Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Global Christianity Part 1: Egypt

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The feast of the Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, the moment in which the God of the Jewish people was revealed to all the peoples of the world. Many of us are accustomed to thinking of Christianity as a primarily European religion—a faith concentrated in Europe and spread around the world by European colonization and imperialism. But in reality, some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are found in parts of Africa and Asia, and their living traditions can provide us with an interesting perspective on our own.

Our Thursday discussion series this winter will take up this theme, learning about and from ancient and modern Christian traditions from around the world. But I know that many of you can’t be there, so I thought I’d offer short versions of some of those presentations on Christian traditions from around the world in textual form, instead!

This week, I’ll say a few words about the Coptic Christian tradition of Egypt.

Egypt was one of the centers of the ancient Jewish community, and of early Christianity. The great city of Alexandria lay just a week’s journey by donkey and boat from Jerusalem, a journey roughly equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington, DC. Alexandria was a major metropolis, a center of learning and Greek culture, and a hub for the Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean during the period of Greek and Roman rule. As Christianity began to spread, Alexandria became one of its major intellectual centers: even before the legalization and then official adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire, Alexandria was home to prominent Christian theologians like Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215) and Origen (c. 185-253), both affiliated with the Catechetical School of Alexandria, a kind of early Christian proto-university.

The seven-day, 480-mile journey from Jerusalem to Alexandria. (Data and map from Orbis.)

Egyptian Christianity developed into a tradition of contrasts. Its intellectual and episcopal leaders in cities like Alexandria were typically native Greek speakers, deeply formed in the Greek intellectual tradition, and learned in the literary analysis of the New Testament (written in Greek) and the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint. But the overwhelming majority of Egyptians continued to speak the Egyptian language, a direction of the language of the hieroglyphs and Pharaohs. As Christianity spread, a distinctive “Coptic” tradition developed, in which Christian scribes wrote the Egyptian language in Greek letters, while borrowing many Greek philosophical and theological terms. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt several centuries later, as Arabic replaced Greek as the language of government and official religion and began to displace the Egyptian language, another bilingual tradition emerged: while even Egyptian Christians spoke Arabic in their daily lives, Coptic remained (and remains) the language of liturgy and prayer.

14th c. manuscript of the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, with Coptic and Arabic text.

Egyptian Coptic Christianity is a tradition of contrasts in another way, as well. You can see the contrast in this 19th-century map of Egyptian Christian sites. (The red crosses on the map show parishes and dioceses; the brown buildings show monasteries.) Along the Nile River, in the fertile delta, and on the coasts, local parishes and bishoprics flourished where populations were dense. On the outskirts of Egyptian societies, monasteries grew up around the sites where the early “Desert Fathers and Mothers” had gone.

Egypt was the home of early Christian monasticism, and it’s easy to see why. Early ascetics and spiritual seekers went to the desert in droves—not into the depths of the Libyan Desert, but to the deserted outskirts of society, to the places furthest from the rivers, where it was barely possible to sustain life and few people lived.

The wilderness of the desert provided a refuge from the noise of the city and all its distractions. Just as in our own culture we imagine the wilderness to be a place of pure and simple living—however idealized that vision may be!—so too the ancients who sought wisdom turned to the wilderness to find a place where they could pray and meditate without distraction. At first, the desert fathers and mothers were simply individual “anchorites” turning to the desert to seek God. But soon, communities grew up around these leaders, unified in prayer and seeking to build new communities centered on their shared practices of faith, outside the ordinary boundaries of society. Monastic traditions spread from Egypt throughout the Christian world, and these early ascetics and monastics have provided a wealth of spiritual wisdom from which Christians around the world have continued to benefit.

Coptic Christianity has never had an easy relationship with secular authorities. Christianity in Egypt spent its first three centuries as an illegal religion under Rome, and most of the following three centuries in continual theological conflict with the opinions of the Roman emperors. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, treatment of Egyptian Christians alternated between toleration (with the addition of certain discriminatory taxes and fines) and outright persecution, official and unofficial—including, most recently, particularly violent aggression and church bombings claimed by ISIS. But while the Christian population of Egypt has dwindled over time, Christians still make up some 15-20% of the population of Egypt, 15-20 million people in all. In other words, there are more than ten times as many Coptic Christians in Egypt, a Muslim-majority country, as there are Episcopalians in the United States.

So what do we have to learn from a tradition that has always balanced multiple languages and cultures, that’s sought to maintain the traditions of the past and keep them alive for people who quite literally speak a different language? What do we have to learn from a tradition that lives in bustling cities but craves the wisdom found in the desert? What do we have to learn from a tradition that’s never held political power, that’s never been in charge of its country, but has remained faithful without imposing itself on the culture around it?

I’ll leave that as homework for you, but I suspect the answer is: we have very much to learn, in every imaginable way!

“You are My Beloved Child”

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“You are My Beloved Child”

 
 
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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”?

In the Bleak Midwinter

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“A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’”
— Lancelot Andrewes, Christmas Sermon, 1622

You may recognize, in these lines, the opening words of T.S. Eliot’s great poem “The Journey of the Magi,” (1927) which paraphrase Lancelot Andrewes’s Christmas sermon from three hundred years before. You may hear an echo of the great Christina Rosetti carol “In the Bleak Midwinter.” (1872) You may find yourself wondering—if you’re the type of skeptical and cosmopolitan person often found in the Episcopal Church—whether this isn’t all the result of an over-active English imagination. Surely—surely!—Jesus, having been born in the balmy Mediterranean, wasn’t really blanketed by “snow on snow, snow on snow,” as Rosetti would have us sing. Surely the Magi, traveling to Jerusalem from locations in Iran or Ethiopia or Arabia, wouldn’t have had “a cold coming.” Surely we’re simply projecting our own experiences of the cold, dark winter onto the days of Jesus’ birth, and surely this must be wrong.

In reply to which I simply offer you today’s weather reports, from London and Jerusalem, respectively:

You see, the bleakness of the winter into which Jesus is born is not the bitter cold of an icy day in Boston, with clear skies but a biting wind off the Harbor. It is not the exertion of digging your car out from under a foot of snow, or slip-sliding your way down narrow sidewalks on your way to work. It is the unrelenting dreariness of a season too wet and cold to spend any time outside, and too warm to make a snowball. It is a world turned into mud by a month of cold rain, as the camels slip and slide their way through the hills, and you pray that the lid on your jar of frankincense is tight, because that stuff is ruined if it gets wet. And if you don’t believe Bishop Andrewes that this is “the worst time of the year to take a journey,” then—here I write on Tuesday, but the forecast looks the same all week—go outside for a thirty-minute walk in the forty-something-degree rain, and then come back and read this paragraph again.

It’s easy to imagine God as the God of our great celebrations, of Christmas joy and Easter triumph. And it’s comforting to be reminded of God as the God who is with us in our greatest tragedies, the Good Friday God of funerals and hospital beds. But we sometimes forget that God is just as much the God of dreariness, of cold, wet journeys through all the mud of life, of seasons in which we don’t have much to complain about but, don’t have much to rejoice about either. But this is the God of the Epiphany: the God who appears in the dark December skies to lead us with a bright star, the God whose warmth we feel at the end of a long day in the midst of a longer journey, the God of a thousand small epiphanies when days are short and weather sharp.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Adoration of the Magi (16th. c)

“Our Help is in the Name of the Lord”

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“Our Help is in the Name of the Lord”

 
 
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Sermon – The Feast of the Holy Name, January 1, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Do you know the story of your name? Many of us do. Maybe like my five-year-old Murray, you were named for a grandparent whose birthday was the day you were due. Maybe like me, you were given one of the few boys’ names with a nickname that you could keep forever, so that there would never be a day when, as every Timmy becomes a Tim and every Jimmy becomes a Jim, I would have to switch from Greggy to Greg. Maybe it was part of a trend—maybe you were a girl born in the year 1960 and so your name had to be Debbie, Deborah, or Deb; maybe you were a boy born in 2018, when Aiden, Caden, Jayden, and Braden all made the top 20.

Or maybe it was something more normal than that. Maybe an angel of the Lord appeared to each of your parents individually as they planned for their wedding day and told them that they were to name you Jesus, (Luke 1:31, Matthew 1:21) “for [you would] save [your] people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) And so you were “called Jesus, the name given by the angel before [you were] conceived in the womb.” (Luke 2:21) Or something like that.

Today we celebrate a holiday that falls on January 1 every year. Not New Year’s Day, although many of us may also be celebrating that, but a rather less popular one: the Feast of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the eighth day of Jesus’ life, we join the Holy Family for his bris, for the ritual of circumcision and naming that had been a part of the life of the people of God since the earliest days, since the times of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

A name is an important thing. Most people carry it with them their whole lives. And in our culture, the meaning of a name itself is often somewhat obscure; it’s the sort of thing you look up in a book. But that’s only because English is a pirate language, full of words stolen from other languages. And in those languages, names mean something. “Gregory” is Greek for “watchful.” “Dorothy” is Greek for “the Gift of God.” “Jane” is the Anglicization of Jeanne, which is the French form of Joanna, which is the medieval Latin feminine form of Johannes, which is the Greek form of Yochanan, which means, in Hebrew, “the Lord is gracious.”

And “Jesus” means, “the Lord is help.” And Jesus means, “Salvation.”

“Jesus,” like many of these names, has gone through a bit of a transformation. “Jesus” is that Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew and Aramaic name Yeshua, which is itself a contraction of the older Hebrew name Yehoshua. You can almost hear how “Yehoshua” would become “Joshua,” just like “Yehochanan” became “Yohanan” became “Johan” or “John,” and “Yehonatan” became “Yonatan” became “Jonathan.” “Yeho” in each of these names is the name of God: not the generic term “God” but the specific name of a specific God, the four-letter name YHWH, considered too holy by observant Jews to be spoken aloud. This is the name that you’ll see translated sometimes in the Old Testament with the words, “the LORD,” with LORD in those funny small-caps.

But Jesus’ name is a bit of a pun. Because while “Yehoshua” means “God is salvation,” “Yeshua”—its contraction—sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word meaning “salvation.” It’s literally the difference between יְשׁוּעָה and יֵשׁוּעַ, and if you can hear or understand that distinction then God just may be calling you to a deeper study of Proto-North-West-Semitic philology.

So “Jesus” means “God is salvation.” And Jesus also means “salvation.” Which means, in a sense, that Jesus, who is salvation, is God, who is salvation.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, the way logic works. But it is the way symbolism works. And it explains the enigmatic comment that the angel makes to Joseph: you will call him Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins.” You will call him “Salvation,” because he will save them. And it’s possible that even the word “save” isn’t quite right here; it’s probably something closer to “help.” The most respected Hebrew lexicon I have glosses the name “Yehoshua” as “The Lord is help.” Jesus is not just “salvation,” in an abstract or theological sense. Jesus is help. And maybe this connects with you more. Because while you may not always feel like you are in need of salvation, you probably sometimes feel like you need some help.

Believe it or not, there’s much more that I could say about the name “Jesus” or “Yehoshua”—about the great prophet Joshua, lieutenant of Moses, who finally led his people out of their wanderings in the wilderness and into the Promised Land; about the great high priest Joshua, the anointed one who rebuilt the Temple and whom the prophet Zechariah depicts as a semi-messianic figure being accused by Satan—but I regret to say that I’m going to leave it here, instead, with a simple questions.

Where in your life do you need help this year? And how can Jesus be a “help” to you? On January 1, many of us are making resolutions and setting goals in a new year. Does it help to know that there is a God who has sent the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide you as you struggle along the way? Many of us are trying to leave behind the patterns of the past, and start off fresh. Does it help you to know that there is a God who will forgive you more easily than you’ll forgive yourself for all your failings? Many of us are cold or tired or sick, trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more month. And God has been there; in the Jesus whose birth we still celebrate during these twelve days of Christmas, we know that God has been there, and is there, right alongside us; that the God whose name is “Help” has helped us and he helps us still, because he walked among us and he lives among us even now in the one who “was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”