Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Conversion

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This Tuesday was the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, celebrating the famous day on which the zealous man known as Saul, a ferocious persecutor of the earliest churches, was struck blind by a light blazing brighter than the sun on the road to Damascus, cast down to the ground by a voice crying out: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:14) Saul’s whole identity is transformed, down to his very name: Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the apostle, fostering the growth of the new Christian churches around the Mediterranean as zealously as he’d once tried to destroy them.

As a paradigm for spiritual life it’s a bit imposing. While there are many examples of profound change in the lives of Christians all around the world, few of our stories are nowhere near as dramatic as Paul’s. Our paths have fewer sudden swerves and many more gentle turns, and when they do begin to meander in another direction, it rarely comes with such clear signs, with blazing lights and booming voices and traveling companions, fallen to the ground.

We don’t all have Paul’s kind of conversion. But we do all need to be converted.

Not “converted” in the sense of “converting” from one religion to another, but in the sense of what the Christian monastic traditional calls “conversion of life.” “Conversion,” writes Brother Curtis Almquist, SSJE, “is about our life-long turning and returning to Christ.” It is not a matter of self-denial, of giving up the things that are best about ourselves, but of pruning, of trimming away the things that are preventing us from living fully in God’s love, of “co-operating with how Jesus wants to set us free.”

Blinded by the light, Paul is unable to see until he meets Ananias, one of the very Christian disciples whom Paul had been headed to Damascus to persecute. God urges Ananias, despite his (reasonable) skepticism, to go to Paul, and when he does, he lays his hands on him and greets him, this persecuting enemy, as “Brother.” “Brother Saul,” he says, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And immediately, famously, “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” (Acts 9:17-18)

“What needs to be changed in us?” asks the nun and spiritual writer Joan Chittister, OSB. “Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone has to teach us.”

These things are like so many scales, obscuring our vision. They prevent us from seeing God face to face. They prevent us from seeing our neighbors, near and far, as the beloved children of God. They prevent us from seeing ourselves, in fact, as the beloved children of God. And in proclaiming his unconditional love for us—in declaring that we are beloved, whatever our achievements or failures, weaknesses or strengths—Jesus invites us to yield to God’s grace, to the Holy Spirit’s slow work of converting us as we all walk roads that stretch beyond Damascus to the very ends of our days.

O God, who by the preaching of your apostle Paul has caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

“People of the Book”

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“People of the Book”

 
 
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Sermon — January 23, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Even in 2022, with so many free travel amenities of the past gone, 80% of hotel rooms still contain a Bible. In part, it’s because they tend to stick around. Hotels don’t have to endlessly replace tiny travel-size Bibles after guests stuff them all into their suitcases every day. And of course, they were mostly free in the first place. These hotel-room Bibles are usually donated by the Gideons, who’ve been doing exactly this for over a hundred years. You can easily picture the imagined audiences for these books: the faithful executive with no room for a Bible in her carry-on luggage; the salesman at a convention facing the temptations of the big city; the bored and unchurched traveler, who sits alone in the isolation of a modern high-rise hotel, quietly turning the pages of the Bible, and finds Jesus there for the first time.

It’s a rather different way of reading the Bible than the one I once heard from my old Syriac professor. Syriac is the classical Aramaic dialect used in the liturgy of the Maronite and Assyrian churches of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and around the world. It’s written in its own distinctive script, a vague cousin of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. And when some of us were grumbling about how hard it was to learn the Syriac alphabet, George, our teacher, told us that we had it easy. George was born in Bethlehem, and he’d learned to read the Syriac alphabet when he was a child, at a monastic school in Jerusalem. He had to learn to read it in every direction—right-to-left, top-to-bottom, upside-down or backwards—because during services, he’d crowd with all the other choir boys, around a single giant, handwritten psalter to sing the psalms. You might be standing at the bottom of the page and reading rightside-up while you sang; or you might be standing at the top of the page, and reading upside-down, but either way—you certainly weren’t sitting in a hotel room alone.

There’s a strange paradox about the Bible in Episcopal churches. If you took a poll of Episcopalians asking how much of the Bible they read on their own in an average week, I’d have to think the median answer would be “none.” But walk into any Episcopal Church on any Sunday morning, and you’ll hear an uninterrupted stream of Biblical text for most of the first half of the service. The same is true of Catholic churches and many others. It’s not true in most evangelical churches, where the preacher might read a single brief “teaching text” on which he’s going to preach, or simply lace references to chapter and verse throughout the talk, for the congregation to follow along in their Bibles. This evangelical pattern has a lot of individual or small-group reading at home, little or no liturgical reading in church, and long sermons. The typical Episcopalian pattern has little or no individual reading of the Bible, lots of liturgical reading, and—one can only pray—fairly short sermons.

We’re often a bit defensive about this pattern, or dismissive about the notion of reading the Bible on your own, which is just another kind of defensiveness. Now, individual Bible reading is a wonderful thing. It can help you understand the stories of our faith more deeply and lead you to encounter God in prayer. But it’s also true that this pattern—the one we’re doing right here, right now—reading the Bible together in church, that is older and, in fact, more Biblical way of reading the Bible.

The crucial difference between reading in the modern world and reading in the ancient or medieval world is that before the invention of the printing press, every word in a every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. That’s how we ended up with the tradition of a lectionary book and a gospel book that only print the assigned readings; not for convenience or because it’s cool to walk around with a special book, but because the cost of copying out a whole Bible would’ve been prohibitive.

The expense of books and the lack of any kind of public education meant that reading was a very different thing. Books were relatively rare; readers were even rarer. But reading was common, because for most people, it meant listening to someone else read aloud. For most of human history, and most of the history of the Bible, a book was not something you looked at, but something you listened to; not pondered by yourself, but something someone else read to a room full of people, interspersed with questions and conversation. It was very much like what we do on Sunday mornings. It was very much like what Ezra and Jesus did long ago.

I can’t help but notice how familiar some of the details of these stories feel. The people gather together (Neh. 8:1; Luke 4:16) and a reader stands before them. (Neh. 8:3, Luke 4:16) One of the verses we skipped in Nehemiah says that Ezra stood in a “wooden tower,” maybe something like an old-fashioned pulpit or lectern. (Neh. 8:4) Ezra says a blessing, and the people respond give a response. (Neh. 8:6) (“Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Wait, no, that’s us.) And when the reading’s done, or as it goes along, they pause for interpretation—whether the three hours of reading and explanation as in Nehemiah, or in Jesus’ short quotation and punchy sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Neh. 8:8, Luke 4:21)

These practices of reading are communal; they’re done together, not alone. They’re liturgical; they begin and end with ritual movements and prayer. They’re architectural and postural: the reader stands, often in an elevated place, to be seen and heard more easily through a crowd. They’re often musical. While it’s not explicit in Ezra or Jesus’ case, most public speaking in the ancient world was basically chanted; not to make it fancier or because people liked to sing, but simply because, like St. John’s, they had no speaker system, and singing is a way of projecting speech.

The words they read from the Bible were not assumed to be clear and simple enough to be splashed across a billboard or a bumper sticker, or even read alone without context. They required interpretation, and often multiple interpreters. Our lectionary reading skips the verse, for reasons soon to become obvious, but Nehemiah lists thirteen Levites who assisted with the task of interpreting the law: Ezra read, but “Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, [and] Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand.” (Nehemiah 8:7)

(By the way: Always take a look at the text in advance if you’re signed up to read.)

Okay, you know me. I love historical tidbits much as much as the next guy, if not much more. But this isn’t just trivia about the practice of reading. It’s actually about the substance of these readings.

When you sit alone in a quiet room and read the Bible, and hear God speaking words of comfort or inspiration or exhortation to you, it is a marvelous thing. It has the potential to create a deeper relationship between you and your God. And we should probably all do it more often.

But when we sit or stand together in a crowded (or a not-so-crowded) room, and we hear the word of God read aloud, and we say “Thanks be to God,” and we listen to some one of our number get up and offer a few words of interpretation, it too is a marvelous thing, because it calls into being, it literally creates, a community, the people of God gathered around the word of God, growing into a deeper relationship with God.

It’s no accident that these two stories happen when they do. Ezra and Nehemiah are the leaders of the first generation of Jews to be allowed to return from exile. They come back to their shattered homeland to rebuild. They’ve lived for years under someone else’s law, not their own law from God, and so when they finally return to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes, they come together to hear Ezra read from the law, and in this communal act of reading, they are made a people again.

Likewise, Luke tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to go and read in the synagogue, but he only writes one story about it, here at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He’s just been baptized in the river Jordan, and driven out to be tempted in the wilderness, and now he returns to civilization to announce what he’s about to do and to gather a movement around himself. And so he goes to the synagogue, where the people gather, and he reads.

And he reads to them, as Ezra does, from a text of liberation and solidarity. The Torah is sometimes mocked for its dietary rules and sacrificial laws, but it contains one of the earliest and most profound codes of social ethics in existence, with numerous laws to prevent the poor from going hungry and to reduce inequality, not least the “year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus announces, the Jubilee, in which debts are forgiven, and accumulated wealth redistributed. We can scoff at the Book of Leviticus all we want, but it’s there that Jesus finds the commandment that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) And when Ezra’s finished reading from the law, the very last thing he does is to command generosity and social solidarity: “Go your way, eat…drink…and send portions…to those for whom nothing is prepared.” (Neh. 8:10) Jesus’ sermon is Nazareth is the announcement that in him, God’s reign is becoming manifest, and this is “good news to the poor…release to the captives,” freedom for the oppressed, (Luke 4:18) because solidarity and justice are the cornerstones of God’s holy law.

Standing and reading together, sitting and listening together, are not just something to do; they do something. They bind us together as a community, as a people gathered around a book like a dozen chanting choristers huddled around the psalter. And it’s not just any book. It’s a book that tells the story of a world being transformed by God into something else, of a people being knit together into a single body in which, as Paul writes, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,” in which “the members…have the same care for one another,” in which “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor. 12:22, 25-26)

This is the glorious work of God: God is transforming us and our world into something very different from what it is. And this is the gift of reading Scripture together: we can hear these words from two thousand years ago, these dreams of a world of justice, solidarity, and love, and say, with Jesus, every time: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)

“The Glory of God”

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The heavens declare the glory of God, *
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another, *
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
– Psalm 19:1-2

For a few brief weeks each year, I get to see the sunrise.

The daily schedules of work and school don’t shift with the seasons, so I tend to sit on the couch drinking coffee at around the same time every day. In late December, it’s already dark. By June, it’s already been light for hours. But for a few precious weeks in January, sunrise falls somewhere around coffee o’clock, when I’m the only one awake and can sit and look at the sky.

This morning was a good one.

I’ve always loved these opening words of Psalm 19 because of the way they imagine the clouds and the stars and the planets in the sky glorifying God: not by singing or by praying or by sacrificial rites, but by being themselves, exactly as they are, exactly as God intends them to be. They don’t have free will, of course; with a few exceptions subject to the intricacies of relativity and quantum mechanics, they are bound to follow the simple rules of Newtonian physics. But their doing exactly that—their following their natures so precisely—is what causes God’s great delight. Light refracted through the early-morning sky cannot but skew toward orange, and yet “the heavens declare the glory of God” nevertheless.

I find it a useful image because we human beings so rarely do the same. Unlike the planets set in their courses, we do have free will. We can and do wander out of our paths. We can and do acts in ways that don’t accord with our true selves. God set the planets to orbit around the sun, and they do it, to the glory of God. God created us to love God and one another, and we don’t do it so well, but when we do—the glory’s even greater!

Most of us, by the grace of God, have a pretty good sense of who we are. You can call it conscience, or self-knowledge, or the Holy Spirit, but for the most part, we have a pretty good sense of who we are in our most authentic selves. It’s harder to express it, to live it, to give ourselves permission fully to be ourselves, as we are.

But you are a creature of God! You were formed and molded from before time to be who you are, and God is glorified when you are, no less than by the cycles of the stars, for—as the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons once wrote—“the glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”

(I didn’t actually take this photo! Link for credit.)

“Water into Wine”

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“Water into Wine”

 
 
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Sermon — January 16, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When time seemed to slow down in March 2020, some people’s kitchens slowed down too. All around the world, people with too much time on their hands tossed out their sliced bread in favor of sourdough starter. And it was the perfect solution to a very specific set of problems, helping limit the frequency of their grocery trips, giving them something to fill their time, and creating a new, socially-distant hobby of posting excitedly on Facebook when you found a store that actually had flour in stock. (Seriously, I bake bread sometimes. It was, like, six weeks before I could find flour at the grocery store. The guy at the corner store was selling it in little plastic containers.)

When these new converts would talk about how slow sourdough is but how much it was worth it, homebrewers laughed. Brewing beer and baking bread are both the responsibility of slow-working yeast, but on wildly different timelines. A good sourdough loaf takes an hour or two of mixing and kneading and a few days of fermentation. A batch of beer takes six or eight hours of mashing and six weeks to ferment and bottle; a whole quarantine’s worth of time before you can take a drink.

But when homebrewers talk about how slow beer is to make, home vintners roll their eyes. A six-week-old wine sounds like the punchline to a joke. If you want to make your own wine at home, as some of my retired relatives have done, you’ll be waiting something more like six months, at least; at the time that beer has begun to lose its carbonation and hoppy aroma, wine’s only just starting to age.

And that’s wine made from a kit. They ship you the juice. It’s nothing like real wine made from grapes growing on vines planted a generation ago in the hopes that one day the sun and the rain and the soil would all be distilled down intp the flavor and the color and the aroma of this grape, that the produce of an acre of vineyards would be painstakingly harvested and crushed into juice, strained and fermented and aged until its very terroir was captured in this Trader Joe’s box of Two-Buck Chuck. Or maybe even something nicer.

Sourdough is slow food. Beer is sluggish. Wine is positively glacial.

So you can imagine everyone’s surprise when Jesus shows up to a wedding, to which he seems by John’s account to have been invited in part as a courtesy to his mother, and, in a single instant, with a single phrase, turns 150 gallons of water into wine.

Cheers!

This story of the wedding at Cana is perfectly clear on the literal level. There’s no interesting alternative translation or important bit of historical context to understand what Jesus is doing. He’s turning a whole lot of water into a whole lot of wine, and the scope for scholarly debate has mostly revolved around exactly how big those containers really were.

It’s less clear what it’s supposed to mean. And so preachers throughout the centuries have each put their own spin on it, in ways that usually reflect the things they were already thinking about.

The fifth-century bishop Maximus of the city of Turin in Italy, for example, takes the story as an object lesson in the interrelated divine and human natures of Christ (a fifth-century concern if there ever was one): “as a man,” he writes, “he was present at the wedding, and as God he changed the water into wine.” (Sermon 23) (A classic example, by the way, of early Western Christology, which often verged on dividing Jesus’ divinity and humanity from one another.)

Later preachers, too, allegorized the story to fit their own concerns. Philip Melanchthon, who began the process of turning Martin Luther’s thought into a Lutheran theological system, interprets the story with a typical Lutheran concern for Law and Gospel, telling the story of the transformation from the plain and joyless water of the Law to the sweet, intoxicating wine of the gospel. (Commentary on John 2:1)

My favorite leader of the first generation of reformers, Martin Bucer of Strassburg, says there’s no allegory here. It’s a plain historical account, showing that Jesus asks only for our faith in his power. Jesus and Mary don’t reject marriage or celebration or even drinking a bit of wine at a wedding when the crowd’s already tipsy. And Bucer’s point could seem frivolous, were it not for the story of his own life. Like many of those first Protestant reformers, he had been raised in and taken his own vows of celibacy in a medieval Catholic church in which the everyday life of married Christians was seen as inferior to the celibate life of priests, monks, and nuns. For Bucer, by this point happily married to a former nun, Jesus’ mere presence at a wedding—Jesus’ mere affirmation that marriage could be an equally-holy calling to celibacy—was a profound spiritual comfort.

Personally, I get stuck less on the interrelationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity or between the Law and the Gospel or between marriage and celibacy and more on the surprising details of this story.

I notice first the super-abundance of it all: six water-jars’ worth of wine, each twenty or thirty gallons in volume. (John 2:6) Say 150 gallons of wine, which is about 750 of our standard bottles. Even at a huge wedding—say, three hundred adult guests—this comes out to two and a half bottles of wine per person; and that’s after they’ve drunk everything the happy couple had provided. Their cups runneth over indeed.

I notice, too, the timing. Jesus doesn’t show up to the wedding pulling a little red wagon carrying sixty-two cases of wine. He waits, until the worst moment of the night, when the guests are grumbling and the party’s winding down, and then, reluctantly, he does what his mother says, and makes some water into wine. (“Some,” I say.) And he does it in a way that goes almost unnoticed. The head waiter tastes the wine and sends for the groom, puzzled, and commends him: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10) The waiter compliments the puzzled groom, and Jesus’ place in the story remains unseen.

I notice, finally, that the miracle is not one of transformation, but of revelation and sensation. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water, but he utters no magic spell, no secret incantation or even prayer to turn water into wine. It’s only when the steward tastes the water that it seems to be anything but water, that it seems indeed to be wine, and good wine in fact. And it’s only the steward who ever tastes the wine, and “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory.” (2:11) I’m left wondering whether the water ever became wine at all; or whether, in the presence of Christ, the simplest, plainest water became sweeter than the finest wine could be; whether its own glory was revealed by basking in his light.

It seems sometimes, and in some ways, that we’re living at the tail end of a wedding party in which the wine has run out. We’re tired, and we’re grumbling; the party’s over, and we need to go to bed. And at the same time, Jesus is transforming the tepid water all around us into wine, and we don’t even know. Or perhaps he is revealing that what we thought was water was wine all along, and we don’t understand. We don’t see his Holy Spirit in the beautiful moments we have with one another and with God. We call over the bridegroom and thank him for his generosity, while Jesus stands hidden to the side. In every blessing, in every moment of sweetness, in every drop of metaphorical wine, the power of God’s love is being revealed all around us, right before our very eyes. And those blessings are not just the dregs of a party past, but new wine, gallons and gallons of it, all around us, even now

God, give us eyes to see, and noses to smell, and mouths to taste the good things you are doing all around us; give us the grace to see your place in our lives, and to thank you for it; give us the hearts to love one another and share the abundance of your gifts with one another, as you have poured them out on us; that your glory may be revealed in us and all the world; through Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. Amen.

“Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord”

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(Okay, but it’s pretty.)

I hate winter.

Yes, I’m a New Englander. No, I’ve never lived further than 10 miles from Boston except for the three years I moved down south for seminary. (…In New Haven, Connecticut.) Yes, I grew up building snow forts in the big snow banks in the driveway and drinking hot chocolate at the skating rink after a hard hour pushing two stacked Hood milk crates all around the ice.

I still hate winter.

I mean, come on… Who wants to shiver through a 12° day? Winter starts with the darkest and gloomiest month of the year, followed by a month or two of bitter cold, followed by eight to ten weeks of false springs that lift your spirits and are immediately followed by dreary cold and damp.

I hate winter. But even I will admit that nothing lifts the spirits of your average four-year-old more than a good 11” of snow. Nothing breaks up the tedium of a long winter of cold, dry days than three hours playing “Sugar-Land” in a landscape iced with confectionery snow. No temperature change is more satisfying than coming in from a cold walk to a warm apartment—it’s even better, I’ll admit, than air conditioning on a hot day.

I’m reminded, on cold winter days like these, of the words of the canticle we call the Benedicite, short for its opening words in Latin: Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.”

The poem invokes the whole order of creation, from the stars to the seas, from the beasts to priests, calling on every slice of creation to “Glorify the Lord…praise him and highly exalt him for ever.” Even the wind and weather are called upon to praise God:

Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
    all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

BCP p. 88

The same God, after all, who made the snow day made the bitter cold. The same God who made the fiery summer sun made the wintry arctic blast. And like members of a cosmic choir, they are different but not (one hopes) dissonant. They sing in a polyphonic harmony in which each’s existence enriches the other. The heat of summer makes us appreciate, in other words, the cold of winter. Supposedly.

The same is true for all the seasons of our lives. “Silver linings” are a cliché in difficult times, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. There are consolations tucked within every season; not only in the reminder that it will not last forever, but hidden within that very time itself.

Every dark winter’s night contains within it the promise of a warm fire. Every hot summer day holds the possibility of jumping into the sea. Every drop of dew and flake of snow glorifies the Lord; every blizzard in our lives, however literal or metaphorical, invites us to see God’s glory revealed in and through and behind it, even if only by contrast.

Or at least it gives us a chance to play Sugar-Land.