Sermon — March 6, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As people have followed the news from Ukraine recently, I’ve seen a number of different ways to try to understand what’s happening by telling the stories of the past. It’s something we often do. Is this, one might wonder, closer to what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, or is it closer to what Germany and the Soviet Union did to Poland in 1939? Is it more like what Russia did to Georgia in 2008, or what Russia did to Ukraine just back in 2014? Or, if you’re not so familiar with the dates and times of 20^th-century European history: Is this, as one headline said, a “David and Goliath story”?

It’s interesting, the way we try to understand, as if picking the right story about a situation can tell us something about the way it will unfold. “David and Goliath” is the perfect example. After all, nobody ever claims to be Goliath, because “David and Goliath” doesn’t just distinguish between “small and big,” it separates those who are small, scrappy, and untrained, but righteous from those who are big, powerful, incompetent, and wrong. And “David and Goliath” aren’t just characters, but a story. We know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And we know that it’s not the story of a small but righteous child slowly crushed, despite his best efforts, beneath the inexorable power of a giant. It’s a story in which the determined, innocent boy overcomes the hardened warrior by the grace of God and by the power of his goodness. To claim the David and Goliath story for oneself is to claim that one will have victory, as unlikely as it may seem; and in fact, by giving courage to your friends and attracting compassion from the world, the telling of the story itself shifts the plot of reality toward the victory. It’s not a magic formula. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want. But it’s a legitimate strategy, and it sometimes really works.

We often call Lent a penitential season, a season in which we repent, as one of our liturgies puts it, for “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf,” and we try to repair the damage. It’s also a season of fasting, which is something different. Fasting—whether from certain foods or from alcohol or from anything else we choose to give up during Lent—is not a form of repentance. We don’t give up chocolate or wine or whatever because they’re evil, but because they’re good. And it’s not a punishment, a way of somehow making amends for our sins by forsaking something we like. It’s a workout for the soul, a way of practicing our resistance to really serious temptations by resisting things that aren’t actually bad to do. Along with repentance and fasting, Lent is also a season of preparation: not only of our preparation for the joy of the resurrection on Easter, but, traditionally, a season in which new Christians were formed in the traditions of the faith as they prepared to be baptized at Easter.

Lent is a season of repentance, and of fasting, and of preparation; but it’s also a season of wandering in the wilderness. The forty days of Lent symbolize the forty days of Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness, which are themselves an echo of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness generations before. And this is the part of Lent I’m really feeling the most this year—not repentance, or preparation, or even fasting (although, ask me in a few weeks)—but that story of the wilderness.

The wilderness is an interlude in the story of the ancient Israelites. It should just be a couple days’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and yet this wilderness stretches on for a long, long time, the Promised Land always tantalizingly just around the bend. Much like the last two years. We’ve left behind an old way of living, and we haven’t quite reached the new one yet. And it turns out that this wilderness time hasn’t just been empty time. It’s been a time of transformation and change and reimagination. It’s not just the gap between Point A and Point B—it is, itself, point B in a much longer alphabet of change.

The Book of Deuteronomy is written as a speech by Moses at the end of this wandering time, forty years after he parted the Red Sea so they could escape slavery in Egypt. Moses reminds them of the law that God has given them, and tells them what to do when they finally make it there: “When you have come into the Land…and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of the ground…” and go to the altar of God, and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” and retell the story of their people, of their ancestors’ own ancient wanderings, of their enslavement, and of their liberation. (Deut. 26:1-2, 5)

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the same river Jordan, he is led out into the wilderness to be tested, and stays there for forty days, a miniature version of their forty years. And each one of his responses to the devil’s tempting offers is a quote from that same Book of Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone,” and “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” and “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” all come from that same moment in the people’s story. (Deut. 8:3, 6:13, 6:16)

Jesus’ wilderness time is at the beginning of his ministry, not the end. But it comes while his people are still enduring another wilderness, not forty days or four decades but four centuries and more of foreign rule, of occupation and oppression. And when the devil tempts him with offers of bread, and power, and safety for himself, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, recalling the whole story of the people’s time in the wilderness and their entrance into the Promised Land. The devil offers a single hungry man a loaf of bread; and Jesus calls forth the story of the God who fed his people with manna from heaven every day. The devil offers him power over the kingdoms of all the world, and Jesus recalls the story of a people who’ve had enough of being ruled. The devil offers him protection, but Jesus calls forth the God who parted the sea and dashed the chariots of Pharaoh, the tanks of the ancient world, into bits.

These words have power. When we quote a beloved text, or we give a ritualized address, when we recite ancient prayers or we write a news headline about a “David and Goliath” struggle, we write ourselves into the story, and that story becomes real in our lives.

Paul writes to the church in Rome that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) It’s not a magic formula. It’s the retelling of a story. Like the Eucharistic prayers that evoke the story of salvation, like the Great Litany that echoes with five centuries of the prayers of the past, it draws upon the strength of the experience of Christians in ages past, and their stories begin to shape our lives and our choices as we live the remaining chapters of our stories. And in fact this retelling doesn’t just call forth the stories of our ancestors; it’s brings God to us. When we tell those old stories, Paul quotes Deuteronomy to say, “The word is near [us], on [our] lips and in [our] heart.” (Rom. 10:8, Deut. 30:14) The uppercase-W Word of God is near us. The Word who became flesh is near us. When we tell these stories, and pray these prayers, Christ is near us, whether we can sense him or not, and he is writing the rest of the story for us as leave this place today.

Only a few words of this service today came from me, or from you. More came from the generations before us, fifty or five hundred years ago. And more still came from generations long past, from those who lived in a far-off live two or three thousand years ago. But their stories are our stories. Their God is our God. Their wilderness is not our wilderness, but their wandering is our wandering, and it feels like we’re getting awfully close to the Promise Land. We don’t know what God has written for us in the next chapter of our story, but we do know where God’s story has brought us in the past: from a wilderness of spiritual fasting to a land flowing with milk and honey; from enslavement to liberation; from the cross to the empty tomb; and together with all those who live among us, we can give thanks to God and “celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord [our] God has given to [us].” (Deut. 26:11)

Amen.

Sermon — February 27, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As somebody whose mood mostly revolves around the weather, I can’t stand the kind of overcast skies we’ve been having recently. But as a college newspaper photographer, I loved them. For three years in college, I was a staff photographer and then a photography editor for The Harvard Crimson, an amateur managing amateurs shooting photos for the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, and I very quickly learned about the paradox of light.

In low light, of course, the camera can barely capture anything. If you’re taking candid photos of some visiting scholar at a dimly-lit evening lecture, you can’t just use a flash like a paparazzo. Your only options are to reduce the shutter speed to let in more light (and making your photo blurrier) or to increase the film speed to capture more light (and make your photos grainier). And while printing photos onto newsprint gives you a certain amount of wiggle room—ink bleeds, after all—the digital era takes it all away.

Outdoor events are much better. You have all the light you need. In fact, it’s often too much light. A sunny day is hard for photographers, too. The rays of the sun, coming from a single point, tend to cast harsh shadows. The nose creates a black triangle across the cheek. The bags under the eyes deepen. And the range between the bright highlights and the dark shadows can be hard to capture. Hand the newspaper over to a bunch of freshman photographers on a sunny day, and it looks like The Phantom of the Opera; half the subject’s face is covered in a white mask of over-exposure.

But a cloudy day is photojournalist heaven. A cloudy sky acts like the celestial version of one of those white umbrellas you’ll see in a studio, diffusing the power of the sun. You no longer have a single light source shining down and casting shadows. In fact, on a really overcast day, when the sky’s not just filled with clouds but uniformly grey, it’s as if your subject is illuminated from every direction at once with a soft light, giving you crisp, glowing photos with absolutely no skill required.

This, by the way, is why you’d never want to go on a first date in an airport bathroom. (Well, there are several reasons.) The harsh overhead lights show you exactly as you are; and then some. But the gentle glow of a romantic restaurant, with soft lighting from above and candles from below, shows you in, quite literally, your best light, better than you looked ten years ago on a good day.

Well, you have come to church, not to a photography class (or an airport bathroom), and you’re presumably here to hear about God, not mood lighting. So let me put it this way: while there are many ways to understand who Jesus is and what he does, one school of thought is to say this: Jesus is “the light of the world”; (John 9:5) and he shows us in two very different lights.

One of them is like the harsh light of the sun: beautiful and necessary for our life and growth; unflattering and dangerous to behold with our bare eyes. This is the divine light that shines out of Moses’ face when he comes down from Mount Sinai, fearful to behold. It’s a light so brilliant that you might almost describe it as “sharp.” Indeed, the Book of Exodus literally says something like “his face sprouted horns of light.” (Ex. 34:29) It’s an odd phrase, and indeed it’s the source of a misunderstanding in medieval art, because while every other ancient translator of the Bible ignored the image and simply translated “his face was shining” or something similar, Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, included the bit about horns. He was fluent in Hebrew, he understood that it was just a poetic turn of phrase, but his later readers did not, leading to a thousand years of Western art that depicts Moses with little goat horns on his head. Which is not the point.

The point is that Moses doesn’t just glow with a peaceful, heavenly light. He radiates light in beams so sharp they piece the soul. It’s a symbol of the soul-piercing power of the Law, which he delivers with his face uncovered, the Law whose perfect precepts show human beings exactly as they are. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might,” (Deut. 6:5) shines forth, and the shadows begin to appear; and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) and our imperfections become clear. In the bright light of God’s word, none of us look very good.

And indeed, it’s with such light that Jesus appears when he is transfigured in prayer. “The appearance of his face changed,” Luke writes—get the reference?—“and his clothes became dazzling white,” (Luke 9:29) and again (not to make this an ancient-language seminar) the literal sense of the words is important: “his clothes were white,” Luke writes, “flashing like lightning.” What sharper beam of concentrated light could there be than a bolt of lightning?

And like the Law given to Moses, Jesus’ life is full of love so perfect as to be unflattering for the rest of us. It’s a self-sacrificial, unconditional, patient, peaceful love; a love that loves not only its friends and neighbors but its enemies, as you may recall. This love is an ideal to which we can all aspire, but by whose measure we inevitably fall short. And so Jesus’ light, like Moses’ light, illuminates our flaws. His brightness deepens our shadows. The lightning that flashes from his very clothing stuns his closest followers; even the most holy saints can’t stand before it.

But Jesus shows us in another light, as well, because he is not only the bright sun, but the cloudy sky; not only the shining Word of God, but the veil that softens its radiance. He doesn’t just dazzle Peter and James and John with his light, he brings them into the cloud that buffers it, and they hear the voice of God speaking to them from within. (Luke 9:34-35)

In Jesus, God became human. He faced temptation, and pain, and he knows what it is like to be a human being suffering, and has nothing but empathy and compassion for us. Jesus chooses to become the veil or the cloud or the umbrella that softens the harsh light of his own perfection, and the light of God’s law of love that highlights our flaws by contrast becomes the soft and loving light of God that shows us at our best.

People sometimes say that when God looks at you, God sees Jesus. And this is meant to be a reassurance about divine judgment and divine mercy: God doesn’t see and condemn your imperfect self, God sees and loves Christ in you. But of course, God sees us, God knows us, and God loves us. It’s just that God has chosen to see us in the light of Christ: in the bright light that shows how far from Jesus’ sacrificial love we really are, but ultimately in the soft light that shows us at our best.

And that light, if you take St. Paul’s word for it, not only shows us at our best; it begins to transform us into our best.

I’ll just say up front, be careful about Paul’s interpretation of the veil and the reading of the Law in this passage from Second Corinthians. It deserves a longer aside than I’m going to give it about inter-faith relations. If you read it a certain way, you can draw out some implications about Judaism that are condescending or even dangerous. I’ll just say now that it’s helpful to remember that Paul isn’t a Christian criticizing Jews; he’s a Jewish author, writing to the leaders of a mostly-Jewish religious community, about the way other Jewish religious leaders read the Bible they all share, and he writing without knowing the legacy of Christian violence against Jews that would eventually come.

What interests me, though, is Paul’s idea that seeing this divine light transforms us into that light; that seeing the image of the glory of God, as if it were reflected in a mirror, transforms us into that same image. That it’s not just that God has chosen to see us in our best light, that God chooses to see us at our best and therefore forgives us. It’s that seeing us at our best is what begins to transform us.

It’s almost like the romantic lighting on a first date in that dimly-lit restaurant, which has the power not only to show us in our best light, but—by bringing us into a relationship with someone who will bring out the best in us—has the power actually to make us better. (And, to be clear: I mean it makes us better people, not better-looking people.)

This kind of light doesn’t work by hiding our flaws, but by revealing the goodness of our true selves beneath the exterior. And it’s that light that God chooses to shine on us, not only seeing us in our best light but by making us into our best selves. “Therefore,” Paul writes, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” (2 Cor. 4:1) Since it is by God’s mercy that we, all of us, are engaged in this ministry—in this Christian journey of love—we do not lose heart, because we know that God sees us in that loving, forgiving, transforming light. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18) Amen.

Sermon — February 20, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s been a week of love. On, Monday, Murray got a homemade Valentine and some cookies from a preschool friend, I baked Alice chocolate muffins, and Alice bought me not one but two varieties of pickles. (Spicy green bean and smoked okra, if you’re curious.) Then, this Sunday, we hear not one, not two, but three reflections on love in our collects and our readings.

“O Lord,” the Collect of the Day begins, “you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love…without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.” Love is truly the greatest gift of God; whether it’s romantic love, the love between family members or friends, or the love that we make manifest in the service of our neighbors, love is one of the most powerful forces in the world.

For “if you love those who love you,” Jesus says, “what credit is that to you?” (Wait. What?) “For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same… But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:32-35)

This is not the “Sunday after Valentine’s Day” kind of love.

“Love” is, of course, one of the core concepts of Christianity; you might even call it one of the key practices of our faith. It’s certainly been at the center of my faith. I remember reading the First Letter of John for the first time during college, at a time when I had a good friend who was struggling, and being struck by its beautiful account of love:  “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7–8) For whatever reason, I’d never grasped before how central “love” is to Christianity, and I can’t describe how comforting it was to hear that the love that was sustaining me as I tried to care for this friend was God’s love working in me. And I found that I was able to anchor my faith and my life in those Two Great Commandments that Jesus names from the Old Testament: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27) Wherever I went, and whatever I did, I knew that if I walked this road, loving and serving my neighbor, loving and serving God, I couldn’t go wrong.

It wasn’t for a couple of years that I realized I’d been tricked. Loving a friend in need, caring for a neighbor who needs help, these things are wonderful and important—but they are not the most difficult or the only forms of Christian love. After all, Jesus has a point. Loving those who love you is one thing; loving your enemies is another.

Because “love your enemies” doesn’t mean “have warm and fuzzy feelings about Vladimir Putin’s army massing on the borders of Ukraine.” It means desiring and working for the good for the person right here, in front of you, who has wronged you. Your enemy is not an abstract, faceless horde. It is the person you can’t stand, the one who takes up your headspace as you rehash old arguments and rehearse the ones to come. “Love your enemies,” Jesus says; “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6:37) But sometimes, it can be hard to forgive. At the very same moment that I felt so comforted by the idea that my love for a friend was God’s love working in me, I was, at the very same time, utterly refusing to forgive another person, a family member who’d done something wrong. I was mulling and stewing and raging against this person, even as every day I fell more deeply in love with our loving God.

But if you ever think your family members have treated you badly, you might want to recall the story of Joseph. You may remember the details: Joseph, the youngest of twelve sons, betrayed by his brothers as a child and sold into slavery, rises with God’s help to the heights of Pharaoh’s administration in Egypt. Now there’s been a famine, and his brothers have come to Egypt for help, not realizing that he’s in charge, and while he takes his revenge, messing with them for a while, eventually his old love of his brothers rises to the surface.

“Joseph could no longer control himself,” the story goes, “before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me… And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence…[But he] said to his brothers, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt… Do not be distressed” (Genesis 45:1–5) And he comforts them, and he provides for them, and he embraces them.

He loves his enemies; he blesses those who cursed him; and it is like “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,” put into his lap; “for the measure you give,” as Jesus says, “will be the measure you get back.” (Luke 6:38) And the most poignant moment of the story turns out not to be the moment when Joseph’s brothers bring their faith the bloody Technicolor Dream Coat, and he thinks his son has dead, but the moment when that son finally meets his brothers again and forgives.

The truth is, we all have the power to do what Joseph did. We have all been forgiven, and we can all forgive.

A few years ago I went to a preaching conference just outside Richmond, Virginia. and the keynote speaker, was a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University named Everett Worthington. Now, keynote speakers can be hit or miss. But this was a hit. Worthington was a psychologists, working at a public university, not a theologian or a pastor; but he was a Christian, and his work was a kind of ministry, because his academic specialty was the psychological study of forgiveness.

Now, it was a week-long conference, and I have more than one of his books still sitting on my shelf, but to a certain extent you can summarize what he had to say in a few key points.

First—and this is important—you can make the decision to forgive. Whether someone has apologized or not, whether they’re still alive or not, whether you’ve ever met them or not (imagine, here, the person who’s just cut you off in traffic!); whatever the case may be, you can choose to forgive. You don’t have a choice whether they wronged you. You don’t have a choice whether you felt angry or hurt; and you probably should have! But you do have a choice between forgiveness and unforgiveness; between ruminating and plotting revenge and forgiving and beginning to heal.

The actual emotional process of forgiveness takes much longer than this initial decision. It’s almost like painting a wall that’s been painted many times before: without replacing the feelings of anger, or pain, or frustration with this person, you add layers of empathy, or compassion, or love. You can start with a primer of empathy, remembering a time when you’ve needed forgiveness, remembering that you, too, are fallible. You can add a coat of prayers for their wellbeing, or even for their repentance and change. At the very least, in the most horrifying situations, sympathy, even pity, can do the trick; it must be so terrible to have a soul so twisted as theirs. Poor baby. But in any case the emotional work of forgiveness consists of gradually adding more layers onto that wall, until the color slowly shifts from the green and red of envy and anger to the pink and blue of love and, one day, peace.

And while there will sometimes be chips, flakes that show the layers of old color beneath, for the most part, you no longer have to look at that ugly wall every day.

I’ll be honest with you, I hate that this is the case. I wish that the Christian religion was about being right. That it was about me loving you, and you and me loving God, and all of us working together to build a world shaped by love; which is to say, a world where everyone held my opinions and lived according to my values and voted for my favorite politicians. I wish that Christ’s message of love were about how awesome I am when I am loving, and how terrible those people are who aren’t as accepting and loving as I.

But alas. Christianity is not a religion of perfection and good deeds. It’s a religion of forgiveness. And thank God for that, because I need it. “Forgive,” Jesus says, “and you will be forgiven,” (Luke 6:37) and it’s not a commandment or a burden or a judgment but an invitation and a gift. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Set yourself free from the burden of age-old wounds, and if you can’t—if loving even your enemies is just a bridge too far—then remember, always, that if God extends such love and forgiveness to her enemies, then she will surely, surely, forgive you, her beloved friend.

“O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”