Sermon — September 14, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador; an adventurer, a conqueror, a colonizer. You’ve struck out to make your fortune, and you make landfall somewhere in the area that we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, that part of Mexico that juts out into the Caribbean. (Most Americans know it best for places like Cozumel and Cancún.) When you land on the beach, you encounter some of the local folks, and you draw yourself up with your full European dignity and you ask them, in your most imperious tone, “¿Cómo se llama este lugar?” “What is this place called?” And they answer you, and you listen carefully to what they say, and that night, you record in the ship’s log: “Today we arrived in Yucatán.”

There’s just one problem, though. Yucatán was not this place’s name. It’s not what the local Maya people called it, at least. It wasn’t the name they would’ve given you. So for at least four hundred years historians have tried to figure out what exactly the Maya said that the Spaniards wrote down as “Yucatán,” and for four hundred years, one theory has reigned supreme: “Yucatán” was not the name of the place. It was not the name of any place. It was, in fact, the last few syllables of a simple but important phrase in Mayan, the only reasonable response when someone pulled their boat up onto your beach and started interrogating you in a language from across the sea: “I don’t understand you.”

I love this story, not just because I’m a language nerd who loves to see the conquistadores looking ridiculous, but because to me it sums up something that happens all the time in conversation, even when we speak the same language. We listen to each other, and we think we get the point. We become so confident that we know what’s going on in a conversation that we stop listening, stop trying to understand. And then it turns out we’re completely wrong.

Our readings this morning are full of communication breakdowns of various kinds. The Book of Proverbs starts with a vision of a one-sided conversation between Wisdom and the world. The personified Wisdom of God cries out in the street (1:20), and no one listens. She pours out her thoughts (1:23), but the listeners ignore them. (1:25) She has the most important things to say that could be heard, and it’s not that the people passing by aren’t smart enough to understand; it’s that they don’t care enough to stop and listen.

The epistle introduces another problem with our speech. James points out how easily we lose control of the things we say. The tongue’s small size masks its “great exploits.” “The tongue is a fire” that can set a “great forest” ablaze. (James 3:5-6) A careless word can bring our whole world crashing down. So sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, James says—and here I think he’s mostly talking about preachers, but…welcome back to school—“for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” (James 3:1-2) Amen, says the preacher.

Psalm 19 seems to have a more positive take. It begins with the beautiful image of a celestial conversation between the day and the night, as “one day tells its tale to another.” (Psalm 19:2) The psalm exults in the beauty of the word of God, which is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) Yet even here, communication is flawed. We can’t fully understand what God is saying. “The law of the Lord” may be “perfect and revive the soul.” (19:7) “The command of the Lord” may be “clear and give light to the eyes.” (19:8) And yet all the divine enlightenment cannot reveal our own flaws to us. So the psalmist asks, “Who can tell how often he offends?” as if even that perfect law weren’t enough to teach us right and wrong. (19:11-12) At least the psalmist recognizes the imperfection, and wards it off with a simple prayer: “Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” (19:13)

“Keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” Words St. Peter would do well to heed.

I sometimes feel bad for picking on St. Peter, but I don’t feel that bad. Again and again, throughout the gospels, Peter gets so close and then fails, once more. He just can’t stop getting in his own way.

Peter starts off well in our Gospel story today. Jesus asks who the disciples say that he is. “You are the Messiah,” Peter replies. (Mark 8:29) Plain and simple. Some people say that he’s John the Baptist, risen from the dead; or he’s Elijah, returning to herald in the last days; or one of the prophets, sent by God bearing a divine message. But Peter knows better. “You are the Messiah.” You are the anointed one, the king who will deliver us, the one who will finally throw out the Romans and lead the people to glory, or at least to independence. And this moment is huge, It’s the first time the disciples recognize who Jesus is. It’s so important it gets its own feast day. “The Confession of Saint Peter the Apostle,” January 18. The day on which Peter finally gets it right.

Well, sort of. Because Jesus goes on to explain what he is going to do: not to conquer, and be crowned king, and to rule his people in glory; but to suffer, and to be rejected, and to die—and then to rise. “And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” (8:32) Peter is outraged. He’s scandalized. He’s so convinced that Jesus is wrong about the nature of his own mission that he takes him aside and scolds him. I think of Peter like that Spanish soldier standing on the shore. He’s convinced that he understands what he’s heard. And he’s completely wrong.

And Jesus cuts him off. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8:33) You’re imagining what it would look like for a human being to come and be made king; not what it looks like when God is becoming king. The wisdom of David and Solomon is the wisdom of the great conqueror, who rules with power and might. But the wisdom of God is foolishness, in human eyes.

Because God is not just the God of glory, but the God of the cross. God is not just the God of victory, but the God of defeat. God is not just God when we look at a beautiful sunset, when we see one day telling tales to another in the sky, when we experience the many things in life that are “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) God is also God in the midst of the wind and the storm, at the very worst moments of our lives. And God does not just cheerlead the way victory and success; God walks with us in suffering and defeat. In fact, God leads the way.

“If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) This is some grim advice. Jesus never says it will be easy to be a human in this world, or to be a Christian. In fact, he says it will be hard.

But it will never end there.

The Son of Man must suffer, and be rejected, and die, Jesus tells the disciples; and after three days, rise again. The cross is not the end of the story. It’s the worst chapter by far. It will be painful beyond imagining. But it’s not the end. In fact, in the story of what it really means to say with Peter that “Jesus is the Messiah,” Jesus’ suffering and death and even Jesus’ resurrection are only the beginning.

I will be the first to admit I’ve felt discouraged, these past few weeks. I had so hoped and prayed that this summer we could leave COVID behind. I’d looked forward to relaunching our life as a church this year, a few years older, maybe a little wiser, but safer, without the uncertainty and anxiety that have marked the past few years. And as I came back from vacation to face another year of church with mask mandates coming from the mayor and the bishops, with daily case counts higher in Boston than they were this time last year, I felt some amount of despair.

And yet this is not last year. Our kids are back in school, strange as it is. Our adults have free and easy access to vaccines, that make things much less dangerous than they were. We are not fifteen people gathered in the Garden outside for Morning Prayer, but—well, a few dozen more, back in church to share the Eucharist together, as we’ve done more or less safely for nearly six months now. We have been walking the way of the cross. We have been walking the way of suffering and death, and yet there have been many signs of hope along the way, because the way of the cross is also always the path towards the resurrection.

This is not just a “pie in the sky” promise that things will be better in the afterlife, that we will live in misery and suffer and die and then receive our reward. The resurrection is an eternal truth, which means it exists outside of space and time, which means we can taste it sometimes here and now, wherever heaven breaks through onto the earth. We will feast joyfully with God and one another in heaven; but we get a foretaste of that communion in this little heavenly banquet every Sunday. We will sing with the choirs of angels in glory; but today, we sing together pretty well. We will gaze one day upon the loving face of God, and today we can catch a glimpse of that in prayer. We will live in unity and love with one another, and we do that day after day, at home, and at church, and wherever we go.

We do not need to have Peter’s conquering king. We do not need to reach the perfect end. We simply need to walk together on the earth where Jesus walked, and look for the signs of resurrection along the way. For even a little glimpse of that eternal life is “more to be desired…than gold, more than much fine gold.” Even a little taste of heaven on earth is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (Psalm 19:10)

Sermon — September 5, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a concept in the social sciences called “Dunbar’s number,” named after a British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar. After a broad comparative study of human cultures and of various other primate societies (chimpanzees, and gorillas, and so on), Dunbar suggested that a human being can, on average, sustain about 150relationships, all told. It’s about the size of a Neolithic farming village, or a pastoral-size church, or an infantry company; it’s the number of people you can meaningfully know as family members or friends, colleagues or neighbors, rather than just vaguely-familiar acquaintances. And while social scientists have debated the exact number—maybe it’s only 100; maybe it’s 200, maybe even 250—everyone agrees that the human brain is not equipped to know or care about 1000 others, or 10,000, or a million, let alone all seven or eight billion of us here. Technology moves much, much faster than evolution.

So if you’re feeling emotionally exhausted these days, it’s no surprise. Modern media have expanded the scope of the suffering we can see, but our brains haven’t kept up. We can more or less cope, most of the time, with what happens within our circle of 150. But every day we see and hear of horrors happening to people we will never know and whom we feel we could never help: in Afghanistan and New York, Haiti and California and everywhere in between. And we’re left with what sometimes feel like only bad options: to turn off the news and stay blissfully ignorant of it all; to close off our hearts and only feel compassion for the people we know; or to feel the constant guilt that we’re just not doing enough to make things right, or the nihilistic despair that nothing we could do would matter anyway.

(I’m sorry—I know it’s a holiday weekend. Was that too much?)

In a sense, our lessons this morning are perfect for Labor Day weekend. Proverbs and James set the Biblical standard for relationships across economic class, between what the Bible calls “the poor” and “the rich,” between what today we’d probably euphemize as “the working class” and “the upper-middle class.” Proverbs warns us against treating hired hands unfairly: “Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate.” (Proverbs 22:22) Do not, in other words, try to take advantage of someone in a commercial transaction or legal affair, the city gate being the place where day laborers stood to be hired and judges and arbitrators sat to mediate disputes. If you’re better off, you’d better be careful. “Whoever sows injustice,” after all, “will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fall.” (22:8)

And while working conditions are better than they were three thousand years ago, these teachings still ring true. Last year’s Labor Day report from the Attorney General of the Commonwealth was a chilling read. It documents the $12 million in fines paid in hundreds of enforcement actions on behalf of thousands of workers in 2020 alone, for violations ranging from wage theft to unpaid sick time to child labor violations, a pattern of exploitation so pervasive even in Massachusetts that the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division needs seventeen attorneys and more than twenty investigators just to keep up.

Then we could move on to James, who brings it from the legal to the social level, from exploitation to discrimination. “My brothers and sisters,” he practically spits, “do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” (James 2:1) If someone walks in with nice jewelry and nice clothes, he says to the church, you give them a bulletin and a good pew (and a pledge card!)—but if someone comes in off the street looking a little worse-for-wear, the white-glove treatment’s nowhere to be found. (2:3-4) “You’ve dishonored the poor,” James says, (2:5) and therefore dishonored Christ, the one who taught that when we encounter someone who is hungry, or naked, or sick, we encounter Christ himself. (Matthew 25:31ff.)

And then James goes even further. It’s not just that you shouldn’t discriminate, that you should welcome the poor the same way you welcome the rich. It’s that if you want to “really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” (2:8) you must share what you have with the poor as if they were yourself. For “if a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food,” James writes, “and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” (2:15-16) Thoughts and prayers without action are empty. Faith without works is dead. (2:17)

Jesus pushes it still further. He leaves his homeland of Galilee and travels to another land, inhabited by members of another culture: to the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, then down to the Greek Decapolis, and heals people along the way. The first story is an especially strange one. Jesus seems to insult or demean this Syrophoenician woman, saying that she and her daughter and maybe their whole people are like “dogs.’ This is not Jesus at his best. And yet the woman is unbowed. Jesus gives in. He agrees that his compassion should extend beyond his own Jewish people to the Gentiles, from the “children” of God to the “dogs” beneath the table. His gifts of healing and exorcism can’t be limited to his own village or tribe or nation; he ought to freely share them with the world.

So—and here’s the part where I just leave you feeling bad about yourselves—let us choose a good name instead of riches. Let us not rob the poor but defend their cause. Let us not engage in acts of favoritism but welcome all equally. Let us share our wealth with all who are hungry. Let us go beyond the borders of our own communities to give freely and lovingly to the entire world. Let us tackle together the great challenges of our time: racial and economic injustice, political misinformation and division, mass incarceration and educational inequality, and climate change, and affordable housing, and… too many other things to name.

I know a priest who calls these “salad sermons,” because they just end with “let us, let us,” and more “let us.”

The problem with a salad sermon is not that it’s wrong. We should resist injustice. We should share what we have with the poor. We should care for people who are not like us, of every tribe and language and people and nation. These exhortations are good and holy and true. The problem is that they crush us with their weight. These problems are real problems, they’re big, systemic problems; they feel too big for any one of us to solve. Like the constant churn of bad news that overwhelms our capacity to feel, salad sermons overwhelm our capacity to act, demanding we do everything and leaving us unable to do anything.

But Jesus and James don’t do everything. They do something.

James isn’t talking about Global Poverty in capital letters. He’s talking about this person in front of you right now, and how you treat him or her: about this person who walks into your church in ragged clothes, about this person who is hungry or cold, and what you do when the two of you meet, face to face. Jesus isn’t a global-health professional whose mission is to heal the world. He’s trying, in fact, to go on a retreat—he “did not want anyone to know he was there.” (Mark 7:24) But this woman asks him to help her, and he does. And then he moves on, and heals just one man, and begs them all to leave him be. Jesus doesn’t want to do everything. But he can’t keep himself from doing something.

So that’s my little anchor of hope today. We cannot fix it all. We do not have to fix it all. What we can, and what we should do, is to care for the people right in front of us, the people in our circle of 150, the people with whom we live in relationships, whether they’re geographically near or far.We are not made to worry about the fates of eight billion people around the world. But we are made to walk in love.

There are very different ways to do that. Maybe it’s by making sandwiches or buying groceries for our neighbors at St. Stephen’s, people you can see and hear and go to PTO meetings with. Maybe it’s by supporting Episcopal Relief & Development and their partners in Haiti, our brothers and sisters in Christ and in the Episcopal Church. Maybe it’s by picking up the phone and calling a friend who’s struggling just down the street. Maybe it’s by trying to keep your own kids safe and full and warm for one more week. Whatever it is—whatever small thing it is—it won’t feel like it’s enough. It will probably never feel like it’s enough. But you don’t have to do everything to fulfill the “royal law” of love; you just have to do something, knowing that only Christ the King can really fulfill that royal law, but trusting with all your heart that God will “never forsake those who make their boast of [his] mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Amen.

Sermon — August 29, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As the hurricane-that-wasn’t bore down on my in-laws’ home in eastern Long Island last weekend, where we were staying on vacation, some people made last-minute escapes back to the City or across the Sound to Connecticut. We hunkered down, buying gallons of drinking water in case the well shut down; stocking up on rice and beans, pasta and peaches; filling the car with gas and downloading the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie and an entire season of Daniel Tiger onto my iPad. Natural-disaster kit complete.

And then, at the very last minute, I made my escape. Not along the railroad to Manhattan or across the water to Connecticut or up the highway to Boston, but far across the sea and the sands of time, to the world of 1980s Glasgow, because in between showings of Winnie the Pooh and trying to ward off cabin fever over the two-day storm, I was reading the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain.

The novel tells the story of “Shuggie” and his family as Shuggie grows up from a kindergarten-aged boy to a young man living on his own. We follow Shuggie and his family from neighborhood to neighborhood of working-class, post-industrial Glasgow: from their in-laws’ overcrowded apartment to a decrepit house on the edge of a closed coal mine, where Shuggie’s father abandons them, and finally into a new neighborhood in the heart of the city, where Shuggie hopes and prays that things will be different.

Shuggie’s mother is a particularly complicated character. She suffers much throughout the story, often while trying to protect or provide for her children; but she also inflicts much suffering, including and sometimes especially on her children. She maintains a certain kind of dignity for much of the story, carefully maintaining her makeup and dressing well; but it’s not so much dignity as arrogance, snobbishness, trying to show that she’s not like those people next door, and it becomes stranger and stranger as her life falls apart. And most importantly, she’s unable to take responsibility for anything she says or does. Someone else is always wronging her; it’s always someone else’s fault, and as time goes on and relationships fall away, that somebody is often poor little Shuggie Bain, who’s the only one who really tries to love her.

It’s a dark story in many ways, a story of abuse and alcohol and the loss of innocence. But it’s also a strangely hopeful one. Not because it has a happy ending per se, but because Shuggie is and remains, despite it all, a compassionate and loving man, just as he was a compassionate and loving boy. For all his mother’s self-destruction, for all his father’s cruelty, for all his siblings’ selfishness in saving themselves and leaving him behind, when Shuggie finally escapes, he’s still able to love.

“There is nothing outside a person,” Jesus says, “that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15) There is nothing in the world outside you, in other words, that can make you unclean or impure or unworthy; it’s the evil that comes out from inside you that determines who you are.

This whole episode begins with a kind of strange argument over hand hygiene. When the Pharisees see that Jesus’ disciples are eating without washing their hands, they’re scandalized. And when they question Jesus, he’s harsh in response; he calls them hypocrites!

It may seem to us, of course, that Jesus and his followers are wrong. Of course you should wash your hands before eating. (And if there are any kids in the congregation: Listen to your parents! You should wash your hands!) Now more than ever, with eighteen months of hand-washing songs embedded in our brains and hand-sanitizer bottles still stashed all over the place, it seems more obvious than ever!

Jesus’ disciples, of course, didn’t know the first thing about viruses or bacteria, about the importance of washing your hands to prevent infectious disease. Handwashing wasn’t even common among doctors or nurses until the 19^th century. What they’re talking about in the Gospel is a kind of ritual handwashing. When they talk about “clean” and “unclean” hands, those are religious, not medical terms. They’re meant to separate holy things and places from ordinary ones, not to promote public health. And it seems that Mark, probably writing for a non-Jewish audience, may be mistaken, or at least exaggerating. While he claims that “the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands,” (Mark 7:3) modern scholars of the New Testament and ancient Judaism have pointed out that not all Jews had adopted this practice.^[1] “The tradition of the elders” Mark refers to is the particular teaching of certain sages and rabbis among the Pharisees; but it’s not a universal practice.

The priests in the Temple washed their hands before offering sacrifices; to do it before eating every meal is to imagine that the ritual practices of cleansing and holiness used in the Temple should be extended to all of life, and while this kind of rigorous holiness has always been attractive to some people, it was far more stringent than the letter or even the spirit of the law.

So on a very particular, historical level, Jesus is picking one side in a debate among first-century Jews about ritual practices. No, he says, you don’t need to wash your hands for dinner as if you’re offering a sacrifice in the Temple; God won’t strike you down for eating with impure hands.

But then Jesus goes on the offensive: you’re “hypocrites,” he says; you “honor [God] with [your] lips, but [your] hearts are far from [God.]” (Mark 7:6) You worship “in vain…teaching human precepts as doctrine!” (7:7) Our reading skips over the next paragraph, but Jesus cites another practice that the traditions of the Pharisees allow, in which a person can essentially abandon their responsibilities to support their parents in their old age by designating their wealth as a donation to the Temple. But this tradition, found nowhere in the Bible, violates the Fifth Commandment, to “honor your father and your mother.” (Ex. 20:12) Hence the hypocrisy: the Pharisees accuse Jesus of violating their traditions, while they themselves “abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” (Mark 7:8)

Now, all of this is somewhat interesting from a historical perspective, but maybe not that relevant either way. We’ll continue washing our hands, thank you very much, Jesus. And that’s okay, because it’s really just the concrete example of a bigger point: this practice of ritual handwashing is irrelevant, because “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile” them. (Mark 7:15)

He doesn’t just mean this in the narrow sense, that there’s nothing that we can touch with our hands that can make us impure, or that there’s nothing we eat that can defile us. There’s nothing outside a person that can do this. Nothing in our circumstances or our situations in life renders us unworthy of God. Nothing about the neighborhood we come from or the family we live in, nothing about the clothes we wear or the place we live or how well we keep up appearances can make us any more or less holy.

This is bad news, in a way, because it means the easy fixes don’t work. Little Shuggie Bain’s mother can’t make everything right just by applying a fresh layer of makeup and making sure there’s never a run in her tights. She can’t fix her family by moving them to a new neighborhood, where nobody knows who they are. The same old destructive patterns will emerge, because the neighborhood and its people are not what’s wrong with her; the problem lies within.

But I think this can also be very good news. It frees us from having to attend to the things that simply do not matter in the eyes of God, all the practices of appearance and respectability that make up the ritual hand-washings of our lives. But it also frees us from some of the pain of whatever has happened in our lives, because whoever we are, whatever we have done, whatever has been done to us, “there is nothing in all creation”—to borrow a phrase from Paul—that can “separate us from the love of God.” (Romans 8:39) There is nothing outside us that can defile us. But what comes out from us can.

It’s a challenging idea. It means that we are responsible for the things we do. Our flaws and broken patterns of behavior are not germs that infect us from the outside. They flow out from the inside. All the theft, adultery, greed, deceit, envy, pride, and folly in the world, all our sins large and small, can’t be prevented by washing our hands for two “Happy Birthdays.” They can’t be blamed on our parents or our spouses or our children or our friends. They are ours. They bubble up inevitably within us.

But so does grace.

And that’s the really good news. There are many things that flow out from our souls that can defile us, that can make us “look at [our]selves in a mirror,” to borrow an image from the Epistle of James, and not like what we see. (James 1:23) But there are many good things too, because God has “implanted” in us a “word” that “has the power to save [our] souls.” (James 1:21) God has given us a new “birth,” God has made us “the first fruits” of a new creation. (1:18)

God has already done what we prayed for in the opening collect today. God has grafted in our hearts the love of God’s name. God has nourished us with all goodness. God has brought forth and is bringing forth in us the fruit of good works, the spiritual growth that allows us to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” with one another. (James 1:19) God is increasing in us “true religion”—not the belief that our religion is the true one, but true religion, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father… to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) Because the world can’t stain us—“there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile”—and what is inside us is not just a laundry list of evils, but the implanted Word of a holy and loving God.

^[1]The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84.