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.

Sermon — May 22, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Massachusetts has one of the world’s most boring flags: the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a white field. The seal itself is kind of interesting. It consists of three elements—and by the way, I’ve printed the seal out on a bulletin insert so you can see what I’m talking about. In the center, a Native American holds a bow and an arrow pointed down, symbolizing peace. Above him, an unfortunately-placed arm holds a sword, looking like it’s about to swing down and cut off his head, just like the famous scene in one of the great movies about indigenous people and their relationships with the colonial state: Frozen II. And below him, there’s a scroll with the Latin state motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem: “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” It’s an unfortunate combination, implying as it does that violence against the indigenous people of Massachusetts is what ensured our quiet peace under liberty.

Now, the seal is pretty problematic—the model for the supposed Massachusett Indian, for example, is in fact an 1890s Chippewa chief from Montana—but the Frozen thing with the sword over his head is mostly accidental. The seal actually combines elements of two earlier and unrelated seals. (See the other side of the paper!) The revolutionary seal of 1775 features a colonial Minute Man with a sword in his right hand and the Magna Carta in his left, with the motto, “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” Hence the disembodied sword-in-hand, and the motto; the violence is against the king. The original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first used to seal the colony’s charter in 1629, is different. It features a rather stereotyped drawing of an American Indian with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, which have been adopted into the modern seal. But the banner coming out of his mouth holds a very different motto from the Minute Man’s statement of revolutionary zeal, one much more relevant to our reading from Acts today: the simple English phrase, “Come over and help us.”

This is, of course, an ever-so-slightly adapted version of the message Paul receives in a dream from a Macedonian man: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” (Acts 16:9) It’s a divinely-delivered request: cross the sea from Asia into Europe and bring us the gospel. And indeed, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw themselves as repeating that apostolic process: they came across the sea, and landed, and settled here, right here, in Mishawum, where they established their first settlement, soon renaming it after the man who’d granted their charter by stamping it with that original seal: King Charles I. Hence, the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: “Charlestown.”

Now, placed into the mouth of an indigenous resident of Massachusetts by his soon-to-be colonizers, “Come over and help us” is somewhere between a naïve disaster and grotesque bad faith. Diseases spread by Europeans had already devastated the Massachusett and Naumkeag people of this area, and war with the newcomers would soon nearly annihilate them. Some of the more godly colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony surely thought they were walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul and spreading the gospel here. Others were, without a doubt, cynically exploiting the seeming parallel between the Bible and their lives, using royal authority and Western technology to grab the land for themselves, with no real concern for the actual well-being of the locals. But even the best-meaning colonial Puritan missionaries were doing the very opposite of what Paul had done in the Book of Acts. They were swimming with the stream of a growing empire. Paul was fighting against one.

For three centuries before Paul’s journey to Macedonia, the history of the Jewish people and the whole region had been marked by armies moving from the west to the east, subjugating the local people to Greek and then Roman rule. Macedonia was where it all began, with the rise of a young man named Alexander, known to us as Alexander the Great. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, had founded a powerful kingdom and united many of the independent cities of ancient Greece. Alexander had bigger dreams, and in a brilliant but short career he went on to overthrow the great Persian Empire. After his death, his generals began to squabble over the remains, and rival kings set themselves up in Syria and Egypt, battling over and over again for the areas in between, including Judea. These kings surrounded themselves with a Greek aristocracy and sometimes sought to impose Greek customs on the locals, leading to occasional resistance, including the Maccabean revolt still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. By Jesus’ day, Roman rule had replaced Greek rule, but it was more of the same imperial domination.

In the first century BC, Rome was wracked by civil war as well, and while the history is too confusing to be helpful, there’s one event worth noting. In the year 44 BC, after three Roman generals defeated Julius Caesar’s assassins outside the city of Philippi, they discharged some of their veterans soldiers as a reward for their service and gave them land in and around the city. When one of them, Octavian, finally triumphed in the Roman Republic’s final civil war, claiming the title Augustus and becoming the first emperor, he sent more of his veterans there to strengthen and reorganize the colony, transforming Philippi into a “miniature Rome,” giving his soldiers all the rights of citizens of Rome itself.

All of which is to say: when Paul receives a vision inviting him to cross the sea, to “come over and help us,” he is not coming as the colonizer, the powerful one, here to spread the gospel with a sword hanging over your head. He is the one whose land has been conquered. He is the one whose people have been oppressed. And in next week’s reading, Paul and Silas will be arrested by a mob, who say, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” (Acts 16:20-21)

Now Paul was himself a Roman citizen. He would use that, at times, to his advantage, to escape from a local mob or a small-town jail by telling them he was a citizen of Rome, and therefore under Roman protection. But it was a dangerous game to play, because it turned Paul’s proclamation of Jesus Christ—his claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, God’s anointed King, and that he was inviting Gentiles as well as Jews into his kingdom—from mere rabble-rousing by some foreign traveler to an act of treason by a Roman citizen.

Paul walks, nevertheless, into the mouth of the imperial lion. He crosses over into Macedonia, the homeland of the great conqueror Alexander. He walks into Philippi, a city named after Alexander’s father Philip, a colony of Roman army veterans. He shows up eager to “proclaim the good news” of another, very different, kind of King. (16:10)

You’d almost have to be insane to try it. But after cooling his heels for “some days,” (16:12) Paul does what Paul generally does: he goes to the synagogue to be with his fellow Jews.

Or rather, he goes to the “place of prayer,” down by the river. (16:13) It’s a little unclear, but it seems the Jewish community in Philippi is perhaps too small for a synagogue within the city walls; perhaps too small even to muster a minyan of ten men, as Luke tells us simply of the “women who had gathered there.” (16:13) But these are powerful women, the great saint Lydia among them. Lydia listens eagerly to Paul’s message, accepts his words, decides that she and her whole household will be baptized—and then invites him to stay at her home, which becomes Paul’s base in Philippi. (16:14-15) Lydia’s the first person Paul meets in the city, and she’ll be the last one he says goodbye to before he leaves after his miraculous escape from jail in next week’s reading. (16:40) Within a few years, the Christian church at Philippi will have become a strong and thriving one. In fact, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of his most upbeat: there’s much to rejoice about and little to criticize. And I think we have Lydia’s leadership to thank for that.

Paul’s ministry in Philippi gives us a better model to think about the Church’s mission in the world than that Puritan “come over and help us.” It’s one founded on resistance to imperial power and might, not backed up by it. And it’s built on the assumption that you come and work in order to hand leadership over to someone else.

I think sometimes about the relationship that churches like St. John’s and many others have had over the years with organizations like the B-SAFE summer camp program. Over time, there have been changes to those partner relationships, and some of them have been hard for partner churches to swallow. Over time, B-SAFE has made many changes that come from listening to the kids and young adults who are part of the program. This year, B-SAFE has decided to hire parents from their community to cook meals for the kids, instead of churches bringing in food for lunch. And for many people who’d enjoyed cooking those meals for years, this felt like a loss. And it is. But it also reflects a kind of growth and maturity in that program, in a very good way.

God does not want us to “go over there and help them” in the Puritan sense. No, God is working through us more like God works through Paul. God is inviting us to recognize that we are citizens of an empire founded by the sword, and to spread instead the subversive message of the Prince of Peace. God is inviting us to go to the people on the margins of society, to the people gathered at the riverside outside the city gates, not to “help them,” per se, but to accept their hospitality and to support their leadership, to build a self-sustaining community of love, and to trust them to run it. And for what it’s worth, this is as true when it comes parenting or management or friendship as it is about community service or the mission of the Church. The end goal is not a permanent program for “us” to help “them,” year after year after year, but a community built on equality and love. So I pray that when God calls us to go and help people near or far, we answer that call, and that we bear witness to the good news of Jesus’ reign of peace and justice, in word and in deed, in our homes, and in our community. I pray that we have the wisdom of Paul to recognize the strength of leadership that’s already there among the people we come to know. And I pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God might build us up into a community that is founded not on the sword, but on the promise of the peace left to us by Jesus Christ, in whom all our prayers are known to God. Amen

Sermon — May 15, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s become commonplace to observe that life is like a journey, and religion is no exception to this trend. A quick Google Books search for “spiritual journey” shows that the phrase was virtually unused until 1950 or so, then began a gradual rise before exploding exponentially through the ’80s and ’90s. It soon became the defining way for 21^st-century people to talk about the attempt to find the meaning in one’s life. The idea has ancient roots, even in Christianity: the Acts of the Apostles reports that the Christian movement was, at first, called “the Way,” with a capital W. (Acts 9:2) And so our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, in his effort to recover and revive the spirit of “the Jesus Movement,” speaks often of “the Way of Jesus” and “the Way of Love.” It’s an important insight. Our lives as Christians are not about a static body of doctrine that we hold, or a one-time commitment to Christ. They’re about the journey we take together, led by Jesus, who almost always invited people into the search for God not by saying “Learn from me” or “Obey me” but with the words, “Follow me.” To call something a “spiritual journey” is to recognize that it is a process of slow and sometimes-meandering change over time, as we wander day by day toward our final destination.

We sometimes forget, though, how chaotic these journeys can be. I was reminded of this on Monday evening, as I sat outside my apartment, waiting for AAA. You see, on Sunday, Alice, Murray, and I had spent several hours playing and building up Murray’s seashell collection at the “Airplane Beach” in East Boston. And Murray was so eager to return that we planned a trip for Monday evening, after Alice had returned from work. Murray and I waited in excitement all afternoon, and halfway through dinner Murray couldn’t wait any longer and ran out to the car. When I went to unlock the door so Murray could climb into the car seat, I found the remote unlock button wasn’t working. And when I walked around and unlocked the driver’s side door with the key, I soon discovered that the car wouldn’t start. Apparently in the excitement of the night before, I’d forgotten to turn out one of the lights, and the battery was completely dead—so dead, in fact, that it could not even be jumped, and I had to wait for the AAA truck to come with a new battery, by which point Murray’s excitement had been on its own journey through denial, anger, and bargaining, to its final destination: sleep.

It never feels good to disappoint someone you love. But it’s really not so different from what Jesus does to the disciples.

“Follow me,” he says to Peter and to Andrew while they’re fishing on the shore, “and I will make you fishers of men.” (Mark 1:1719) “Follow me” he says to Philip, as he leads him from John the Baptist’s camp by the Jordan back to Galilee. (John 1:43) “Follow me,” he says to Matthew sitting at his tax booth. (Matt. 9:9) And the disciples say yes. They leave behind everything they have and follow Jesus on this remarkable journey, pledging to go with him wherever he leads.

And then he pulls the rug out from under them: “You will look for me,” he tells the disciples at the Last Supper, “but as I said to the Jews I say now to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’” (John 13:33) What a disappointment. They’ve answered his call. They’ve followed him where he has led. They’ve gone with him even to Jerusalem, the city of his destiny. But now, the same Jesus who said to them, “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me,” follows up with, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”

It’s a frustrating end to their journey. And it’s typical of this late part of the Easter season. On Easter Sunday, we celebrated the Resurrection, and in the weeks that follow we heard stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. But he soon stops appearing, at least in bodily form—and on this Sunday and the next, we look forward to Jesus’ Ascension, his departure from earth to return to heaven, the place he is going where we cannot come. He’s going away, and he’s leaving us behind. He has made it to the Airplane Beach, and we are stuck here, in desperate need of a jump start, completely unable to reach our destination. We seek him, but we cannot go where he has gone.

And so he comes to us instead. And for me, this is the most startling part of Revelation’s stunning vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.” (Rev. 21:1) This passage is the culminating moment in John’s vision. It’s the second-to-last chapter of the whole Bible, and it’s a message so comforting and powerful it’s (ironically) hard not to cry:

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:3-4)

The destination of our life’s journey is a place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, where death and mourning and crying are no more, where the pain and the toil of this world are no more, “for the first things have passed away.” We have so many blessings and so many things to be thankful for in life, and we have so many burdens to lay down, so many tears to be wiped away. And It can be a great relief to hear these comforting words.

But the emotional power of these verses makes it easy to miss something. This is not a message about our final destination, when our lives’ journeys come to an end and we arrive in heaven to dwell with God. It’s a message about God’s final destination, when God returns to and renews the earth to dwell with us. It’s not a vision of each one of us individually journeying toward heaven, our eternal home. It’s a vision of God coming down out of heaven to dwell with us, and all who have gone before us, for “see, the home of God is among mortals.” (21:3) God will come here once again, as God came here once before, and walk among us again, and care for us with tenderness and love. It’s as though the AAA truck never came, and my battery was never replaced, but we woke up in the morning to find that the beach had come to us.

Our spiritual journeys can be long and winding. Sometimes they’re interrupted or cut short. Even the most blessed and saintly souls often struggle with periods of doubt, or despair, or dead spiritual batteries. And while we pray to drink deeply from the sweet, fresh “spring[s] of the water of life,” our lives are filled as well with brinier waters too, with tears, and sweat, and blood. Our journeys take us far afield, and sometimes we don’t know where they’re leading us. But God knows, and God is coming home to dwell with us as our God; to be with us, and to wipe away every tear from our eyes. God is making all things new. And this promise of renewal is already being fulfilled.

This is important. This passage from Revelation is traditionally read as if it’s about the end state of things, about what’s sometimes called the “Parousia,” Jesus’ final return at the end of time or in some eternal sense, and that’s true. It is. right now, we get a taste of that eternal life. The season of Easter, after all, doesn’t end with the Ascension, with God’s disappearance from earth to go away into heaven, never to return until Judgment Day. Jesus ascends into heaven, yes, but Easter goes on until the day of Pentecost, when he sends the Holy Spirit to be our comforter and guide. And in this long ordinary time, between the first Pentecost and the final Parousia—between one day two thousand years ago, and the Last Day in some eternal and unknowable time—the Holy Spirit is already here, dwelling with us.

Our comfort is not yet complete. God’s new creation is not yet complete. We still live in the world of death and mourning and crying and pain. But there’s a reason it’s called a spiritual journey. We are not alone on our voyage toward God. God the Holy Spirit is already here with us, comforting us, dwelling with us, recreating us into new people every day, as God will one day create a new heavens and a new earth. For “behold,” says the one who is seated on the throne, “I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) Not “I made it once and it was good enough,” not “I will one day fix it all,” but “I am making all things new.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.