Sermon — December 12, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I do three things at the altar rail every Sunday during communion: I deliver the Body of Christ to anyone who wants to receive communion; I say a blessing for anyone who doesn’t; and I try to make every single toddler smile. I say “every single toddler” because usually the older kids are too cool for me, and just receive a blessing or a wafer in fidgety silence. But the older babies and the toddlers have none of their ennui, and some of them are just into that blessing. They look up at me from their parents’ arms or from the cushion where they stand. Their eyes track my fingers as I make the sign of the cross. And if they’re looking at me, I smile at them, and I tell you there is literally nothing that makes me happier on a Sunday morning than when a toddler smiles back. It especially impressive, when you think about it, that they can do this at all: they can look at my face, recognize that I’m smiling, and smile back, without ever once being able to see my mouth beneath my festive, liturgically-colored mask.

It has everything to do with the physiology of what psychologists call a Duchenne smile, a genuine smile. A non-Duchenne smile is what you do for school picture day: you may be feeling bored or sad or angry or tired, but when it’s your turn you sit in your chair and you put on a smile and, at the end of the day, the photographer sends home at least one print in which the corners of your mouth are upturned, however fake the smile may be.

A Duchenne smile, though, a real smile, is not just about the shape of your mouth. A real smile engages the muscles of the whole cheek and—most importantly—the orbicularis oculi, the muscle that surrounds the eye. And it’s this that leads me to smile so vigorously with my eyes; not just that I’m working on my crow’s-feet so people will stop telling me how young I am for a priest, but that I’m trying to broadcast my smile as clearly as I can over a mask. You can use a mask, in fact, as a filter for whether someone’s giving you a real or a fake smile; if it’s a fake one, you can’t even see it!

Toddlers get it. Toddlers recognize that real smile, and toddlers will smile back.

And that’s part of the actual power of the blessing. The words provide no comfort to a one-and-a-half-year-old. The gesture is fascinating to watch at first but presumably gets old with time. I can’t speak to any intangible spiritual benefits the child may receive; they are, after all, intangible. But a smile really does something.

There’s a famous study from the late 1980s in which researchers asked participants to rate how funny cartoons were while holding a pen either between their teeth or between their lips. They found that people holding the pen in their teeth (forcing their muscles into a “smiling” position) rated the cartoons as being significantly funnier than those who held the pen in their lips (and who were therefore “pouting”). Just activating the muscles they use to smile put them in a better mood, even though they didn’t know they were supposed to be smiling.

More recently, this particular study has come under fire; other researchers haven’t been able to replicate its remarkable findings. But psychologists do agree that genuine smiles really do make us feel happier. It’s not a huge effect. It’s not a miracle cure for unhappiness. But it reflects what some people call our “embodied cognition.” Our emotions don’t start in our brain and flow into the rest of our bodies; they are, in part, the way our brain interprets what our bodies are already feeling. It’s the same reason drinking coffee makes you feel anxious—because caffeine raises your heart rate, and your mind thinks something must be wrong. We can’t control the world around us, and we can’t control our own emotions; nor should we try to. But we can give them a little nudge.

We have arrived again at the Third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, “Rejoice!” Sunday, the Sunday on which we switch our candles from penitential purple to joyful pink and, perhaps ironically, hear words that can be remarkably hard. I don’t mean the words of John the Baptist about the “brood of vipers” and the winnowing fork and the chaff being burned with unquenchable fire. I mean the beautiful but burdensome words of St. Paul: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice… The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything.” (Phil. 4:4-6)

I preached a similar sermon a year ago, you may remember, on the third Sunday of Advent, when we read the other epistle, when Paul instructs us the Thessalonians simply: “Rejoice always.” I suggested then that this was a difficult proposition to preach straight into a camera in a virtually-empty church in December 2020, at the end of what was, needless to say, anything but a joyful year.

The state of the world has gotten much better since then, in some ways, but it’s still not pure, continuous joy. That’s not because of Covid. It’s part of human life. We’re not all happy all the time. “Rejoice in the Lord always” has never been good news if it’s meant “feel joyful all the time.” It’s a burden and a source of shame to anyone who aren’t always having a “holly jolly Christmas.” “Don’t worry about anything” isn’t a relief, if it means “just relax.” It’s an insult, a minimization of people’s very real concerns about very pressing issues in our lives, and our communities, and our world.

But Paul, for his part, wrote these words from jail. So I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to say at all.

“Rejoice,” after all, is a verb, not a noun or an adjective; it’s a thing that you do, not a thing that you feel or a way that you are. “To rejoice” doesn’t mean “to feel happy.” It means to celebrate. It means to give thanks. It means, in the words of the prophet Zephaniah: “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” (Zeph. 3:14) These are not things that you feel. They’re things that you do. I said that Paul wrote “Rejoice in the Lord always” from prison, awaiting trial. Zephaniah’s writing in dark times too. You don’t need to comfort people with the idea that they “shall fear disaster no more” (3:15) if they haven’t been afraid; you don’t need to tell people that “all your oppressors” will be “dealt with” if they haven’t been oppressed. (3:19) But despite their fear, despite their oppression, Zephaniah exhorts the people, “Rejoice! Sing! Exult!” because God is “rejoic[ing] over you,” God is “renew[ing] you in his love,” God is “exult[ing] over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.” (3:17-18)

And even Paul’s words about anxiety aren’t as simple as the Bobby McFerrin song: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The word “worry” here has a certain connotation; not “worry” in the sense of reasonable caution about possible danger, but “worry” in the sense of fretting, of stewing, of allowing your attention to be consumed by the contemplation of dangers over which you have no control. The English word “worry” originally meant the way some dogs and wolves kill their prey, by grabbing it in their teeth and shaking it. To “worry” about something is to grab hold of it and shake it and not let go.

Paul doesn’t tell us “don’t worry,” full stop. It’s not about suppressing your emotions. It’s about redirecting them. Paul gives us the ancient Christian equivalent of a practice of mindfulness: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil. 4:6) Don’t keep circling around those worries in your own head again and again and again, but name them, speak them out loud, offer them to God in prayer. And then, if they come back, well… “Let your gentleness be known to everyone,” not least to yourself. (Phil. 4:5)

“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul writes from his prison cell, “again I say, Rejoice.” And so, on this better-but-not-yet-perfect Third Sunday of Advent again I, Greg, say: Rejoice!

Not because I think you should feel cheerful or joyful or happy all the time. But because all of us, whatever we’re feeling at any given moment, can rejoice. All of us can give thanks for the light we find amid darkness. All of us can gather at this Eucharistic feast, literally this feast of thanksgiving, and offer our prayers and supplications to God… and then let go, just for a moment, if we can, and see if those outward practices of rejoicing might make our hearts rejoice as well, just as seeing another person smile at us and smiling in return can be a blessing in itself.

There’s nothing worse than being told to smile when you do not feel like smiling. And so I recognize the danger in telling you to rejoice, when you may or may not feel like rejoicing. I hope that you hear it not as a command and another burden in a busy season, not as an attempt at emotional manipulation, but as a gift and an invitation, a reminder that while there are many things you cannot control in this world, things that will cause you grief and things that will cause you worry and things that will cause you joy, you can choose to rejoice, to practice gratitude and joy, in ways big or small, “always,” no matter what the day may bring.

For “the Lord is near… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Amen.

Sermon — December 5, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

For my birthday a few weeks ago, Alice and Murray bought me a two-part present that says a lot about the kind of man I am. First, they went to Ace Hardware, and bought me the gift they knew I needed: a brand-new toolkit, with two sets of new screwdrivers and matching adult and child-sized tape measures. And then they walked next door to Whole Foods, where they bought me the gift they knew I’d love: a matching set of lavender body wash, moisturizer, and bubble bath, and three magnificent bath bombs in various flavors: cactus flower, gardenia blossom, strawberry something or other.

And you know what? I’ve loved both my presents.

Now, bath bombs for grown-ups come in all sorts of fragrant and relaxing varieties. But bath bombs for kids are even more fun. For those among us who are especially reluctant to take a bath, there are all sorts of enticing ways to make it more fun. My favorite one is ingenious: the dinosaur-egg bath bomb.

Can you imagine what I mean? Essentially, it’s a little egg made of that chalky bath-bomb stuff. And at its center, there’s a tiny plastic dinosaur. If you toss it into the water while you take a bath, the outside starts to fizz, slowly eating away at the egg until the dinosaur within is revealed. It’s a win-win-win: your boring bath is now a bubble bath, you’ve got a new dinosaur toy, and your parents might have twelve to fifteen seconds of peace.

Remember the dinosaur bath bomb. We’ll come back to that later.

For now, on to more serious, perhaps more somber, things. In this morning’s readings, the traditional Advent themes of judgment and upheaval continue. You may remember last Sunday’s prophecies of fear and foreboding, of the heavens shaking and the Lord God coming in might. Today the cosmic judgment of Advent gets personal. John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, and he wants you to repent. John is an unforgiving prophet—in next week’s gospel he’ll call his audience a “brood of vipers!”—and it’s easy to hear his proclamation of “a baptism of repentance” (Luke 3:3) as a condemnation. “For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” Malachi says of the messenger who comes to prepare the way of the Lord— “Who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:2) Not any of you, the prophet’s rhetorical question implies.

Not many of us like John’s message of sin and judgment, of repentance and salvation. It can seem harsh. It can seem as though it’s there to draw lines between us, to separate out the good from the bad, to say that those who repent will be saved and those who don’t will be destroyed with fire.

But that’s not quite what’s going on. “He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” says Malachi, “he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” (Mal. 3:2-3)

The process of refining precious metals involves melting them down. You put silver ore or gold ore inside a crucible, and put that in a furnace hot enough to melt stone. The heavy gold or silver sinks down to the bottom, while the lighter impurities float on the top and can be removed. So a “refiner’s fire” isn’t a force of destruction. It doesn’t burn something up. It melts something away, removing everything that obscures the metal’s brilliance, distilling it down to its essence, to liquid silver or gold.

It’s the same with fullers’ soap, an even more obscure metaphor. “Fulling,” if you don’t know, is a part of the process of making wool. The fuller takes the fleeces of sheep who’ve been shorn and, through a vigorous process of pounding and washing, slowly removes all the oils and dirt and grass that have accumulated on the fleece, transforming it slowly from a yellow, shaggy mass into fluffy white wool.

Now, neither of these processes is particularly fun. It takes extremely high heat or harsh chemicals to turn ore into gold or fleece into wool. But it’s not a destructive or even a harmful process. It’s not a punishment. It’s a refinement. It melts away everything that obscures its object’s essence, revealing it for what it really is at its core. Refining and fulling are, in a way, like a much-less-pleasant form of that dinosaur bath bomb, slowly melting away the soap to reveal the dinosaur within.

And this is what John’s baptism of repentance is, too: not a condemnation of those who need to repent and be saved, but an invitation to all of us who are being saved; not a one-time decision to repent or a cleansing of original sin on a day you can’t remember, but the beginning of a slow process of transformation that takes place every day, as all the things that separate us from God, all the things that keep us from loving our neighbor, all the things that obscure the beauty of who we are at our core, are slowly washed away and we become the human beings God always meant for us to be.

But it’s not easy.

It’s not easy, in part, because sometimes the things we need to let go of the most urgently are the ones that we cling to the most desperately: our various addictions or obsessions or defense mechanisms, all the unhealthy patterns of behavior and relationships that weigh us down. Often they start as survival mechanisms, and stop working after a time; like the rock mixed in with gold, or the oil protecting a sheep’s fleece, we cling to them long after they’ve kept us surviving, when they’re just stopping us from thriving. No matter how they began, it’s hard to let go of these parts of ourselves, even when we know we need to, because it’s hard for us human beings in general to do the right thing, even when we want to.

But this process of repentance and refinement is hard for a second reason, as well, and that’s that it’s not always easy to know which things in our lives are good and which are not. Life is not actually like a dinosaur bath bomb, or even so much like a refiner’s fire or fuller’s soap. It’s easy to distinguish between gold and dross, wool and dirt, toy dinosaur and fizzy soap. It’s much harder to apply this discernment to our own lives. Some of us struggle with things so toxic that we know that we need to leave them behind. But all of us struggle with things with which we don’t even know we’re struggling, with broken cycles and habits we don’t even realize are separating us from God and one another because we’ve grown so used to them.

And this is where Paul’s letter to the Philippians comes in: with the practice of discernment. Paul begins, it’s comforting to note, with a confidence that whatever happens, however rocky the path may be through the wilderness, those to whom he writes will find their way: “I am confident,” he says, “that the one who began a good work among you”—which is to say, God—“will bring it to completion.” (Phil. 1:6) He’s confident that they’ll find their way in the end. But he prays for them still. He prays for their “love to overflow more and more with knowledge and insight, to help [them] to determine what is best.” (Phil. 1:9-10) He prays that they may have the wisdom born out of love to help them discern between good and evil, or even just between good and not so great, “so that in the day of Christ [they] may be pure and blameless.” (Phil. 1:10) He prays for them to look at their lives and to be able to distinguish between what is gold and what is dross; what is clean wool and what is oil and dirt. He knows that God is working in them to transform them, and he prays that they will have the wisdom to let themselves be transformed—that we will have the wisdom to let ourselves be transformed.

It will be hard. But that’s okay. Because this process of repentance is not really something we need to do; it’s something God is doing in us and with us and for us. We are the gold, we are the fleece, we are the bath bomb, and God is the refiner, God is the fuller, God is the happy bathing toddler who has been refining and transforming us since before we were born, and who may well be working on us still long after we have died. But I am as confident as St. Paul that “by the day of Jesus Christ,” all that obscures who we are in our essence will be stripped away until we shine like a bars of gold; like soft, white, wool; like tiny plastic brontosauruses.

“And this is my prayer,” I pray with Paul, “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to discern what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless,having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Amen. (Phil. 1:9-11)

Sermon — November 28, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s nice to have a gradual hymn again, isn’t it? That’s what that’s called – that hymn before the Gospel reading reminding you to stand up for the Gospel and then giving me a minute or so to walk back here and shuffle my papers. Eight hundred years ago it would’ve been a gradual psalm, sung from the steps of the pulpit. And “step” in Latin is gradus. The English words “grade” and “graduate” come from the same root. When you “graduate” from eighth to ninth grade, you are taking the next step in your education. Likewise, if something is “gradual” in the ordinary sense, it means that it doesn’t happen all at once, but step by small step. So while the “gradual hymn” is named after the gradus, the step up to the pulpit from which it was once sung, it’s nice to think of it as being “gradual” in our sense too, a way of easing us from the readings toward the gospel and the sermon, gradually.

The last few months in the church calendar have been a gradual kind of season, too. Not just because of our gradual recovery as we slowly return to in-person church, but in the church’s calendar itself. Week after week, we hear stories of Jesus’ parables and miracles in the low-drama season that follows the excitement of Easter and Pentecost. Even the names of the Sundays blend together like the words of a child counting in some kind of ecclesiastical hide-and-seek: the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, the Last Sunday after Pentecost, then — BAM! Ready or not, here Advent comes!

I say “ready or not” because there is nothing gradual about Advent.

Of course, we know that the secular version of Advent—by which I just mean December—is not a gradual season at all. For many of us, it’s a busy and increasingly-frenetic season as school semesters and fiscal years end, holiday planning and cooking and shopping accelerate, and our small apartments begin to overflow with hidden gifts. For others, it’s a dark time of the year, literally and metaphorically, when we feel the absence of those we’ve lost and wait for the dark nights and cold days to loosen their grip. Many of us pray to find just a few moments of peace and quiet to appreciate what the season is really all about.

And then we come to church and find that it’s not exactly “peace and quiet” season here either. I don’t mean that we’re busy with preparations for Christmas services or the pageant. I mean that the liturgical season of Advent itself is a bit intense. We don’t get four weeks that take us step-by-step through Mary’s eighth month of pregnancy, as she sets up a nursery and freezes lasagnas and rides ninety miles on the back of a donkey. (Ow.) We don’t get Joseph the Carpenter perplexed by the Ikea instructions on the crib. We get: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-26)

(“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”)

Again and again, our readings today point to a time of sudden change, a season or perhaps a single day that will mark a sharp break between the way things were and the way things are to be. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord” to Jeremiah, “when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel.” (Jer. 33:14) May “you may be blameless before our God and Father,” Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:13) “Be on guard,” Jesus tells us in the midst of holiday happy hours and hectic preparations, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” (Luke 21:34-35)

It’s often said that in the season of Advent we prepare for “two comings,” two Adventūs, to give you a bit more Latin. Not only for the First Coming, the birth of God the Son as the human child Jesus of Nazareth on Christmas Day, but for the Second Coming, his return to judge the world at the end of time. Not only, as the stunning Collect for the First Sunday of Advent says, for “the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility,” but for “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” And that last day, that second Advent, is coming “like a trap.” At the moment we’re least expecting it will snap closed on us, and we’d better be prepared.

Advent, it seems, is not a gradual season at all.

But dig a layer deeper and you see the quieter changes going on beneath. It’s telling that where Jeremiah has a Branch, Jesus has a tree. “I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David,” God says to Jeremiah. (Jer. 33:15) “Look at the fig tree and all the trees,” says Jesus to his friends. “As soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.” (Luke 21:29-30) This isn’t just a cute arboreal pairing by the lectionary committee. It has a point. Before every sudden branch springs up, before every green leaf sprouts forth, before every tree trunk pierces through the earth, there’s been a winter’s worth of gradual, quiet work. There is in every seed unthinkable potential, the power to transform itself, from nothing but the air and the sun and a few of the minerals in the dirt, into a towering behemoth, in a process so gradual that we don’t even stop to think of its majesty, because if we did, we may well faint from fear and foreboding. And while we know that the leaves on the trees are a sign of the sudden arrival of summer or spring, the seasons have been turning all the time, and it is in fact the gradual, quiet growth that enables the green leaves suddenly to spring forth.

St. Paul was a good writer, and in a nice symmetry he imagines two reunions in the future. He prays “night and day” that he “may see [the Thessalonians] face to face” (1 Thess. 3:10); and he warns them about a day when they’ll want to be “blameless,” the day when they’ll see Jesus face to face. (3:13) Thomas Cranmer, too, knew the power of a good symmetry, and in our collect for today, which he wrote in 1549, he balances “the time of this mortal life” and the day when we may “rise to the life immortal”— the time of this mortal life in which” Jesus came, and “the last day, when he shall come again.” But I wonder whether this poetic symmetry obscures what each is trying to say. The present and the future, are not equally balanced. The future is sharp, and sudden, and maybe a little frightening; the present is slow, and repetitive, and maybe a little boring. The future will happen once, some day; but we live the present over and over again, every day.

And so the things that they prescribe for us to do are not one-off events; they’re things that ought to happen over time. Again and again, we will need God’s grace to “cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” Slowly, over time, God will “make [us] increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” (1 Thess. 3:13) Gradually, slowly, our spirits’ branches gather strength until one day, the leaves will spring forth, and we’ll know that summer is near.

Advent is not a very gradual time. And yet it is. Christmas doesn’t come out of the blue; as abrupt and as wild as their imagery may be, Advent really does ease us toward it. And I wonder whether the very abruptness of Advent is part of its gradual work; whether these wild predictions of the turbulence and change, of the roaring of the sea and the waves, are the only thing that could really prepare us for the birth of a sweet and gentle baby, which is itself a world-unraveling event. These predictions that the world will be turned upside down, that the sun and the moon and the stars themselves will be changed, are there precisely to prepare us for the most extraordinary thing of all—not the day on which God sees us as we really are, but the day on which God reveals to us who God really is: all-powerful and powerless, begotten of the Father before all worlds and yet just minutes old, the one through whom all things in heaven and earth were made unable to lift up his own tiny head. What’s startling about Christmas—what’s startling about the day when almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, enters into the world—is precisely how gentle that day is.

The sudden first Advent of Christmas Day doesn’t actually give us much to do in response, and that’s okay; we don’t need anything more on our to-do lists this time of year. Nor does the second Advent that is to come. Christians have spent a thousand years making guesses about the arrival of the Last Day, and every single time, they’ve been wrong, leaving us only with the conclusion that maybe Jesus was right after all; it’s going to come when we’d least expect.

In between these sudden, world-shaking events, we live our gradual lives. Day after day, in ordinary ways, we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. We pray to God to strengthen our hearts and restore our faith. It can sometimes be hard to see any change. But I wonder whether, in and through all these gradual days, God is transforming us, as profoundly as the ancient prophets expect God to transform the world; whether in the season of Advent, God is not just over-turning our ideas of who God is, but our ideas of who we are, too.

So “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:11-13)