the first kind of mountain-top experience, one like Moses had, like the one that Dave wondered if his friend had had, the kind of intense spiritual experience that probably only happens once in a lifetime, if that: that moment when you find yourself wrapped in the overwhelming presence of the living God. Perhaps God reaches out to you, with an inviting word: “Come up to me on the mountain.” (Exod. 24:12) Or perhaps you set out to go there on your own, seeking after God. But you go up on that metaphorical mountain—in worship or meditation, a group retreat or private prayer—and suddenly, the cloud wraps itself around you, and you are in the presence of the Lord, and the appearance of God’s glory is like a devouring fire, and you dwell there in rapture for forty days, or forty minutes, or forty seconds; the time really makes no difference. But you come down from that mountain and like Moses, your face is shining: you have been transformed, and your life will never be the same.

Or perhaps you may have had the second kind of mountain-top experience, an experience more like Peter’s: the sudden realization that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s long past time for you to shut your mouth. Peter’s up there on the mountain with his friends and spiritual companions, with Jesus and James and John, and Jesus has been transfigured before him, his face shining like the sun, his clothes dazzling white, and ancient prophets have appeared in their midst, and Peter finds himself completely fumbling the response: “Oh, Jesus, thank God we’re here! Okay, I’ll build three houses if you want: you can be here and Moses can be here and Elijah could be over here, and…” and God essentially just says, “You know what, Peter, I’m gonna stop you right there. ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’” (Matthew 17:5) Peter has completely missed the point. In his desire to get everything right, to try to manage this whole experience and maybe even preserve it, he’s missed what’s going on. He’s taken so much time to speak that he hasn’t realized that he’s supposed to be listening. And this is one of a handful of stories that the Gospels tell to show us Peter, once again, missing the point: this most central leader of the disciples failing to understand what God is doing right in front of him, failing to understand who Jesus really is.

Moses’ time on the mountain-top is an experience of the glory and the sweetness of the presence of God. It’s an inspiration, an invitation, as the Psalmist says, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8) In Peter’s mountain-top experience, the only thing you’re tasting is humble pie. If Moses’ experience is an ascent to the heights of spiritual experience, Peter’s is a descent into the depths of humility. He literally throws himself onto the ground and tastes the dust. And yet Peter doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. In just a few weeks, the same Peter who’s all too ready to praise Jesus with unnecessary words on the mountain-top will find himself at a loss for words on Good Friday as he warms himself by the fire; the very one who proclaimed Jesus as Lord at his transfiguration will deny even knowing the man as he journeys toward his crucifixion. Peter is no superhero. He’s been humbled once by the realization of his own limitations, and he will be humbled again and again.

And it was this kind of mountain-top experience that had turned Dave’s friend’s life around. It wasn’t an extraordinary spiritual experience or a profound moment of prayer that had loosened the grip of his despair or healed his burned-out soul. It was the realization that he was like Peter—just a human being trying to do his best, but “pretty much insane,” lacking the words or the courage or the wisdom to know how what to do—and so was everyone else around him. And as soon as he stopped expecting perfection from himself or anyone else, he was no longer consumed by frustration with himself and everyone else.

I don’t know which mountain-top you’re on right now, or what mountain-top experience of the past casts its shadow over the valleys through which you walk. I hope that at some point in your life you taste the sweetness of the experience of the presence of God in your life. And I hope that at some point, you learn that you are a human being, fragile and limited in scope. But I do know that Lent can be a good time to get a taste of either of these things.

In Lent, we can set aside a little extra time for prayer or for worship, for reading the Bible or taking up a new practice of meditation, for spending an extra hour a month serving the community or spending an extra day a month with family or friends. And every one of these things can lead us deeper into the cloud that’s wrapped around the presence of God. In Lent, we can take on practices that set us up to experience the goodness and the glory of God.

And in Lent we can be humbled. We can fail in our fasts. We can find ourselves just going through the motions of prayer. We can discover that forty days is a long time to do anything, let alone to spend with God on the mountain-top or being tempted in the desert. And even if you don’t do anything differently for Lent, you may find that a forty-day season of rain and mud will simply grind you down.

But there is as much wisdom to be found in our failures as there is our most joyful experiences. These two mountain-tops are part of the same range, part of the same process, part of the same journey deeper into the heart of God. And whichever experience we have—however glorious or however humbling it may be—God is there. Jesus is there, and when Jesus comes to us, he speaks to us in the same words he spoke to Peter: not with judgment or with anger or even with congratulations, but simply with the courage we need to face another day: “Get up,” he says, “and do not be afraid.” (Matt. 17:7)

[1] Dave Zahl, Low Anthropology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 71.

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.