Sermon — October 16, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When I was in college, I spent a semester’s-worth of Saturday mornings learning how to use an old-school, hand-operated printing press. This is the sort of thing I love: learning how to hand-set lead type in a little wooden frame; applying just the right amount of ink; the moment you realize where the phrases “upper case” and “lower case” come from, because you’re pulling a whole case of type out of a drawer.

But this was the easy stuff. The guy who taught our informal class was working on woodcuts. Those are something else. Printing a woodcut is closer to carving a statue than to drawing a picture, because when you roll ink over something, it coats only the highest, raised part of the surface. It’s like rolling ink over a mountain range: you only coat the peaks and the ridges, not the valleys. That means that to make a woodcut of a rose, you’re working completely in negative space. You can’t just carve a drawing of a rose into a block of wood, which would be hard enough for most of us. Instead, you have to carve away everything that’s not the rose, revealing the form of your design from within the wood like a sculptor revealing the human form hidden within a block of marble. It’s a gradual process of carefully, slowly carving away layer after layer, because if you go too deep or your hand slips, there’s no gluing the wood back on. You have to start again.

And all I did was print some stationery.

Our readings this morning touch on three of the central practices of Christian life: the reading of Scripture; persistent, devoted prayer; and incredible frustration with how slowly things are getting done. (But mostly the Bible and prayer.) And each of these readings is difficult in its own way.

Jeremiah’s prophecy combines destruction and restoration, accountability and judgment, and he promises the people a “new covenant.” “I will put my law within them,” God says, “and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer. 31:33) This “writing” is an interesting metaphor. “Law” here is Torah; not just “law” in the abstract, but “The Law,” the first five books of the Bible. So it’s a fascinating promise: What is now captured in a scroll or in a book, God will write within our hearts. There will be no more sermons or Sunday Schools; we will not need to teach one another about God, we “shall all” simply “know” God, because God’s Law will be written on our hearts. But of course, it’s clear that this promise has not yet been fulfilled.

Paul, for his part, introduces a phrase that’s been used as a kind of proof-text for one view Biblical authority in more years: “All scripture is inspired by God.” (2 Tim. 3:16) In the long-running debates over the exact nature of the relationship between the Bible and truth, Scripture and science, some have held tight to a particular understanding of these words. “All scripture is inspired by God,” they say, meaning every word and every sentence of the Bible is factually true, in some sense dictated by God. Creation in seven days? A literal Adam and Eve? As the bumper sticker goes: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” And if you don’t believe it, that’s just your “itching ears,” seeking “teachers to suit your own desires.” (2 Tim. 4:3) (Or maybe not.)

And then in the Gospel of Luke we get this inspiring and yet troubling image of prayer. There’s a judge who despises both God and humankind, who can’t be bothered to look out for anyone but himself. And there’s a woman, a widow, who comes to him, begging for justice, again and again. And for a while he refuses, but she persists, and eventually she’s so annoying that he just gives in—Fine! You win the lawsuit! It’s yours! Just get out of my face. And this is, Jesus tells us, a parable about “the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Because God, the takeaway seems to be, is at least marginally less terrible than that judge.

Three readings, each stranger than the last. But in a way it’s actually this third reading, this strange parable in the Gospel of Luke, in which we spend most of our lives. Our spiritual lives are not a one-time act of conversion, or commitment. They’re a process, a continual turning and returning to God. Spiritual life is less like passing the driver’s license test, and more like learning to drive.

Again and again and again, Sunday after Sunday, night after night, we bring ourselves before God in prayer, wondering whether God will answer our pleas. Year after year after year, for centuries and millennia, we read the same stories and sing the same songs. And that’s not because we have “itchy ears” or insufficient faith. It’s not because we need to be, as Jeremiah says, broken down and overthrown and destroyed. It’s because God is slowly writing on our hearts. And the human heart is a precious thing, more fragile than any woodcut, and carving away at it takes time and care.

If you look back at 2 Timothy, you’ll see that Paul doesn’t actually see mean that the Bible as a repository of simple facts, something we can consult to give us easy answer, because “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” “From childhood,” Timothy has “known the sacred writings,” and they are still instructing him. (2 Tim. 3:15) The scriptures are “inspired by God,” they are, Paul literally writes, “God-breathed,” in the sense that God breathes through them. They are “useful” for us, and when we use them “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness,” (2 Tim. 3:16) we are engaging in exactly the same kind of gradual process as the widow slowly wearing down the judge. Over time, as we read again and again what has been written, God is writing in our hearts.

In our worship and in our prayer, in our singing and our sermonizing, God is gently carving away everything that obscures God’s image in us. When we come before God in prayer, wondering whether God is out there listening, God is in here, working. The story is not yet finished. The new covenant is not yet complete. The judge who lives in our hearts has not yet broken down. But day by day and year by year, as we “persevere with steadfast faith,” God is carving away within us and among us, refining an image whose beauty will one day be revealed.

Sermon — October 9, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

For many people, life in a city neighborhood like ours can be transient, just one stop on a train that goes from the suburbs to a college dorm to an apartment in the city back to a house in the suburbs or maybe just the first place they could find a place to live. For some, the neighborhood is the only place they—or their parents, or their grandparents—have ever known. But for others, a city neighborhood is neither an ancestral home nor a temporary stopping place. It’s a place that they choose to make a home, even if it’s not forever. They can “plant gardens,” a Jeremiah says, knowing that they’ll be around long enough to “eat what they produce.” (Jeremiah 29:5) They can marry, and maybe have children, knowing that it’s a place that they could raise them. (29:6) They can “seek the welfare of the city,” because it is their city, and “in its welfare [they] find [their] welfare.” (29:7)

These are the prophet Jeremiah’s words. But there’s a big difference between the people to whom Jeremiah’s writing and the “yuppie long-haulers” who move into a city neighborhood and decide to stay. The people to whom Jeremiah is writing didn’t have any choice. They didn’t move to Babylon for its walkability or its amenities. They didn’t leave Jerusalem fleeing persecution or even war. They were kidnapped, and brought to Babylon, and kept there in exile, and still Jeremiah writes to them, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Jeremiah writes this letter in between two cataclysmic defeats. For years, he’d been warning about the danger of rebellion, urging the king and the leaders not to resist the mighty Babylonian armies, not to throw away their people’s lives seeking through ham-handed diplomatic maneuvering. He’d been ignored, called a traitor and a pessimist, even imprisoned for his efforts. But he was right. The Babylonians had won the war, and had taken the king and the queen mother and many of the most prominent Judeans back to Babylon as hostages. Jeremiah, that gadfly, was left at home, but even from Jerusalem he writes to those leaders, “the elders among the exiles, and the priests, the prophets, and all the people” living in exile, and he urges them to stay put. (Jeremiah 29:1)

There are prophets who want to convince you, he says, that this will all be over soon; a year or two more, and we’ll be back in Jerusalem. But no, he says. It won’t be two years. It will be seventy. In other words: it will last your whole life. You will live out your days in exile. So plant roots.

Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Jeremiah continues preaching the way of peace, and continues to be ignored, and within just a few years, the nation will once again rise up in rebellion, and lose, and this time the city of Jerusalem and its Temple will be destroyed, and even more of its people will be carried off into exile in Babylon, and the rest will scatter. Jeremiah himself will flee to Egypt. And the exiles will remain in Babylon, for the next half-century, as a small minority in the midst of a big city. They’ll find themselves in the situation of many refugees: What was, for them, the most traumatic and defining event in their whole lives, in fact in the whole history of their people, would hardly be noticed by anyone else. They have every right to curse the city of Babylon, but Jeremiah tells them to pray for it. They have every right to give up on life. But Jeremiah tells them to live it instead.

Now, there’s a simple, spiritual meaning of this text that many people find applies to their lives. You may sometimes find yourself imagining a different life, a world in which the grass is greener, a life in which if only you could do X, then you would finally be happy and could get on with your life. And if you’re ever in this situation, then Jeremiah’s letter may come as good news: You have the ability and you have the choice, now, to live your life, as it is, not as you wish it were. In this spiritual sense the city in which you find yourself is a metaphorical city; the houses and gardens are metaphorical gardens, but the life is your real life.

But we, here at St. John’s, find ourselves in the midst of a city that is not at all metaphorical. And as I gaze out on this community of thirty-something souls gathered this morning in a neighborhood of nearly twenty thousand people, I can’t help but see the similarity to Jeremiah’s letter. What can we do, as a small church in a big city? What difference could our lives and our ministry possibly make?

The late Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town in South Africa, often spoke about something called ubuntu. It’s a term that’s hard to translate, but easy to understand. It means something like “a human is human through other humans.” It is not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am because I belong.” He often tried out different phrases to explain: “I can be me only if you are fully you.” Or, “I am because we are.” “We are created,” he wrote, “for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.”[1] Where the modern European and American tradition of political philosophy imagines that we are completely independent and separate individuals, who make a kind of social contract with one another, Tutu drew together the Biblical tradition of Jeremiah with the political philosophy of his Xhosa and Motswana ancestors to teach that our full humanity only emerges in community, and in fact—our fullest humanity emerges from community across difference.

It’s one thing to live in a small, mostly-homogenous community, like the ancient city of Jerusalem or a small Xhosa village or a single city block of similarly-decorated homes. It’s another thing, perhaps a deeper and a richer thing, to learn that your particular sub-community is just one small slice of a great city like Babylon, or a multiracial democracy like post-apartheid South Africa, or a genuinely-diverse neighborhood like Charlestown or region like Greater Boston, and to discover that your well-being is actually not just your individual well-being, or the well-being of the people like you, but the well-being of the whole body, of the whole city. “For in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

There are many ways in which our city is not well. You may have seen the dozens of memorial photos of residents who’ve lost their lives to overdoses and addiction during September’s recognition of Recovery Month. You may have friends who live in senior housing and are isolated and alone and can’t seem to get the help they need. Just this week, the Boston Housing Authority finally held meetings to address the rat infestation in the Bunker Hill development, a public-health crisis that’s gotten so acute that multiple families have been driven from their homes, with most of their furniture and children’s toys and books left behind, too damaged by droppings and bite marks to be safe.

And there are so many ways in which we our community responds to these afflictions. I think of our growing programs to support at-risk youth and prevent substance abuse. I think of the community members who give their time and money to raise funds for our schools. (Shout out to the Harvard-Kent School, whose fundraiser I believe is going on right now!) I think of the literal gardens being planted and replanted in this neighborhood, at St. John’s and at Sprouts and at Gardens for Charlestown, to bring food and beauty and peace to this neighborhood. (And that’s just this week’s newspaper!)

You may only be here for a season of your life. You may never leave. Or you may not even live here! But what Jeremiah says is as true for the most transient student or yuppie as it is for the Towniest Townies around: Where you are right now, is where you are right now. It may be for two years, or twenty years. It may be for seventy years, that is, for the rest of your life.

But for however long you are wherever you are, it is the not just a place. It is the community in which your full humanity has a chance to appear. And God has given you the gift of a choice. Will you “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce”? Or you will yearn for the good old days, in a different kind of world? Will you stay locked within yourself or keep to your own kind? Or will you let that web of human interdependence grow? Will your curse the city, when it has done you wrong by jackhammering outside your bedroom for three morning straight? Or will you pray to the Lord on its behalf, “for in its welfare you will find your welfare?” (Jeremiah 29:7)

[1] Desmond Tutu, ‘Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community’, in God is Not A Christian (Rider 2011).

Sermon — October 2, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There may come a time in your life when you find yourself living with someone who feels the need to announce, publicly, their completion of every basic household chore. You may already have lived with them. You may be living with them right now.

“Just taking out the trash!” they’ll say to as you lie on the couch. “Long list today!” they say as they unload the groceries, after going to the store for the first time this month. Or, as one New York Times writer put it in her Op-Ed headline, “Honey, I swept the floor!” (Subtitle: “Why do so many husbands feel the need to boast about completing simple household chores? With mine, it’s all about branding.” Which, if you weren’t already in couples counseling… Publishing that sentence in a major newspaper has got to send you straight there.)

The article singled out husbands, but any kind of housemate can be like this, of any age or gender. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful to thank someone you live with for the often-unnoticed tasks that keep a household running. But it’s obnoxious to fish for that gratitude. Doing your half of the chores doesn’t deserve special praise or congratulations. That’s why it’s called “your half of the chores.”

And when Jesus kind of goes off at the disciples in the gospel today, I hear some of that frustration. I wish he’d picked a different way of making the point, without casually taking the institution of slavery for granted, but I hope you understand what he’s saying: Do you thank your servant for serving you? No! he says. Likewise with you: When you do your Christian duty, it is simply your Christian duty. Don’t expect God to thank you for doing it!

The ”slave” thing is strange, for Jesus. But what’s really strange to me is that Jesus says this in response to the seemingly-simple request that he increase their faith. It seems like a total non-sequitur. The disciples pray, as many of us have, for faith, and Jesus lashes out and tells them they’re “worthless.”

So I was wondering what could be behind this kind of response. And I thought about the connection between faith, and trust, and this idea of “doing your half” in a relationship. What is faith, after all, but trusting that someone else is going to hold up their end of the bargain? What is faithfulness but holding up yours? The New York Times columnist interprets her husband’s behavior as “branding.” But I wonder if it’s more about insecurity. One unfortunate husband is cited in the article for arranging separate “viewings” of the freshly-cleaned garage for each member of the family. Maybe that’s because he wants the praise in triplicate. Maybe it’s because he feels so untrusted, he’s so convinced that nobody has any faith that he’ll actually do it, that he feels the need to prove himself over and over again. When the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, there’s something a little insulting to that. “Jesus,” they seem to say, “we don’t trust you to follow through on the incredible promises you’re making. Help us trust you more.” And Jesus seems to say, “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you.”

But if this is what it looks like when God is doing her half of the chores, then I can understand why the disciples pray for faith. It reminds me of one of the most common questions I hear as a pastor: “What is God waiting for?” What’s God waiting for? You don’t need me to list the tragedies, personal and national and global in scale, that could really use a miracles, that desperately need an infusion of God’s grace and mercy and peace. You know them. You’ve lived them. You’ve prayed about them. You may even have lost your faith over them. Two thousand years of war and plague, of sickness and death, and while things are undeniably better today than they once were, Jeremiah’s lamentation for Jerusalem 2500 years ago still rings true. His cry of pain for refugees driven out of their destroyed homes could’ve been spoken this morning about any one of a hundred cities in any one of a dozen countries around the world. So what is God waiting for?

Here’s the thing: We Christians have been losing our patience with God for almost 2000 years now, and still we keep the faith.

You can actually see it in this reading from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Now, it’s disputed among scholars whether this letter to Timothy is one of Paul’s latest letters, or whether it was actually written well after Paul’s death by a follower adopting his name. But in any case, it’s clear that this is not the period of Paul’s early missionary activity, when he’s traveling around, spreading the good news and forming new churches. Timothy himself is a third-generation Christian: his faith, Paul writes, “lived first in [his] grandmother Lois and [his] mother Eunice.” (1:5)

You get the sense that the excitement of the early days has faded, that the gift of faith needs to be “rekindled,” as Paul says, even in church leaders. Many among the first generation of Christians were convinced that Jesus was coming back soon, literally, in his resurrected body, to set things right. They believed that Paul’s claim that Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to life” (1:10) meant that Christ had abolished death, that they themselves would not die. And yet they did.

“Where is God?” they were asking in the 40s, and the 50s, and the 60s AD. “What’s taking him so long?” they asked, as the years since Jesus’ death stretched into decades. Little did they know just how long it could be.

If you understand the Christian faith the way those early believers did, then we are clearly the most oblivious people in the world. If you think that Christ’s destruction of death means that Christians do not die, that Christ’s triumph over the powers of evil means that there is no longer evil, then you’re in denial; you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being so easily fooled.

“But I am not ashamed,” writes Paul. “For I know the one in whom I’ve put my trust, and I am sure he’s able to guard what I’ve entrusted to him until that day.” (2 Tim. 1:12) I can endure suffering now, because God has broken its ultimate power. I trust that on “that day,” that long-awaited promised day, all shall be well. I do not need God to tell me that he’s cleaned the garage, because I trust that on “that day,” that garage will not only be cleaned, but will be transformed into a place of unimaginable wonder.

So “guard the good treasure,” Paul writes, “that has been entrusted to you.” (1:14) Trust in God to win the ultimate victory. Keep the faith, even if your faith is as small as a mustard seed.

And then he adds, in what sounds like it’s just the kind of phrase that preachers throw in to put a prayerful bow on a paragraph or sentence, something that ends up being the most profound theological answer to the entire problem I’ve been describing for about the last ten minutes, and that Christians have been struggling with for about two thousand years. (Are you ready?)

“Guard the good treasure,” he writes, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”

“Where is God in all of this?” you may ask. “Why is God taking so long? What is God doing in the face of such tragedy? ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?’”

And there is Paul’s answer: Where is God? “Living in us.”

This is what makes the dry abstraction of the Trinity come alive. If only God the Father is God, then it’s clear that God has written us off, that God created the world and the world went wrong and God went off on vacation, leaving us to our own devices. If only God the Father and God the Son are God, the picture is a little better: God the Son came into the world in Jesus, and tried to set things right; God suffered, and died, and rose, and God will come again on “that day,” but in between, we’re left alone again. But God’s a Trinity, not a Binity, and so we are not alone. Because while God the Father is up in heaven (wherever that is) and God the Son is seated at his right hand (whatever that means), God the Holy Spirit is right here with us, “living in us.” That’s how God has chosen to respond to our pain in this world. By dwelling within our hearts and minds. By inspiring us to love and courage. By comforting us and strengthening us and working in and through us, as we love, and comfort, and strengthen one another.

God is right here, taking out the trash of our lives, and cleaning our garages, emptying our dishwashers and putting air, God bless her, in our tires. And if these things are happening in your life, but you don’t notice them—if you ever feel hope, or courage, or peace; if you ever offer an act of love, or let someone care for you, but don’t think of that as the work of God—It’s only because God is not like those good-for-nothing husbands. For God, it’s not all about branding.

So, God: Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Open our hearts to feel the power of your love within us. “Increase our faith,” we pray, knowing that it is already enough, even if it’s only the size of a mustard seed; give us grace to guard the good treasure you have entrusted to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us. Amen.