Sermon — May 1, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

This is one my favorite stories in the Bible, and it’s definitely one of the silliest. Easter has come and gone, Jesus has died and risen again, and the disciples have gone home to Galilee. They’ve gone back to their ordinary lives, they’ve gone back to their fishing boats, and they’re putting a hard day’s work. And you can tell it’s been a long day working out under the sun, because apparently Peter has taken off his clothes to stay cool. And then they see a man standing on the shore, and after he speaks to them, the beloved disciple recognizes him: it’s Jesus! And Peter is so excited that he totally freaks out. He picks up the clothes he’d taken off to work, and throws them on, and then, fully-clothed, leaps into the water to swim to Jesus! And the rest of them do what normal people do and turn the boat toward the shore.

Do you get this excited to church on a Sunday morning?

Maybe not. But in a way, this story is exactly like what we do ever week. We come from our ordinary lives—from our work and our play, from our grocery shopping and our sports practices—and come to this place where Jesus can be found. And he welcomes us, and shares with us a simple meal.

We come to give thanks for all the blessings of our lives. That’s what “Eucharist” means, when we call the Communion or the Mass “Holy Eucharis.” Eucharist means “thanksgiving.” God has given us all the good things that we have, our lives and our health and our 153 fish—that’s seventeen fish per person for breakfast, by the way—and we bring some of what God has given us back, and offer it to God, and share it with one another with gratitude. That’s why we offer our bread and our wine and our donations to the church, as a token of thanks from all that God has given us.

Jesus welcomes them, and feeds them, and they rest there for a moment in the presence of their risen Lord.

And then he does something new. He’s fed them, and now he tells them to feed one another. He asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?” And three times he says yes, and three times Jesus commands him to share that same love with the people around him: “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.” Jesus has loved Peter, and Peter has loved Jesus; and now it Peter’s turn to love everyone else. Like all the disciples, Peter has returned home and he’s returned to his ordinary life—but his life will never be the same again, because it has been transformed by the love God has felt and shown for him.

Some of you are receiving communion for the first time today, sharing your first holy meal with Jesus. Some of you have received communion hundreds, even thousands of times before. Each Eucharist is different for each one of us. We give thanks for many different things. We pray for many different things. But in this moment, when we give thanks together to the same God, we meet the same Christ and hear the same call.

In this bread and in this wine, Jesus comes to us. He is as really and truly present for us now as he was on the seashore for the disciples all those years ago. And he speaks the same words to each one of us here. Go, and cast your nets in the world. (John 21:6) Bring some of what you’ve caught, and give thanks. (21:10) Come and break your fast; take, and eat. (21:12-13) And after you’ve been fed—go feed my lambs.

This is the most holy and sacred meal we share. But it means nothing if its spirit remains here, in this room. So I pray that you take the spirit of this day with you throughout the week. I pray that the same Holy Spirit who makes Christ present in his Body and his Blood sends you out into the world to carry on this moment in your lives. I pray that the Christ who takes what he has, and breaks it apart, and shares it with the people around him, becomes present in your acts of sharing, and kindness, and love. I pray that this sacrament makes us all sacraments of God’s love in the world, outward and visible signs of God’s inward and spiritual grace; and I pray to God in the words of the priest Percy Dearmer, who wrote in the words of the communion anthem the choir will sing in just a few minutes: O God,

All our meals and all our living make as sacraments of thee,
that by caring, helping, giving, we may true disciples be.
Alleluia! Alleluia! We will serve thee faithfully.

Sermon — April 24, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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!