Author Archives: Greg Johnston

“Good News of Great Joy”

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I sometimes joke that I’ve held nearly every job in a church that doesn’t involve playing the organ. In roughly reverse chronological order, I’ve been something like: rector, assistant rector, curate; Godly Play teacher, seminarian, wedding coordinator; administrative assistant, campus minister, summer assistant sexton/floor-waxer, and (this one was unpaid) Christmas pageant spotlight operator.

This was one of the highlights of my (in retrospect, extremely churchy) youth. For a few years during high school, my friend Tom and I would sit up in the church balcony and act as a very minimal crew. One of us would handle sound effects: rhythm sticks for Mary and Joseph’s knocks on the hotel doors, jingle bells for the appearance of the angels, and so on. The other, trying not to burn himself as our decades-old spotlight overheated, would point the spotlight here and there and flip the switches for a variety of tinted and opaque shutters, trying and inevitably failing to highlight Gabriel’s radiant splendor at precisely the right moment.

It was a significantly less-polished production than some (I could name more than one parish pageant that involves live-animal rentals and/or competitive auditions!), but still more involved than most.

Whatever the nature of the Christmas pageant, though—whether the costumes are simple or ornate, whether the words are a memorized script or a read narrative, whether there’s a menagerie of live animals or simply a bunch of kids making animal noises—every Christmas pageant does the same exact thing. It reenacts the story first told by an angel to the shepherds long ago: “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10-11)

It’s a story so familiar and yet so strange that the differences between our many pageants and retellings barely matter. However cute or serious the actors, however shoddy or precise the lighting, however real or imaginary the animals, the story remains the same: a Savior wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; a God made flesh in a child’s vulnerable form; a holy family exhausted at the end of a long journey, only just beginning their season of exhaustion.

It’s a story that’s simple but enigmatic, familiar but bizarre, unnoticed but world-transforming; a story that reaches us in very different ways in very different circumstances and at very different times of our lives. It’s a story, in other words, that’s better suited to a pageant than to a sermon, to an enactment rather than an exegesis!

So “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.” Let us return, as we do every year, to the scene of Jesus’ birth, to a family who are poor, and tired, and looking for a place to stay. And let us prepare ourselves to greet him, whenever and wherever we find him in our world.

This year’s Christmas Pageant will be held on Sunday, December 19, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, during the 10am service.

“Rejoice in the Lord Always”

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“Rejoice in the Lord Always”

 
 
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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.

“Unquenchable Fire”: Gospel Notes for December 12

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I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to use this space this week to offer a few comments on our Gospel reading that may be helpful to hear in advance, for two reasons: 1) my sermon will be focusing on the epistle this week, and 2) John the Baptist’s words in the Gospel are quite harsh and (at least in my opinion) often misunderstood.

(Here’s a link to the whole Gospel reading, if you want the full context before reading on.)

You may have heard of the “praise sandwich” sometimes taught to aspiring managers or teachers; when offering feedback, they’re told, begin and end with the positive and stick the “constructive criticism” in the middle. In this week’s gospel, John offers more of a “hellfire sandwich.”

The passage is split into three paragraphs. In the first, John shouts at the crowds of people coming out to be baptized by him in the Jordan: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? … Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” In the third, John returns to his fiery theme: “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand… to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

And then, strangely, the text ends: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

It’s easy to hear these words and think that John is declaring that humanity will be divided into two parts: the good and the bad, the saved and the damned; the branches that bear good fruit and the branches that are pruned and burned; the wheat gathered into the granary and the chaff burned with unquenchable fire. Not many of us in the year 2021 in a pluralistic-and-mostly-irreligious city like Boston are very comfortable with this. In the abstract, it’s troubling: how could a good God burn people with unquenchable fire? But when we make it concrete, it’s even worse: why would John say this about my friend, my neighbor, my family member who doesn’t believe the same things I do? This isn’t “good news” at all!

I want to make one observation, though, about the image of the wheat and the chaff, the granary and the unquenchable fire, that leads me, at least, into quite a different understanding of this passage. (NB: As a city kid I sometimes get myself into trouble with agrarian metaphors; send me an email if I get this one wrong!)

Wheat and chaff.

“Wheat” and “chaff” are not two different kinds of plants that grow in a field together, which the farmer must sort out, one from another, destroying those of one kind and saving the others. Instead, they’re two pieces of the same thing. The “chaff” is the light husk that protects the “kernel” of the grain, the “wheat” proper. Even “whole wheat” flour is simply using that whole kernel; the chaff has to go. (And before the invention of modern threshing machines, this was done using a “winnowing fork”: the farmer could use what was essentially a large shovel to break the chaff apart from the wheat and then throw the harvested grain up into the air, causing the lighter chaff to fly away and the heavier kernels to fall to the ground.)

Threshing grain with a winnowing fork.

So I invite you to consider: What would it mean if the dividing line between the wheat and the chaff ran not between people, but within people? What would it mean if John’s point was not “Alice is wheat and Greg is chaff, Alice will be saved and Greg will be burned” but that each of us is like a grain of wheat covered with chaff, that each of us needs to be husked, that each of us has things that need to be broken apart and sifted out? (and, yes, maybe burned like the yard waste they are!)

In fact this reading then makes sense of the middle of John’s “fire sandwich,” in which he gives practical advice to individuals on how to repent, how to reform their lives. If you’re a tax collector, don’t take a little more than you’re owed to pad your salary. If you’re a soldier, don’t plunder from the locals. If you have two coats, share one; if you have extra food, share some. John doesn’t condemn a single one of those who come to him to fiery damnation: he identifies the chaff in their lives, and invites them to burn it.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, this image transforms a gospel of condemnation and destruction into a gospel that is really gospel, really “good news.” Because I know that I have chaff that needs to be thrown away; and now John tells me that one whose sandals he’s not even worthy to untie is coming with his winnowing fork in his hand, to burn the chaffiest bits of me up, and to gather my best wheat into his granary. Oh, Lord, you can’t come soon enough!

Greg

“Fire, Repentance, and Dinosaur-Egg Bath Bombs”

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“Fire, Repentance, and Dinosaur-Egg Bath Bombs”

 
 
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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)

“The Harvest of Righteousness”

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“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine 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.” (Philippians 1:9-11)

On Wednesday, we wrapped up our second online, multi-week iteration of the Harvest Fair. On Sunday, we’ll hear St. Paul’s prayer for the Philippians that they may “produce the harvest of righteousness.” Last Thursday, of course, most of us sat down to eat meals that originate in a day of thanksgiving for the fall harvest. For a modern, urban, post-industrial, way-too-online society to spend so much energy celebrating the harvest is about as ironic as the New York Times headline I read last week: “The Best Pumpkin Pie: Skip the Actual Pumpkin.”

But there’s something beautiful in this tradition of harvest celebrations as well. However far our fingers may be from the dirt, however different our desks or cash registers or brooms may be from a plough or a tractor or a scythe, we’re all harvesting something in our lives. “Harvest” comes from an Old English cognate with the ancient Greek word karpos, which means “harvest” in Paul’s “harvest of thanksgiving” but usually means something more like “fruit.” Paul’s writing to a church in Philippi that’s almost as urban as ours in Charlestown. Few of the Philippians were working in the fields, but the image of the harvest was as poignant for them as it is for us, because they, too, were praying to bear good fruit in their lives; not the “fruit” of a field of wheat, but the “fruit” of a life powered by love.

It’s worth saying that this is not an individual prayer. It’s not an exhortation to each of you to “produce the harvest of righteousness” in your own life, to bear good fruit in your own life. The quality of the harvest never falls on a single worker; it’s a communal event. In the days before the combine harvester, the harvest took every hand in the village, and the people’s fortunes rose or fell together.

So let’s celebrate the harvest we’ve produced this past year, the fruit that God has brought forth in our community and in our lives in the midst of difficult times. Let’s give thanks for the seven children we’ve baptized and the many loved ones we’ve lost. Let’s give thanks for the hundreds of people we’ve fed, near and far, through St. Stephen’s and through our own Harvest Fair. Let’s give thanks for the new friends who’ve joined us and for the old friends whose faith has long carried this church. And let’s give thanks to God for the fruit that’s growing in our lives even now, however brown our garden plots may seem to be.