Author Archives: Greg Johnston

An Abundant Harvest

Posted on by

The idea of a “Harvest Fair” seems a little silly in the 21st century. Sure, a few of us have community gardens plots or a backyard vegetable bounty, but the old tradition of gathering once a year in the fall to give thanks for a good harvest is a little unmoored from the realities of modern food production. We’ve all heard the phrase “supply chain” more than we’d like in the last three years, but there’s never been any real risk that the harvest filling our supermarket shelves would be anything less than abundant. These days, food insecurity is an economic problem, not an agricultural one; a matter of unequal access to food, not of famine and drought—at least in the United States.

Still, we take time each fall to celebrate an abundant harvest. We celebrate with our families on Thanksgiving Day. We celebrate with our church in the annual Harvest Fair.

The “harvest” we celebrate at the Harvest Fair may have become a metaphor. But it’s no less abundant.

This year’s Harvest Fair is, more than anything else, a celebration of community, and of the fields bearing abundant fruit in our community.

So here’s what I’ll be giving thanks for at this year’s Harvest Fair:

  • The ability to sit down, face to face, and share a meal as a community, and with neighbors in our community, in relative safety, once more.
  • The tireless and enthusiastic work of members of our church community who are spending their time baking, cooking, sewing, knitting, crafting, organizing, and planning.
  • The artists and craftspeople from our surrounding community who will join us to sell their own work for the first time,* and for the support we’re able to give them by providing a place to do that.

Most of us may not be getting dirt under our fingernails this fall. But we can still give thanks to God for this abundant harvest.

Greg

Click here for more information about this year’s Harvest Fair.

Pharisees Like Us

Posted on by

Pharisees Like Us

 
 
00:00 / 9:36
 
1X
 

Sermon — October 23, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I don’t know if you realize this, but if you’re sitting here in church on a beautiful Sunday morning in October, you’re probably more like a Pharisee than a tax collector.

I’m not trying to insult you. I’m not talking about this Pharisee or this tax collector. I’m not saying you’re prideful or arrogant. It’s just that you’re probably exactly the kind of person that a Pharisee in general would be. “Pharisees” have gotten a very bad rap in Christianity. In some circles, “Pharisee” has become a synonym for a self-righteous, hypocritical, judgmental person. But that’s completely missing the point of what Jesus is saying.

There’s nothing wrong with Pharisees. The Pharisees were a movement of reformers, a group calling people to return to a genuine and heartfelt practice of their religion. They were, for the most part, salt-of-the-earth people, craftspeople and workers trying to live their lives according to God’s will. While the aristocratic Sadducees were more concerned with the priestly intricacies of Temple ritual, the humbler Pharisees focused their attention on personal religious study and how to live in a holy way in your own home. “Pharisee” was not a dirty word. It was the name of a genuinely popular and quite beautiful religious movement. Jesus uses Pharisees in his stories not because they were notoriously bad, but because they were notoriously good. (The “tax collector,” on the other hand, was really a troubling figure. The tax collector’s job was to fund the Roman Empire by extorting money from his own people, and to line his own pockets by adding a premium on top. When you hear “tax collector,” don’t like “IRS agent with a pocket protector.” Think of the Sherriff of Nottingham.)

So when it’s the tax collector and not the Pharisee who “goes down to his home justified,” you’re supposed to be surprised. It would normally be the other way around.

This is why I say that we’re all probably more like the Pharisee than the tax collector. Not because I think we’re condescending or rude, but because I think we’re generally upstanding people, doing our best to live good lives.

But I’ll admit that some of us, sometimes, are like the Pharisee in this particular story, as well. Maybe you’ve never quite said these things in prayer exactly, certainly not standing in the Temple, but I suspect some of you have had the occasional thought: “Thank God that I’m not like other people.” (It’s okay to admit it—I stand before you confessing that I’ve thought this very thing myself.)

Maybe it’s about religious things, like the Pharisee’s prayer. “Thank God that I’m not like those Sunday-morning layabouts and those Christmas-and-Easter Christians.” I’m doing my part to support the church. “I come to church twice a week—or at least twice a month.” “I give”—and here I have to beg forgiveness from our stewardship chair for this sermon—“I give a tenth of all my income.” Thank God that I’m not like other people. (Or maybe for you the religious one is a little different: “Thank God I’m not like those other Christians…”)

Maybe it’s about family things. “Thank God that I’m not like my husband (partner, housemate). I cook dinner every night. I take out all the trash. I’m the only one who even knows where the toilet brush is.” Thank God that I’m not like other people.

Or maybe “Thank God I’m not like my coworkers, or we’d never get anything done.” “Thank God I’m not like my teammates, who’ve been slacking off all season.” “Thank God I’m not like that person next to me on the airplane who’s dressed head to toe in a leopard-print sweatsuit.” Thank God I’m not like other people.

And it’s tempting, right, to take this text and run with it, to say, “Don’t be like the Pharisee; be like the tax collector. Don’t puff yourself up for your own piety or your own achievements. Don’t put other people down because they’re not as good as you.” But in a funny way, our very desire not to be the Pharisee turns our words into a paraphrase of the Pharisee’s own prayer: “Thank God that we’re not like that Pharisee, who proudly boasts of his own achievements and spends his time judging other people!” It’s surprising how easy it is to exalt yourself for how humble you are.

So I want to ask a question instead: Who do you think the Pharisee is trying to convince with this prayer?

The Pharisee is good, and imperfect. God knows that he is good, and imperfect. But it seems like the Pharisee has a hard time really accepting his own goodness, and he certainly has a hard time admitting his imperfection. He can only prove his goodness, it seems, by repeating over and over that it’s different from those people’s badness. And if his goodness is defined by someone else’s badness, then he can’t admit that he himself has any flaws, or he would be like them. And you can feel his spiritual muscles straining as he tries to hold these two aspects of himself as far apart as he possibly can—to prove to himself that he is good, and to hide from God that he’s imperfect, too.

And this is what’s so refreshing about the tax collector’s prayer. He is not the “good guy” of this story. He knows his work is wrong. He knows the life he’s living is not as just or as ethical as it could be. The only thing he’s got going for him is his self-knowledge, that is, that he knows exactly how imperfect he is. And that self-knowledge has freed him from the anxiety of comparison, from the need to justify himself by how good he is relative to someone else, rather than just as he is.

So what about you? You are, like the Pharisee, like the tax collector, good and imperfect. What would it feel like to know that you are good as yourself? What does it feel like to have to prove that you are better than someone else? What would it feel like to know that God will love you, however imperfect you are? That while God wants you to be good, more than anything else God wants to set you free, so that you, too, can go home justified—not by your own achievements in comparison to anyone else’s, but by God’s eternal and unconditional love for you.

Help Desk

Posted on by

As a relatively young and technologically-adept person, I often find myself fielding impromptu requests for tech support from family, friends, and coworkers. As Douglas and I sat in the office on Tuesday trying to fix his phone, I realized that my quick fixes fall into four categories:

  1. “It’s not plugged in.”
  2. “Turn it off and turn it on again.”
  3. “You’re doing something wrong. Here’s a better way.”
  4. “I think you need some professional help.”

It turns out these apply to the rest of life, as well. So:

Are you plugged in? Are you eating, sleeping, getting out of the house? Are you connected to other people and to God? Are you meeting the basic needs that give you energy in life? Or are you running on a battery that’s quickly draining away? In Christian spirituality, we sometimes call this a rule of life: a pattern of work, and community, and prayer that’s sustainable over the long term. Do you have a rule of life, implicitly or explicitly? Are you following it? What needs to change for you to be connected to your power source?

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Sometimes you need a complete reset. Something’s gone haywire. You can’t get from Point A to Point B by a series of gradual steps; you need to shut everything down and start it back up again. The Bible calls this Sabbath, a kind of weekly power cycle where you turn off all the activity and the anxiety and the worries of the world and spend time with family and God. Whether it’s rest from work or space in a relationship or that walk outside that refocuses you and brings you new insight into a problem: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Is there a better way to achieve what you’re trying to achieve? Many of us have parts of our lives that consist mostly of banging our heads against the walls (usually metaphorically.) We’ve fallen into rut. We try the same thing again and again and again and wonder why it doesn’t work. “That link,” we think, “should simply copy and paste!” But it’s not so simple, because engineers (no offense) don’t always think quite the same way you do. Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. This is actually one of the reasons we spend so much time in church reading the Bible: not because it confirms what we already believe and do but because it’s so often surprising and counter-intuitive, at least in our culture. Sometimes it helps to have another perspective that comes from far outside our own place and time, to lead us to ask, “Is there a better way?”[1]

Do you need to ask for help? Sometimes, the most important thing a friend can do to help you is to tell you that he can’t help you. Maybe you need the Genius Bar or the phone manufacturer. Maybe you need a doctor or a therapist. Maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe you’ve been so convinced that you need to be independent and strong that you can’t even ask a friend for help. But this is why we have community: so we have others to whom we can turn in times of need. There’s no shame in needing others’ help or support, when you need it. There’s no shame in recognizing your own limits, when more or different help is needed, beyond what you can provide.

[1] As C.S. Lewis beautifully makes the case for reading old books: “Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.” (In hisintroduction to a translation of St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation published in 1944.)

Written on our Hearts

Posted on by

Written on our Hearts

 
 
00:00 / 9:26
 
1X
 

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.

Dappled Things

Posted on by

On Monday, my family celebrated the long weekend with a trip to our old end of Cambridge: a visit to a favorite bakery and a few hours’ playing and walking around at Fresh Pond. As we stood at one of the lookout points there, looking across the water, we were treated to one of those sights people pay big money to come and enjoy in New England this time of year: the dappled vista of a forest mid-transformation, with green giving way to red, orange, and gold, not only tree by tree but leaf by leaf.

But the beauty of autumn is a peculiar thing.

The beauty of fall foliage, after all, is both the revelation of the leaf’s true nature and the sign of the leaf’s impending decline and fall. The green color we see most of the year is something of a mask. It comes from the chlorophyll that allows the leaf to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy, As the days grow shorter and cold weather approaches, the tree begins to retreat into itself. The “true color” of each leaf, beneath the uniform green flood of chlorophyll, is revealed. But the more of the leaf’s color appears—the less chlorophyll there is—the less energy the leaf is generating, and the closer it is to death.

And it’s the same with fall. Those of us who loathe the winter (that’s me) cherish every warm and sunny day, knowing it may be the last, such that a single seventy-degree day feels better in October than a week of them in June. It’s the knowledge that the winter is drawing near that makes a fall day’s beauty especially sweet.

In a world in which sweetness and sadness are often mixed together, we go through a thousand variations on this theme. Parts of our lives are peeled away to reveal truths about ourselves we’d never known before. Parts of our lives are made more precious by the knowledge that they are soon coming to an end. Parts of our world are made more beautiful by their very instability, by the fact that the leaf won’t stay a mottled orange-green forever.

Even so, that sadness is never absolute. The death of a leaf is not the death of the tree. This autumn is not the end of time. The seasons of our lives will continue to change. And even at the very moment the leaf falls, when its story seems to be at an end, new life is already being formed within the tree.

So “Glory be to God for dappled things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote,

… All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.