Sermon — August 14, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

These are hard readings, this week: verse after verse of judgment, suffering, division, and despair. They seem to be starting out with something nice— “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song!” (Isaiah 5:1)—but things quickly take a turn. Oh, I’ll sing a love song, all right, Isaiah says, about a vineyard. “I will remove its hedge!… I will break down its wall!” It shall be “devoured” and “trampled down!” “It shall not be pruned or hoed,” it will not receive a drop of rain, “I will make it a waste,” and “it shall be overgrown.” (Isaiah 5:1-7) Not quite romantic.

Then Hebrews reminds us of the stories of the great heroes of the Old Testament, of the judges and kings and prophets who led their people to freedom and to victory—and of the martyrs who were “stoned to death, sawn in two… killed by the sword…” who were “destitute, persecuted, tormented,” who were driven from their homes and lived in holes in the ground. (Hebrews 11:32-38) And this encomium to faith is more than a little intimidating. Would any of us really be willing to do the same?

But thankfully, as we do everything Sunday, we finally get to the Gospel reading, and Jesus always has something nice to say. Right? “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! … Do you think I came to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but division! … Three against two and two against three… father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother… You hypocrites! Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:49-53, 56)

Just in case you didn’t get enough strife and division in the newspaper from Monday to Saturday: here’s an extra Sunday-morning dose. Of course, a part of me secretly relishes this kind of thing, because we are divided—in our nation, in our communities, in our families—and I know, as we all do, that my side is right, and it’s those people who disagree with me who are hypocrites. Right? And to be perfectly honest there’s just a little part of me that’s glad that the lectionary puts all these readings in mid-August, and not on “Welcome Back Sunday!”

Today’s lessons make for grim reading. But I want to suggest to you at least one way of making sense of them as “good news,” as a reassuring word from God to the people of God, because each of these readings comes out of the anguish of a bedraggled and discouraged minority, desperately trying to hold onto hope in a world that seems to be burning down all around them. So let’s start from the beginning.

The prophet Isaiah lived in the city of Jerusalem in the 8^th century BC, in the shadow of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians were a mighty and merciless power. Isaiah would watch them conquer and destroy the northern kingdom of Israel, scattering ten of the twelve tribes of the Israelites into exile. He would see them come for Jerusalem, nearly destroying that city, too, and they nearly did, in a siege that only ended with what the Israelites saw as a miraculous divine intervention. This was a terrifying thing; conquest wouldn’t have been a casual change of government, but would likely end in death or enslavement for most of the population. But it was a religious crisis as well. The Israelites were God’s chosen people. Wasn’t their God strong enough to protect them?

Isaiah’s prophecy subtly shifts the blame. It’s not that God is too weak to protect the city, it’s that the people have created a social order that’s so unjust, so unequal, that God just might allow it to be destroyed. He closes with a cutting Hebrew pun: “God expected mishpat and found mishpach; he expected tzedakah, and found tze‘aqah.” God expected that the people whom he had led into freedom would build a city based on his divine law of love, and he found bloodshed instead. God imagined they would practice tzedakah, charity—and he found tze‘aqah, outcry.

It’s not Isaiah’s prophecy that’s grim and scary. His people’s actual lives are scary. And you may or may not like his theology, but Isaiah offers hope: the hope that if they change their ways, if they reorganize their society, if they practice law and charity instead of cruelty and outrage, God will return to the people she loves and tend their vineyard again.

The Book of Hebrews comes from a similar place. We don’t know much about the author of the letter—he or she never names or places herself—but we do know that the early Christians were a persecuted and misunderstood group. In good times, they could hope to be treated like most of us would treat door-to-door proselytizers: strange people with strange ideas who you kind of want to avoid in polite society. In bad times, the simple statement “I am a Christian” could be punishable by death. Hebrews looks to the great heroes and the great martyrs of the Bible, and blends them together as exemplars of faith. It makes no distinction between the kings and prophets who achieve great success, and the ordinary men and women who suffer and die in failure. And this is grim, and it’s depressing, but it’s comforting, too, in its way. Hebrews reminds these early Christians that, with all due respect to Isaiah, their suffering is not a sign that God has rejected them. It’s not a sign of divine punishment. It is, in fact, what Jesus himself had endured, like generations of faithful people before him and generations  since. And more than that: Jesus’ own failure and death were the means of his ultimate triumph and our ultimate redemption, because it was Jesus, the “pioneer and perfecter” of our faith, who had “endured the cross, disregarding its shame,” and through his own death had destroyed the power of death.

And so we come to Jesus’ words in Luke, dividing households and families and nations against themselves. For what it’s worth, we know that Jesus’ own family were less-than-enthusiastic about his ministry, at times. (Luke 8:19-21) And we know that his movement did in fact divide families. Some whole households would convert, to be fair, and join the Jesus movement. But it was much more common for one or two members to become Christians, and we have ancient stories about the breaks this could cause with parents and siblings and the retribution angry fathers could take. Now, that’s very different from our own, modern Christianity, in which so many people are born into Christian families or even Christian nations, where a kind of casual cultural Christianity is taken for granted. But there’s some similarity, too; there’s comfort and hope for us in Jesus’ hard words, because they mean that the early Christians weren’t letting Jesus down when their churches struggled to grow, when the people around them didn’t just accept their message and join in. Jesus knew that what he was trying to do wouldn’t be popular, he knew it would cause division and conflict, and he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

We live in very different times. And yet they’re not so different, in some ways. Our families are often divided—sometimes even by religion! Our churches, in this country, are not persecuted, but they are struggling. Our city is not besieged by a mighty army, but sometimes it does feel like the world is falling apart. And if you look around, it’s easy to find bloodshed where there should be justice; a cry, where there should be righteousness.

Isaiah, and Hebrews, and Jesus found hope in the midst of it, in their very different ways.

So where do you find hope?

I can’t speak for anyone else. But for me, there’s something comforting about Hebrews’ idea of the “great cloud of witnesses” who surround us. Human beings have been on this earth for ten thousand generations or more. There is no joy and no sorrow we can experience that has not happened before, and there are ancestors and friends, visible and invisible, bearing witness to our lives, all around us. And in Jesus, our very God suffered, and wept too. Wherever we are, whatever happens to us, it has happened before, and God loves each one of us still. God is faithful to us, even when our faith begins to fail, and is leading the way for us through all the turmoil of life into a better future for this world.

So then, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Amen.

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — August 7, 2022

Lectionary Readings

When I was in elementary school, my parents finished the basement in my childhood home. Before, it had been a dark and dirty place; I was scared to go down there by the laundry machines alone. But now, it was a bright room, with lights and a couch and a carpet and my new favorite place in the house: the cedar closet.

It was just a regular closet to store clothes, but lined with cedar, and of course cedar repels moths, so it was the perfect place to store clothes that were out of season. Of course, I didn’t care about this at the time. I loved it for a very different reason: the smell. Not the nasty smell of mothballs, but the indescribable smell of fresh-cut cedar planks. And so I’d go in there, and play among the coats like a little kid does in a coat closet, and enjoy that wonderful smell.

And then some time in early December, my mother would start telling me to stop messing around in the closets. She was always a little secretive about the reasons, and I wasn’t a very obedient child, so one day, I was playing in the basement and opened up the cedar closet and I discovered the reason she’d told me not to go in there: tucked away behind the fall coats and ski jackets was a stack of Christmas presents from my parents, each one neatly wrapped.

Now, don’t worry. This is not the story of how Greg opened all the presents in advance and ruined Christmas. And of course, my gifts from Santa Claus had not yet arrived. But to me, it’s the perfect illustration of the difference between faith and knowledge. I had faith, every year, that there would be something under the tree on Christmas morning. But I never knew for sure, not until that moment of excitement some time around 5am on Christmas Day when I would run down the stairs and peer around the corner into the living room and see that the presents had arrived. Faith and knowledge are two very different things.

“Faith,” writes Hebrews, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) Faith is to “set out for a place” you have been promised, like Abraham had done, “not knowing where [you are] going.” (11:8) Faith is spending a life living in tents, wandering in the desert in a foreign land, when you’ve been promised a home. (11:9) Faith is trusting the promise that your descendants will be “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the sea,” even though no children have been born yet, and you are getting very old. (11:12)

Faith is not certainty; it’s more like perseverance in the face of uncertainty. And this is the frustrating and the wonderful thing about a life of faith. The greatest examples of Christian faith are not people who’ve always had an answer to everything and never doubted the teachings of their religion. They’re people who struggled with God throughout their lives, who went through long periods of spiritual dryness or despair, and who nevertheless persisted in loving God and loving their neighbors with everything they had.

This is a frustrating truth. “God, just give me a sign!” must be one of the most common prayers in human history. We genuinely want and need guidance. Some of us have had times when God felt especially present in our lives. Some of us have had spiritual experiences that reassure us of God’s love. But most of us spend most of our lives uncertain, wondering where God is, wondering whether any of this makes sense. And none of us truly know God; not on this side of eternity.

But these struggles are not a lack of faith. They are faith. Not “faith” in the sense of unquestioning belief in some theological proposition, but “faith” in the sense of Abraham’s faithfulness to God, and God’s faithfulness to Abraham. God has promised us a kingdom of peace, a community of live, an everlasting life of joy, and those things have not yet come to be. We are like all those whom Hebrews names who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw them and greeted them.” (11:13) We get a taste to sustain us on our journey, but the destination is far off, and we do not know where we are going. And yet, faithfully, we continue on, and it’s the power of those promises that has sustained us over the years, that invitation into the dream of God that has inspired generations of people of faith. And that’s why I say that faith is a frustrating and wonderful thing: it is perseverance and uncertainty combined.

This goes beyond our own personal spiritual lives. The same is true about our journey as a community, as a nation, as the human species. God spoke through the prophet Isaiah 2700 years ago to command us: “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17) Jesus invited us 2000 years ago the enter “the kingdom”: to sell our possessions, and give alms; to make for ourselves “an unfailing treasure in heaven.” (Luke 12:33) This is God’s dream for our world, and yet it’s obvious that that dream is not yet reality. That dream has sustained and frustrated us for generations as we journey towards it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He knew that he would never live in the promised land of peace and equality. He could see it from a distance and “greet it,” as Hebrews said, but he would die in faith, without having received the promise—as will we all. And yet, his perseverance in the face of uncertainty—his conviction that history bends toward justice, even if the world is not yet just—has inspired millions of people to keep that faith in their own way.

God has promised many gifts to us, but Christmas has not yet come. We have made many prayers, but haven’t yet seen all of them answered. We are journeying together toward our promised home, but for now, we live in tents, in a foreign land. But even here, we live, as we always have, by faith. Not by knowledge. Not by certainty. But by persevering in the way that Jesus taught us, holding fast to that faith which is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things” that are not yet fully seen. Amen.

Sermon — July 31, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I had a conversation a few years ago with a man who had big plans for a new non-profit he wanted to start. He’d spent a long career working hard in the financial sector, and been able to retire early, so he needed a new project. And he told me about this new organization he’d learned about in the city where he lived. Their plan was to rent unused space in under-subscribed public schools in the city, convert those empty classrooms into squash courts, and then use them to teach squash for free to kids in the neighborhood. It’s a funny variation on the idea that the best urban sports are the ones, like basketball that don’t need much space or grass, and squash certainly qualifies. And it has the kind of side benefit that certain sports, like golf, or tennis, or racquetball, carry a kind of social cachet that could actually boost the careers of kids who went on to college and professional life, at least in some professions.

I’d never heard of this, but the acquaintance who was telling me about it loved the idea. It was right up his alley. There was just one problem. “I don’t play squash,” he said, “but I love golf. So, I want to start the same thing, but teaching golf to inner-city kids!” And—never having really seen the appeal of golf myself, and thinking that a golf course is a little harder to squeeze into an empty classroom than a squash court, I nodded politely. And then he said something I’ll never forget: “I’m all ready to get started. I just need to lower my handicap by a few strokes first, so I have enough cred in the golf world.”

Jesus’ parable today confronts us with the urgency of God’s call to each one of us. “What should I do?” the rich man asks himself. “I have no place to store my crops!” (12:17) Or rather, he has a place to store his crops, it’s just not big enough anymore. It’s as if your bank account were a physical place where you stored your cash, and you became so wealthy that your bank account was full. When you went to make your deposit, you could not cram another hundred-dollar bill into its depths. And instead of thinking to yourself, “Maybe I don’t need all this. Maybe I should share some of this wealth,” you spent your money building a bigger bank. And when you’d built a bank big enough to hold it all, you took a deep breath, and said to yourself, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” (12:19) You could finally relax. “But God said to you: ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you!’” (12:20) What do you have to show for yourself?

Now, let’s be as generous as we can to the rich man in the story. Perhaps he planned to give some of his wealth away one day. Perhaps he had good intentions of feeding the hungry with some of that food, perhaps he had always planned to donate a hospital wing or to renovate the synagogue. Perhaps one day he would, when he was finally comfortable enough that he could give something away without it undermining the lifestyle he’d come to expect.

But if there’s one thing I know about human psychology, it’s that that “one day” is elusive. We set our sights on the future, thinking things will be different then; and then the future arrives, and things feel much the same. The parable is about wealth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that, but the pattern applies to so much more of our lives than that. Have you ever thought to yourself, “Once I X, then I’ll finally be able to Y?” “Once the baby’s sleeping through the night, then I’ll finally take some time for myself.” “Once the kids are out of the house, then we’ll work on our marriage.” “If I just put my head down for a few years of seventy-hour weeks and make partner, then I’ll be able to relax.” “If only he’d try just once to make things better, then I’d let go of this resentment I’ve been carrying.” “If I could just knock a few strokes off my handicap, then I could finally start teaching golf to the kids.”

And then we get there… and we kick the can down the road again, because it feels just as hard now as it ever did then. But there’s an urgency to these things. We can defer them further and further into the future, but we can’t guarantee that the future will ever arrive. We can’t control our own destinies; and we’re not very good at predicting our future actions. All we can do is act now, or not. But “this very night your life is being demanded of you,” God says. What are you leaving undone? (12:20)

Now, I don’t want you to think I’ve come back from vacation full of fire and brimstone. (I was always like this.) No, because alongside this parable of urgency, we have to read a prophecy of mercy: our first lesson, from the prophet Hosea.

You may not quite grasp the historical and geographical and national references, to Israel and Ephraim, Admah and Zeboiim; that’s okay. But you can probably tell that they’re a way of locating the original hearers of the prophecy, a way of addressing them directly. So indulge me for a minute in addressing this prophecy from God to you, as Hosea addresses it to the ancient Israelites: “When you were a child, I loved you; and out of hard times I called you. The more I called you, the more you went from me… it was I who taught you to walk, I took you up in my arms; but you did not know that I healed you. I led you with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I lifted you like an infant to my cheek… You may be bent on turning away from me… But how can I give you up, O my beloved people? How can I hand you over? …My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender… for I am God, and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:1-11)

And here’s the thing: if you deferred your humanity, if you put off every act of goodness, if you turned away from God again and again and again and never acted on any of those vaguely good intentions for the future, and if this very night you came face to face with your Maker, this would be God’s response: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over? From before time, I have loved you, through it all.”

This merciful, unconditional love doesn’t undermine the urgency of God’s call. In fact, it’s the only thing that lets us answer that call. Because, left to our own devices, we will probably never feel like we’ve arrived. We will never have enough to really feel comfortable giving it away. We will never have achieved enough to really feel comfortable relaxing. We will never golf well enough to feel like we’ve earned the respect we need to start that non-profit. No matter what anyone says to us, most of us will never fully feel like we are good enough to be loved; and yet if God loves us so deeply in our imperfection, even in our outright rejection, what risk could there possibly be in just starting now?

So, you may never reach that “one day.” Or, if you do, it may not feel as different as you’d imagined. But this day, “this very night,” you are enough to answer that call. You are enough to tackle that task. You are enough to live your life right now as you wish you could live it then. For—as St. Paul writes in that beautiful but enigmatic phrase, “your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) So may you indeed be, as he says, “renewed in knowledge according to the image of [your] creator,” (Col. 3:10) who has loved you for so long with such indescribable love. Amen.