Author Archives: Greg Johnston

50 Great Days

Posted on by

Happy Easter!

I say this not just because I’m basking in the memory of Easter morning, and not just because my house is still full of chocolate rabbits and carrot-shaped candy, but because Easter is not just a day: it’s a fifty-day season, stretching from Easter Day to Ascension Day, which falls on the Thursday after the Sixth Sunday of Easter—a season stretching from April 17 to May 26 this year, a season of celebration even longer than our forty-day season of Lenten fasting.

Easter isn’t a season of fasting or arduous spiritual disciplines, but it can be a wonderful time to continue a daily devotional pattern of prayer. If you’re looking for a way to way to mark this season, I’d encourage you to take a look at 50 Days: Celebrating Easter with Daily Reflections from Forward Movement. It’s a free, online devotional with a new daily post during each day of Easter. You can read it on their website or subscribe to receive it in your email every morning. You might also enjoy Easter Triumph, Easter Joy, a book of daily devotions for Easter written by Scott Gunn, Executive Director of Forward Movement.

I’ve taken a few days off this week, so I’ll continue with my usual newsletter reflections next week. For now, I just wanted to share these resources with you.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed—Alleluia!

First-Fruits: An Easter Sermon

Posted on by

First-Fruits: An Easter Sermon

 
 
00:00 / 10:00
 
1X
 

The Rev. Greg Johnston

April 17, 2022

This Christmas, I received a surprising gift. It arrived in a large cardboard box, about four feet tall, and after I cut through the tape and laid out all the parts, it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. As I assembled it, things became clearer in my mind. What it was was a six-foot tall, all-in-one, WiFi-connected, fully-automated indoor hydroponic garden. It’s a remarkable machine. It starts with a six-gallon tank of water on the floor, then rises, with two strips of 75-watt LED lights on one side, facing three plastic columns studded with round holes, about this large. In each one, you place something that I can only describe as a Keurig cup for plants: a tiny, compostable-plastic cartridge containing a matrix of fluffy rockwool and, nestled within it, a single seed. Just fill the tank with water, insert up to thirty-six cartridges, plug in the device (and connect it to the mobile app!)—and wait.

Soon enough, a few green sprouts shoot forth: herbs and lettuces first, the slower-growing tomatoes and peppers a few days later. And over time, as the plants unfurl, what was once a few dozen seeds hidden within their little pods is transformed into a garden of surprising beauty: basil and mint, jalapeños and cherry tomatoes, kale and chard and a dozen different heads of lettuce all growing in your apartment. And if you’re truly bored, you can log into the mobile app to check on how your garden is doing, because, yes, this thing comes with not one, but two cameras and it takes photos at 30-minute intervals throughout the day. (It is the world’s least-interesting app.)

Imagine, for a moment, that you had never seen a tomato before, and someone showed you a time-lapse video from these photos. At first, you’d would see a little pod of wet mineral fluff, then a pale green thing peeking out, then a rather-impressive tomato plant as it grew. But even if you’d watched the whole video intently, the experience of eating a cherry tomato would be unimaginable. You could never picture the red, or yellow, or purple fruit that was about to emerge; and you certainly couldn’t imagine its smooth skin or its elastic crunch or that distinctive burst of sweet acidity that defines the cherry tomato experience.

Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, Mary and Mary and Joanna and the other women come to the tomb, expecting to find Jesus’ body resting where it was laid, and to tend to it, giving it a proper burial, preparing it with spices and ointments (Luke 23:56) for the life of the world to come. But the tomb is empty. Jesus’ body is gone. And their response is an interesting one. They’re not frightened at first, or sad, or angry. They’re “perplexed.” (24:4) And who wouldn’t be? Who on earth has rolled away the stone? And why? Has someone moved his body? Stolen it? Who knows?

And then the angels speak: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” (24:5) And the women’s perplexity turns into joy, and they run to share the good news. But my perplexity remains, even grows. “He is not here, but has risen.” Amen! Alleluia! But what could that possibly mean?

“Christ has been raised from the dead,” Paul writes to the early Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, “the first fruits of those who have died.” Jesus used the same image once to describe his coming death: “Truly I tell you,” he told his disciples, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) It’s a powerful metaphor for understanding the mystery of Easter. Jesus’ body has not been stolen or moved. He is risen. But his rising is not a resuscitation, as though three days after he died, he woke up suddenly and went back to his ordinary life. It’s a resurrection, and it’s something else; it’s more like the growth of a fruit from a seed. Jesus rises, and he has a body, but his life is not longer quite like our lives; in fact, it’s quite different, as different as a cherry tomato is from its seed. The resurrected Christ is still that same Jesus of Nazareth, but transformed into a beauty and a sweetness and a fullness of life beyond anything that we could ever imagine, because we are only seeds, and we’ve never seen a tomato.

As a kind of illustration to explain the theology of the Resurrection by way of a funny anecdote about my surprise hydroponic garden, perhaps this is interesting food for thought. But that’s actually not the point of what Paul says. He’s not trying to explain what Jesus’ resurrection means, full stop; he’s trying to explain what it means for us. And so he doesn’t simply say that the resurrected Christ is like the beautiful fruit that has grown from a simple seed; he says that he is the “first fruits,” the first ripe tomato plucked from the vine. Easter is not a story about the past, about the resurrection of Jesus. It’s a promise for the future, for all of us. “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died,” but there is more fruit yet to grow. We are yet to grow, we who’ve been watered in baptism and nourished in communion, sheltered in the garden of his love and warmed by the strength of his light. And in a world of loss and pain, it bears repeating that the Resurrection is not only a metaphor, not only a claim that love always win in the end, not only an invitation to look for new life in the world around us. It is a promise that you, and I, and everyone we have loved and lost—and everyone, by the way, whom we hate—are like seeds, and that one day, when Christ has destroyed “every ruler and every authority and power” that keep us down, when Christ has defeated “the last enemy,” death itself, (1 Cor. 15:24, 26) we will bloom into that same eternal life, and be a garden flowering in the light of God’s love.

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” Paul says, “we are…most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:19) This life is hard. We are imperfect. Even with all the grace of God, we will never fully become perfect on this earth. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we will be endlessly disappointed. But even in this life, we get a taste. Even here and now, God’s work in us begins to bear fruit. We see it in the lives of those who inspire us, who are sprouts while we are seeds. We see it when we feel the light of God’s sustaining love, and let ourselves grow toward it. We see it when we encounter Jesus in all the places he has told us he is found: in the hungry, and the sick, and the imprisoned; in children, in communion, in community, and in prayer. And if these tidings of the resurrection appearing all around you seem to you to be “an idle tale,” then do as Peter does when Mary and Joanna and Mary come to tell him the good news. (Luke 24:11-12) When someone comes to you with the good news that they have found some sense of peace, or truth, or God, listen carefully. And then run toward the places they say they’ve found it, and see if you can catch a glimpse of the Resurrection there before it disappears.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

“The Return of the King”

Posted on by

“The Return of the King”

 
 
00:00 / 11:30
 
1X
 

The assembled “elders of the people,” the “chief priests and the scribes,” (Luke 22:66) are so close to being right about Jesus. “We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor, and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king,” they say to Pontius Pilate. (23:2) This is mostly not true. The real issue, the one that pushes them over the edge, is that he claims to be the Son of God. But Pontius Pilate doesn’t care about theological disputes. One the other hand, he cares very much about politics. Nobody can be made a king without the approval of the emperor, and so the elders tell him what he needs to hear to press charges: he’s stirring up rebellion. But as insincere as their accusations are, they’re picking up on something real. While Jesus will neither confirm nor deny whether he is in fact “the king of the Jews,” (23:3) his actions tell the story clearly enough. He rides into the city on the back of a colt. (Luke 17:35) The people spread their cloaks before him on the road, (17:37) and cut branches from the trees to wave. And if the colt, and the cloaks, and the palms weren’t enough, the people cry out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (19:38) as Jesus enters the city.

But even without these words, the symbolism would’ve been clear to any ancient Judean. The colt on whose back Jesus rides is not a symbol of humility, a young colt or a donkey instead of a powerful warhorse. It’s a carefully-arrange enactment of the words of the prophet Zechariah, who cried out, “Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zech. 9:9) The cloaks on the ground aren’t simply a way of protecting exalted feet from the dirt of the earth. They’re an echo of exactly what a band of rebels had done eight hundred years before when they were launching a coup to proclaim Jehu as King of Israel. (2 Kings 9:13) The leafy branches that the crowd cut from the trees and that we wave today, are not just any festive seasonal greenery; they’re the branches of the myrtle and willow and palm, the greens of the local trees used in the festival of Sukkot. And these greens, along with the menorah, were the primary signs of Jewish national identity in Jesus’ day. Earlier Jewish revolutionaries had waved them in patriotic military parades (1 Macc. 13:51; 2 Macc 10:7) and later ones would stamp them on their coins. Where we would put the head of George Washington and phrases like “Liberty” and “In God We Trust,” the rebels stamped a palm branch with the phrase “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”

The elder of the people weren’t stupid. They knew what was up. Jesus was positioning himself as the first king in five hundred years, the heir of David and the leader of the people of Israel—a man who would, presumably, lead them in the armed struggle to overthrow Roman rule and establish a new and independent Jewish state. They knew that Jesus was claiming to be king, and we know that Jesus is king; but the events of the week to come show that Jesus is unlike any king who’s come before. Jesus’ life, from his birth to his death but especially during the events of this Holy Week, overturn and our ideas of what it means to be a king.

The colt, the foal of the donkey on which Jesus rides into Jerusalem reminds me of the donkey Mary traditionally rides toward Bethlehem, (Protevangelium of James 17) to give birth to a king who’s not an authoritarian strongman, but a vulnerable child. And it’s the humility and vulnerability of the newborn king that characterize this grown man as he ascends to the throne. The people treat him as a king so lofty that they protect his donkey’s feet from the dirt with the clothes off their own backs; but Jesus doesn’t mind dirty feet. In fact, on Thursday night, he’ll kneel on the floor and wash the feet of his followers and friends. The people cheer for Jesus as he enters the city as if he were this year’s revolutionary leading this year’s army of liberation. But when the moment of crisis comes, when the battle should break out, when even a single one of Jesus’ followers strikes even a single, non-lethal blow, Jesus cries out, “No more of this!” and heals the wound. (Luke 22:51)

If this is supposed to be a coup, then Jesus is failing utterly, and indeed, he fails, because while he is eventually given the title of king by the imperial authorities, it’s only on the cross, in the words of that sarcastic charge an explanation of his crime: “This is the King of the Jews.” (23:38)

And this is why we read the Passion Gospel on Palm Sunday: the king whom we hail with cries of “Hosanna!” is the king who reigns enthroned on the Cross, and he is the inversion of every earthly king. He doesn’t send the young to die in battle to fuel the fires of his ego; he goes himself to die to save them all from death. He doesn’t lord it over those who follow him, but tells them, “I am among you as one who serves,” (22:27) and then serves them, and tells the future leaders of the Church to do the same, for “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.” (22:25-26) He doesn’t send tax collectors to extort half the grain from his hungry subjects so he can grow rich; he takes what he has, and breaks it into pieces, and shares it among them, and tells them to do the same. (22:19) Jesus doesn’t do any of the things an ordinary king would do. He does the very opposite, because, in Paul’s words, “though he was in the form of God,” he “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself,” and “humbled himself,” (Philippians 2:6-7) giving up all the divine and royal privilege that was his by right.

We know all too well what would-be kings can do. We’ve seen it in the rise of authoritarian politics in this country and around the world in the last few years. We’ve seen it more clearly than ever before in our lifetimes in the Russian assault on Ukraine in the last few months. Evangelical support for the far right notwithstanding, strongman politics are not Christian; they are, as they have always been, the way of “the kings of the Gentiles,” who “lord it over them.”

But literal tyrants of flesh and blood are not the only ones we face. There are cultural and spiritual tyrants who set strict laws we cannot manage to obey and demand tribute we cannot afford to pay, forces that demand success, excellence, endless compassion; that tell us we’re not good enough as parents, as spouses, as citizens of the world or members of the church unless we do more and more and more. These tyrannies are so enticing that we sometimes don’t recognize them for what they are, but over time they will crush us nevertheless.

And we are all subject to death, the ultimate tyrant, the last enemy, whom nobody would vote but whose power claims us all, in the end.

But imagine, for a moment, that the things we heard today are true. Imagine that it’s true that “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:11) and that “the greatest among us must be like the youngest,” and the “leader like one who serves.” (Luke 22:26) If we lived in a world that followed Jesus as “the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” the invasion of Ukraine with all its atrocities would not happen, because its Russian perpetrators would know that the measure of our value is not our strength and selfish hunger for power, but Christ’s weakness and self-sacrificing love. If we lived our lives as though Jesus were king, we would not be subject to the tyrannies of perfection, because we would know that the measure of our value is not in our success or achievement or rightness in our arguments, or even in our good works, but in our humility, and forgiveness, and compassion for ourselves and others when we fail. And we do live in a world in which Christ has overthrown the power of death, in which we die—but we will rise again.

Our world often doesn’t look like the world of Palm Sunday, a world Christ has entered in triumph to reign in humility and love. It more often looks like Good Friday, or perhaps Holy Saturday, a world of absence and of loss. But Christ is king, and he is inviting us into the kingdom of love even in the midst of a world that has lost its way. So “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19:38)

Entering Holy Week

Posted on by

I’ve experienced many strange things as a priest, but by far the strangest was being mocked by a man wearing tights and carrying a musket for shamelessly going around outside without wearing a hat.

It was, of course, a Monday morning in mid-April, and I was at the Old Burying Ground in Lincoln, where I had been invited to offer prayers for the fallen British regulars who’d been buried there after the Battle of Concord in 1775. (The Congregationalist minister was invited to pray for the fallen colonial militia. Go figure.) Except for the two clergymen and a rather-uncomfortable representative from the British Consulate, the event consisted entirely of historical reenactors: men dressed in the uniforms of the British Army or the humble clothing of the Minute Men, shooting off blanks from authentic flintlock muskets in memory of the events of the past.

Our Holy Week can sometimes like feel an historical reenactment of the same kind, as we remember the events of the last week of Jesus’ life and act them out: waving palms, washing feet, breaking bread, and even giving voice to the main characters of the story in a dramatic passion play.

Unlike a military reenactment, our emphasis is not on the accurate details of clothes or tools; we do not dress in ancient garb or use first-century soap to wash our feet. Ours is a symbolic reenactment, pulling out a few key practices and moments from the events of Holy Week and reshaping them into the form of our liturgies.

But we share the same simple idea: that human beings are more than disembodied minds. By reenacting what has been, we can learn from and experience the events of the past and allow them to shape us in the present and the future. By reenacting the struggle for freedom, we strive to remain a free people. By reenacting Jesus’ acts of love, we allows ourselves to be formed into more loving people.

So join us, this Holy Week, if you can, as we remember those last few days of Jesus’ life and walk the way that Jesus walked, together.

Palm Sunday — April 10 — 10am

We celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with a parade of palms, and remember the crushing disappointment of his betrayal, arrest, and death with a reading of the Passion According to Luke.

Maundy Thursday — April 14 — 7pm

As Jesus gathered with his disciples for a Last Supper together, we share a simple meal. As he taught them his “new commandment” to love one another as he loved them, and then humbly knelt to wash the dirt from their feet, we wash one another’s feet. As darkness fell and he went out to the Garden to pray, we strip the decorations and ornaments from our sanctuary and pray before the Blessed Sacrament in a Garden of Repose.

Good Friday — April 15 — 7pm

We remember again the events of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, and death with a solemn service of readings and prayers, and venerate the cross on which he died and through which he destroyed the power of death.

Holy Saturday — April 16 — 12pm

One of the simplest, most austere, but most beautiful services of the year, the Liturgy of the Word for Holy Saturday reflects on the day in which Jesus rested in the tomb, and offers prayers drawn from our funeral services.

The Great Vigil of Easter — April 16 — 7pm

Our celebration of Easter begins with the kindling of a new fire and the retelling of the whole story of salvation, stretching from the moment of creation through Easter morning, followed by a festive celebration of the first Eucharist of Easter.

Easter Sunday — April 17 — 10am

We journey with the women who followed Jesus to the door of his empty tomb, and see their astonishment to find him risen, crying aloud our words of praise: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

Under Construction

Posted on by

From time to time this year, a parishioner has asked me how the construction is going on the park next to our apartment. Most of the time, the answer has been, “Well, it’s really… not!” Not much gets done in the world of landscape construction when the ground is frozen. But now that it’s spring and work has started again, I’m reminded how much the work of a construction site can resemble the unfolding of our spiritual and emotional lives.

Sometimes the work is slow and unpredictable, as months pass by without any noticeable change. Sometimes it’s grating, even painful, as you’re awoken by the noise of a front-end loader dumping chunks of concrete into a dump truck at 6:45am. Sometimes it feels like a loss, as you watch a clawed behemoth rip shrubs from the dirt root and branch and listen to the sparrows who made their homes in them chirp forlornly from the wreckage. Sometimes it’s rather grim, as you look at your window for six months on what was once a beautiful green park and is now a heaping pile of dirt, wondering what they’re trying to do beneath the surface, what new plumbing is being installed in the trenches they must dig so early in the morning, before knocking off for the day at ten.

It’s a bit cheesy to write something for a church newsletter with the segue, “And isn’t it like this with God?” But—bear with me for a moment—isn’t it like this with God?

My spiritual life has never (never!) progressed in a straight line for more than a week or two. Sure, there are sometimes bursts of rich prayer in which I feel like I’m drawing closer to God, or times when I feel like I’m really on the right track, I’m really growing into a kinder or more loving or more compassionate person. But these moments are like the uneven activity in the park next door: brief flares of energy punctuating long periods of waiting.

And sometimes, in the more difficult and ultimately most fruitful parts of our lives, things can really be difficult. We can feel as though we’ve lost something we once had. We can feel as though the rich, green park that was once our prayer (or personality, or friendship) is now a vast expanse of dirt; as though something is being ripped up or stripped away, as if trenches are being dug in our souls and we don’t know when it will end, or how.

And yet in and through all this discomfort, real work is being done. It’s as true of spiritual growth as it is of construction that only superficial change can happen through small improvements to the surface. If you’re to really grow, God sometimes needs to rip up all the grass, dig some trenches through the dirt, and lay a few pipes to improve your drainage.

Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) And while I hesitate to express faith in the ultimate competence of any municipal government, it’s fair to say that—in construction as in prayer—this is the only thing that will see you through: the assurance that what is being built will be worth it, that it will be even better than what was lost, that in God’s own time, you are being renewed and transformed into a more loving, more compassionate, more humble version of yourself—however many supply-chain issues and delays there may be along the way.