Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Race & History

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Like many organizations, the Church has been grappling with its history over the last few years, particularly with regard to race. Our diocese has invited parishes to investigate their own history to try to learn more about our complicated relationships with racism in America: the ways in which we have been complicit in, benefited from, and fought against the sin of racism.

Our neighborhood, too, has been engaging in these conversations, including a monthly dialogue on race and equity hosted by the Charlestown Coalition in the Peace Park on Tuesday evenings. (If you’re ever available, I’d strongly recommend attending at least once!) During one recent conversation, I was fascinated to hear the very different childhood stories being shared by two parts of our community: middle-aged adults (all white) who had grown up as white students during “the busing,” and current high-school students (all people of color) telling stories of police encounters and sidewalk slurs today.

So I was fascinated to come across the following reflection on busing from the Rev. Neil Hastie, who served as Rector of St. John’s from 1973-1981, as part of a much longer (and really fun!) reflection on his ministry. It features several characters who’ll be familiar to many of you—and is a really thoughtful reflection on the difficult challenges and beautiful opportunities that the racial diversity of our city provides. I’ll simply present Mr. Hastie’s words here:

I did not approve of the 1973 federal court decision to integrate only Boston schools, and ignore Greater Boston. I envisioned what in fact happened. White flight to the suburbs—with which I was already only too familiar in Roxbury—intensified. White students became a small minority in Boston. It rankled the working class—black and white alike—to have affluent suburban judicial authorities demand of our low-income communities what they had no intention of demanding of their own well-to-do enclaves. I was reminded of the old racial policies of the Deep South: the pitting by upper class whites of lower class whites against the blacks. But I was proud of St. John’s congregation’s response to the school-busing crisis…

On the second Sunday morning in September, all the women of St. John’s were huddled in conversation in the center aisle of the church when I arrived. I walked up to them and said that I knew what was on their minds. The same thing was on the minds of all Boston parents that day: the busing of children next morning into unfamiliar neighborhoods, to effect the racial integration of the public schools. I said, ‘I have never spoken to you about race. But you know my family lives in Roxbury [i.e., in the black community], and we come here every Sunday morning with no bruises or broken bones.’ Ruth Sherwood replied, ‘I think of that all the time!’

Marion and Winkie Wood’s younger soon Randy got assigned to an elementary school in lower Roxbury, only two blocks from St. Cyprian’s Church, where Marion had attended Episcopal district meetings with me. In August, Marion and Winkie attended the parents’ orientation meeting at the school. When they said they were from Charlestown, there was a gasp of surprise. The first day of school, only one other child from their neighborhood attended, along with Randy. Marion went door to door to reassure her neighbors about safety issues. By Friday they all went. Middle school Charlestown students in Florence Johnson’s neighborhood were assigned to the Timilty School at Eliot Square, across the street from Roxbury’s ‘Missionary to the Indians’ John Eliot’s historic First Parish Church. Florence said, ‘We are not going to send our children to a place we have never even seen.’ She led a group of her neighbors on a thorough inspection tour; then they consented to their children’s attendance.

I was safer living with my family in mostly-black Roxbury than in all-white, angry Charlestown. It had not made sense for us to move into St. John’s handsome, spacious Monument Square rectory. John’s and Beth’s school, and my weekday work [Greg’s note: Mr. Hastie was only 1/3 time at St. John’s], were all in Roxbury, where we owned our house. In my stead, Marie Hubbard moved with her family into the rectory, and experienced the three a.m. random firebombing of her parked automobile…

I had a black pre-seminary year-long full-time assistant, J. C. Woods, who grew up in Memphis and attended a predominantly white college in the mid-west. His college chaplain, Robert Gamble, my former seminarian, referred him to me…

I took J. C. with me to visit Goldie Graffam. In the project parking lot, several teen-age boys confronted us, still in my van. The leader, who carried a baseball bat, demanded, ‘What’s he doing here?’ ‘He’s my student assistant at St. John’s Episcopal Church.” ‘Hmmph!’ They walked away. ‘Remember, J.C., ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’ In huge black letters on the wall by the project door, we saw, ‘KILL N—RS.’ [Greg: I’ve chosen to censor the slur, here.] ‘J. C., it’s a good thing you’re not a n—r!’ I reminded J. C. that he was in Charlestown only one day per week, where I was in Roxbury at least six days per week. He knew that I knew the difference.”

“No Longer”

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“No Longer”

 
 
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Sermon — June 19, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)

Some of you know that I spent most of last week in summer school, taking a week-long class on archaeology, theology, and the letters of Paul. So I’ll ask: Who here has feelings about the Apostle Paul? And the follow up: On a scale from “two thumbs up” to “two thumbs down,” what are those feelings?

People have mixed feelings about Paul, and for good reason. It’s Paul who infamously says that “women should be silent in the churches.” (1 Cor. 14:34) It’s Paul who says, “I permit nowoman to teach or to have authority over a man.” (1 Tim. 2:12) It’s Paul who says, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling… as you obey Christ.” (Eph. 6:5) And it’s Paul who says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28) It’s one of the many paradoxes of Paul: his writings include both breathtaking calls for liberation and confounding endorsements of oppression. And on this Juneteenth, on the day we celebrate the emancipation of the last enslaved people in the Confederate States, as we hear Paul proclaim that “there is no longer slave and free,” it’s worth asking: What’s up with Paul?

For what it’s worth, many people want to apply the findings of historical scholarship of the New Testament to get out of this problem. You may or may not know that there’s significant debate over exactly which of the “letters of Paul” were actually written by Paul, and which were written in his name by later followers. And it just so happens that of the three troubling verses I just quoted, two come from letters that most scholars in our tradition argue were not written by Paul himself, and one is arguably a later insertion into manuscripts of the text. So it may well be true that many of the most troubling things we ascribe to Paul are actually written by later Christians, writing in his name. And for some, this is comforting; it lets them love the Paul they love and ignore the “Paul” they hate. But this is too easy a solution, because not all of the difficult things he says can simply be pushed away onto someone else.

So what do we do with Paul? Well, I want to suggest to you that while Paul’s writing is inconsistent, while it does contain some deeply reactionary words, the theological argument that he’s making about Christ is fundamentally one of extraordinary liberation. To borrow an image from Luke, Paul looks at us as Jesus looks at the man who is living in the tombs: he sees us living in a world where we are bound with chains and shackles, and he tries to free us. (Luke 8:26-29)

I want to go deeper into that reading from Galatians now. “In Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, “you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:26–29)

If you were here two weeks ago on Pentecost and you remember the epistle from that day, you may hear a foreshadowing of Paul’s later letter to the Romans, in which he uses a similar image: we have been adopted through Christ, and become children of God, and if children, also heirs. (Rom. 8:17) Here, though, he adds something. He clarifies that this is for everyone. It breaks through every distinction. There is no longer “Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” “male and female.” All who are in Christ are heirs of Christ. All who are in Christ are children of Abraham.

This is a wild thing to say, in the first century or today. Each of these categories was supposed to be immutable, unchanging, set for us at our birth. They’re part of the top-down, patriarchal family structure of Roman society. And Paul claims, that in Christ, they are undone.

These categories may sound different to you than they would have to Paul. “Jew or Greek,” to us, sounds like one religion and one ethnicity. For Paul, though, “Jew” and “Greek” were two national identities, two ethnic groups. “Jews” were the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, who also happened to be the chosen people of God. And “Greeks” weren’t “people from Greece,” they were “Gentiles,” non-Jews, all the other nations of the world. There was no real “religious conversion”: a Jew couldn’t become a Greek any more than I could just decide to become Irish. Conversion to Judaism was possible; but for a man to convert to Judaism actually meant undergoing the rituals surrounding birth, to undergo the rite of circumcision that a Jewish baby boy would have experienced on the eighth day of his life. To become a member of the family of God meant being “born again,” in a very different way from what we mean today. (And yes, I know this is a male-centered example.) Yet the main point of Paul’s argument in his letter to the Galatians is that it’s precisely this ethnic division that does not matter. You do not need to be circumcised to become a Christian, because you do not need to become a Jew to become a Christian. And if that sounds bizarre to you, given that we think of “Judaism” and “Christianity” as two distinct religious identities, it’s a testament to how distant the Biblical text is from our own lives, and how careful we need to be when we read and try to understand it.

“Slave” and “free” were likewise life-long categories. Actually, many enslaved people were born free and enslaved after being captured as prisoners of war. But once enslaved, a person could never leave the legal category of “slave.” Even if they were freed, they became not a “free person” under Roman law but a “freedperson,” a separate category with more limited rights than those who’d always been free. One of the archaeological tidbits we studied in this summer class was an inscription describing how an enslaved woman had purchased her freedom from her enslaver, on the condition that she remained in her enslaver’s household for the rest of her life and obeyed whatever orders she was given, which… sounds very much like slavery, in fact. But think about it. This woman purchased her “freedom,” on the condition of remaining in servitude, so that she would be a freedperson, and her children would be born free people, rather than being born into “slavery.” She could never be a “free person,” even if freed. But her children could. And then compare this, again, to Paul. Slave or free, all those who were baptized were heirs of Christ. There were, among the Christians in Galatia, enslaved people who could never own or inherit property, who were themselves treated as property to be inherited; yet they would inherit the very kingdom of God as beloved children and heirs.

And you don’t need me to tell you that “male” and “female” were understood and have been understood as a life-long binary division between two sexes, two genders, two distinct sets of rights and roles. The division goes back beyond any one individual’s birth, to creation itself, to the Book of Genesis, when God “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:26) This binary between male and female was an eternal truth, part of God’s created order. And yet… “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” “Jew or Greek…slave or free…male and female.” This is not a stylistic variation. It’s a quotation. In Genesis, “male and female” he created them. In Christ, “there is no longer ‘male and female.’” In Christ, that eternal gender binary on which the whole ancient Roman household structure was built, into which human nature was itself supposedly divided, is… transcended. In fact, it’s not just transcended. It exists, Paul says, “no longer.”

In Christ, in other words, the primary distinguishing markers that structured the hierarchies of life in Paul’s world—ethnicity, slavery, gender—are undone. All that hierarchy has been flattened. Through baptism, we are members of one family and joint heirs of one Lord. And in fact it’s the earth-shattering power of this theological vision of equality that leads us to question Paul’s own inconsistencies, the moments in which he seems to make much of distinctions between men and women, in which he reiterates the distinctions between free and enslaved people.

So, two things should be clear. First, what Paul says is true in God’s eyes. In Christ, our distinctions of race and ethnicity and gender, of Jew or Greek, slave or free, Black or white, male and female, are no longer. But, second: we act as though they are still real, and we have structured our society in such a way that we have and we do make these distinctions and build hierarchies upon them. Like Paul, we have applied this vision of equality imperfectly at best.

It can be tempting to take Paul’s words here and simply say: “I agree! I don’t see color. I don’t see race or ethnicity. I don’t see gender. We’re all just children of God.” But the world sees color. The world sees race and ethnicity. The world sees gender. And the world has structured itself—we and our ancestors, really, have structured our world—along exactly those lines. And if we are to live into God’s vision for the world, we’d better start seeing them, and we’d better start paying attention. If we don’t see color or race or ethnicity, we can’t see that we live in one of the most strictly segregated neighborhoods in one of the most segregated metro areas in America. If we don’t see gender, we can’t see why it’s a problem if our boardrooms have nine men and one woman in every meeting; we can’t see how much of the Church still keeps women silent. And if we pretend not to see these differences, we can’t do anything to change them, and Paul’s vision of equality will remain only a dream.

So perhaps we need to buy a pair of Pauline sunglasses. Perhaps we need to practice seeing things as the world sees them; and then putting on our shades and seeing things as God sees them. Perhaps we need to keep noticing the difference between those two visions of the world, and wondering where it comes from, and cultivating curiosity about what we might do to bridge that gap, step by step, until one day, our world is structured like the kingdom of God, in which

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)

“Children of God”

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“Children of God”

 
 
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Sermon — The Day of Pentecost — June 5, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” (Romans 8:14)

Today is the Day of Pentecost, when we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit among the disciples gathered long ago. The Spirit makes a splashy appearance: with violent wind, (Acts 1:2) and tongues of fire, (1:3) and such linguistic fluency in such unknown tongues that the disciples seem to some to be “filled with new wine,” although it is only nine o’clock in the morning. (1:13, 15) The Spirit, Peter says, is doing what the prophet Joel said the Spirit would do when God poured it out on them: they will prophesy, and see visions, and dream dreams. (Acts 2:17-18; Joel 2:28) And this is all very dramatic.

But the Spirit works in quieter and subtler ways, as well; you might even say lawyerly ways. It’s not just a spirit of mighty wind and intoxicating fire. It’s an “Advocate,” says John, the one who guides you through a court of law. (John 14:26) And it’s a “spirit of adoption,” writes Paul, a Spirit who “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” (8:15-16) There’s a lot in that image: God is our adoptive mother and father, the one into whose family we are being incorporated. Jesus is our brother, the one whose siblings we become. And the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to our adoption, the one whose presence brings us into that family and seals that moment, really making us members of a new family, really making us children of God.

“Children of God” is one of those phrases that often say without really thinking about. So you’ll hear someone say, for example, “well, we’re all God’s children” when what they really mean is something like, “we should treat people well, no matter who they are.” But we don’t often go much deeper than that.

Paul goes deeper, though. (No surprise.) He wants to draw out what this metaphor means. The Holy Spirit, he writes, makes us children of God—“and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) We are truly children of God, a parent whose love is beyond anything any imperfect human parent has ever shown. God is the infinitely loving, patient, understanding One whose only concern is for our flourishing and growth. And as children, Paul points out, we are heirs of God. Everything that God has, God wants to be ours. Everything that Jesus has, is going to be ours to share. All the glory of heaven is ours by right’ we are joint-heir with Christ. “If, in fact, we suffer with him”—and we will suffer, and we will be with him—we will “also be glorified with him.” (8:17) God loves no matter what, and God promises us a future beyond our most wonderful imaginings.

But note, too, that we are children of God. At our best we are child-like; more often we are childish. Children grow and learn and change and make mistakes. That’s childhood is for. And we are all still children. After all, what are eighty or ninety years of life, set beside the eternal wisdom of the One who created a universe that’s more than 13 billion years old? We are all still children in God’s sight, and what a gift: God knows we are still children, however grown-up we may seem; God knows that we are still learning and changing and growing up into the shape of Christ, and God doesn’t leave us alone to learn: God sends “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,” to “teach [us] everything and remind [us] of all that [he has] said to [us].” (14:26)

And there’s one more thing. To say that we are “children of God” does not just mean that we are loved by God, or that we’re heirs of God, or that we are still trying to learn and grow. It also means that we’re one another’s siblings. Our religion is not just an individual relationship with God. It’s life in a family of God. And that family is not just this church. It’s The Church. It isn’t just the people in this room. It’s the raucous Pentecost crowd of people “from every nation under heaven,” (Acts 2:5) young and old; sons and daughters; “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs…” townies and toonies and bears, oh my!

You probably don’t need me to tell you that siblings don’t always get along. No family is perfect, right? Some people have decades-long quarrels with their families; others have more recent hurts. Some have left their families behind altogether, and that’s been the healthiest thing. Other lost their families, long ago, and wish they still have them. But the Holy Spirit has adopted us all into this one family of God, a family that breaks through every boundary of language and nation, race and class, and we are obligated to love and serve and try to reconcile with one another within this human family, across any barriers that may divide us.

We may not see tongues of fire. We may not hear a violent wind. But to really listen to one another, when we don’t come from the same place—to really understand one another, when we don’t seem to speak the same language—that is the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work on Pentecost, and that is work in which we can participate every day. For “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) Amen.

“How Can I Get Out of this Mess?”

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“How Can I Get Out of this Mess?”

 
 
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Sermon — May 29, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30)

The English bishop and New Testament scholar Tom Wright tells the story of an older English bishop and scholar, Stephen Neill, who taught him how translate this verse. They’d both grown up with the classic King James Version translation of the verse, which was so iconic that it hasn’t changed in English-language translations for the last five hundred years: “’Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’… ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’” (Acts 16:30-31) It’s a simple question, and simple answer, and it’s a profoundly important one. This back and forth basically sums up the whole Protestant Reformation. Imagine reading this five hundred years ago, with the whole medieval Catholic penitential system in mind. You would’ve been taught your whole life that you stood under the judgment of a just but exacting God, who kept meticulous accounts of right and wrong, of good and evil deeds, with consequences that could be measured and quantified and compared with one another in units of years in purgatory.

 “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” How many prayers must I say? How many Fridays must I fast? How many offerings must I make to repair the church roof? And if you’d grown up with a legalistic kind of Christianity, as many still do—if this then that, if you are good enough then God will love you—the answer brings incredible relief. “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” The Church’s whole monopolistic economy of salvation is a sham. Don’t be afraid of your priest. Don’t be anxious for salvation. Your salvation is not the result of your good works, of your striving and straining and working to repent. Salvation is the free gift of God, who asks only that you believe in his beloved Son. You should try to be good, to be clear, and you fail again and again, and God will save you still.

All of which is true, by the way. You can understand why the translation was so powerful that it stood the test of time. But it makes the sermon rather short. And there’s an inconvenient truth: This is not really what the jailer’s question means.

He is, we can assume, a moderately pious Roman pagan. Okay, maybe he’s been skimping on his votive offerings, maybe he doesn’t sacrifice a chicken to Jupiter as often as he should, but, hey, life’s busy, the kids have chariot practice, and you know, he’s always good to offer a few sprinkles of incense before the image of the emperor on his way into work. He was a solid Roman guy. And Roman religion had almost no anxiety about things like eternal punishment and eternal reward. There was no notion of a heaven or a hell like ours. The gods were vengeful, yes, but they took their vengeance here, on earth, and you know what? Your boss could be pretty vengeful, too, especially when you were a jailer, and you’d lost everyone in jail. When he asks this famous question, the jailer is not worried about his eternal salvation. He’s worried about how to save his skin, right here and now.

So Stephen Neill offered a rather different translation of the verse. Not “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” but this: “Gentlemen, will you please tell me how I can get out of this mess?”[1]

The foundations have been shaken. The gates have crumbled. The chains have unraveled. And the jailer looks around, and asks the miracle men calmly sitting in their cells: “How can I get out of this mess?” And then, startlingly, the answer to this very different question is the same: “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus,’ they replied.” (Acts 16:31) And you will be saved.

How can we get out of this mess? Twenty people, mostly children, shot and killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Ten Black grocery shoppers murdered in Buffalo. Two thousand Americans dead of Covid this week alone, and countless lives upended and overturned by our ongoing attempts to manage it, and we call that a pretty good week, and statistically, sadly, it is. A politics charged with anger and hate and fear, a culture of exhaustion and despair. And that’s not to mention the world’s largest conventional war in seventy years.

It’s hard to see what “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” could possibly mean to this terrified and exhausted jailer in the middle of the night, let alone to any of us.

And nobody else in this story has it any easier.

The young woman with whom we begin is doubly oppressed, possessed by a fortune-telling spirit that speaks through her lips but without her control and “possessed,” in a very different sense, by the men who enslave her, keeping her under their control so they can profit off her talents. She speaks the truth—these men really are the servants of the Most High God, proclaiming a way of salvation—but she does it so incessantly that in a fit of frustration Paul breaks the spirit’s power over her, rendering her useless to the ones who claim to own her. She is free from the spirit’s power, and now that the magic’s gone there’s no reason to keep her enslaved, so she may well simply be free, soon enough; but to be rendered useless to the ones who enslave you without being protected by the one who’s freed you is a dangerous and precarious situation.

And indeed, we get a taste of her enslavers’, as they seize Paul and Silas and drag them into court. The two men barely escape the mob’s violence, and the magistrates aren’t much better, beating them and throwing them into jail on trumped-up anti-Jewish charges of disturbing the peace and inciting rebellion and lawlessness among the people.

The jailer is a mere functionary. Assigned the impossible task of keeping these miracle men in chains, holding all the responsibility and none of the power, he fails. And he’s so overcome with fear and shame that he’s at the very end of his rope, until a brief moment of hope when it turns out that the men he’d imprisoned had not in fact escaped, but are there, right there, sitting in their cells. Ironically, it’s not the miracle that allows Paul and Silas to escape. It’s the relationship they build with the jailer by forgiving and embracing him, by saving his life.

“Gentlemen,” the jailer asks, “How can I get out of this mess?” the jailer asks. And you could put the same question on the lips of anyone else and it would make just as much sense. “Gentlemen,” the young woman might ask. “You got me into this mess; how am I supposed to get it out of it?” “God,” Paul and Silas might ask, “You got us into this mess; how are we supposed to get out of it?”

And their answer is not quite, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and everything will be just fine.” We know that’s not how the world works. Paul knows, or at least he’ll know soon enough. His escape from jail isn’t the end of the story. From now on, everywhere he goes will be a kind of trial. He’ll travel from city to city, and in nearly every one he’ll be arrested, or mobbed, or escape by the skin of his teeth, until he begins his final journey to Rome, where he’ll die. Faith doesn’t ensure an easy life. It never has.

This is not exactly the joyful kind of hope we’re used to hearing in Easter.

But there is hope in those last verses of the reading from Acts. It’s not an Easter hope, per se. It’s a “Sunday after the Ascension” kind of hope. Jesus has gone away and left us in charge. He’ll send the Holy Spirit, to be sure, but he is gone. And yet through us he continues to do remarkable things. He’s chosen to work through us; not by miracles, but through our quotidian humanity, through our relationships with one another.

The jailer asks them how to get out of his mess, and the easy answer is not such an easy answer. But they tell him to believe, and he does, and he enters into a community of believers. He and his whole family are baptized, without delay! And he brings the men he’d locked up in jail into his own home and feeds them. And together, they rejoice.

It’s not really an answer to his question, or to any of their questions. The enslaved young woman still has to deal with her angry enslavers. The jailer still has to deal with his angry boss. Paul and Silas will still be persecuted and run out of town after town. We know this is the way of the world. You don’t need me to tell you things are hard. But built on top of that, there are those moments—these moments—when we bear witness to another way, an Easter way, a way of peace, and hope, and joy. And we bear witness to that joy, we cherishing and tend the light of Christ, in the midst of everything that is sad and strange and broken in this world.

[1] N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone Part 2 Chapters 13–28, vol. 8 of Accordance electronic ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 67.