Sermon — May 30, 2021 (Trinity Sunday)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I sometimes think that what we want out of religion is Jesus, but what we get is the Holy Spirit.

We want the incarnate God who we can see, and touch, and hear. We get the odorless, colorless wind that gently blows through the world. We want the teacher who speaks to us face to face, who tells stories and gives commandments, however enigmatic or difficult they may be. We get the “Spirit of Truth” who mysteriously guides our consciences and conversations with a “still, small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12) We want the healer who will cure us, the shepherd who will guide us, the politician we can finally trust enough to follow wherever he leads. We get the “wind” who “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8)

We want the flesh-and-blood certainty of Jesus. We get the wispy wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

It’s ironic that for all our talk of the Incarnation, the incarnate God isn’t really what we Christians have experienced for the last two thousand years. Our two most holy days are Christmas and Easter, but it’s not the Incarnate God of Christmas, born into the world in human flesh, whom we encounter week by week. Nor is it the Risen God of Easter, walking through walls but embodied all the same, emphatically not a ghost but there, in the flesh. The God we get to know instead is the God of the long “Season after Pentecost,” the aptly-titled “Ordinary Time” through which we trudge as we count the passing hours and days and weeks, the unseen Spirit whom we can sometimes feel in prayer but never quite grasp or hold onto.

God’s Spirit blows, Jesus says, wherever it wishes. And as much as we might like to pin her down, the Holy Spirit is in fact as impossible to control or predict as the wind. This can be an unsatisfying God. Sometimes we crave something a little more substantial. But I want to suggest to you this Trinity Sunday the Holy Spirit, the poor Third Person of the Trinity isn’t a lackluster replacement for the Second Person, Jesus. I think it’s the case that what we want is Jesus; but what we need is the Holy Spirit.

There’s a book by the psychologist Alison Gopnik called The Gardener and the Carpenter. The title’s a metaphor for two different ways we look at learning and growth. Gardening and carpentry, after all, are two very different processes. The carpenter begins with a product in mind: a chair, or a table; in fact, a particular design for a chair or table. The craftsman’s skill is in how precisely and elegantly he can take that design from his own mind and create it from a few pieces of wood. The gardener, on the other hand, works with living, growing creatures. She can’t force her flowers or vegetables to grow in precisely the way she plans. But she knows that if she can provide just the right balance of light and water, just the right kind of soil, just the right amount of protection from rabbits and bugs, they’ll grow on their own—and grow into shapes and configurations she never could have imagined.

So are we carpenters or gardeners? do we begin with a pre-conceived notion of the way things ought to be, and chisel and cut them and shape them until they fit our plan? Or do we try to create a garden, a healthy environment within which things can grow and thrive? Gopnik is writing about raising children, but we can ask her questions about any part of our lives.

Do we start with a vision of the way we want our child to be when they’re adults, and focus on how to get them there? Or do we try to create a garden for them to grow in whatever direction they grow? When we start a new ministry or plan a special event, do we begin with an idea of the way it ought to be and try to figure out how to execute the plan, or do we begin with an idea of who ought to be there, and risk our initial vision disappearing as things change? In our various professions and vocations, do we start with an idea of where we’d like to be in five or ten years and pursue it, or do we start with what we love about where we are now, and follow the best parts of it wherever they lead?

The point is not that gardening is better than carpentry, that the goal-oriented carpenter is somehow inferior to the more free-spirited gardener. The point is that they work with different kinds of materials. A pile of lumber, no matter how well-nurtured, will never grow its way into a chair; nor can a gardener know exactly what that year’s mix of rain and sun and seeds will bring. A carpenter is an expert at shaping inanimate objects according to her own will and plan. A gardener excels in supporting animate objects as they grow according to some unknown internal plan.

It would be a bit too cheesy, at this point in the sermon, to note that Jesus was a carpenter. I said that we want Jesus, and we need the Holy Spirit; we want the hands-on teacher who gives us easy answers and tangible results, but we get the invisible breeze who gently guides us on our way. But this isn’t to say that Jesus is a carpenter and the Spirit is a gardener, as if they were in some kind of struggle for our souls. No, the point is that God is a gardener, and you are the garden; that, as in Gopnik’s original use of the image, God is a parent, and you are a child, and it’s God’s job, at a point, to step back and let you grow.

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God,” Paul writes, “are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) “You have received a spirit of adoption,” (8:15) and become “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” (8:17) and this is what it means, in our gospel’s words, to be “born again” or “born from above”; not to adopt a particular political or religious identity, but to be born of the Spirit who blows wherever she chooses. (John 3:3, 5, 8) At our baptism, God adopts us God’s own children, destined to grow into the shape of Christ, to grow to be more like Christ, as the Holy Spirit continually guides us in cooperation with our own spirits. And this is relationship we have with God is more like gardening than carpentry.

God plants in us a seed with the stories of Jesus’ human deeds on earth, and then God nurtures the billion different ways in which we respond in love. God’s Holy Spirit tends and waters our spirits as they grow. And time and again, God brings us by the Holy Spirit into the light of Christ in which our souls find their nourishment. The Holy Spirit doesn’t walk among us, or talk to us, or heal us like Jesus did. But the Holy Spirit guides us as we read the Bible and makes the living Word come alive for us again. The Holy Spirit draws us into Christ’s presence in the sacraments and in prayer. The Holy Spirit lays out for us innumerable ways in which to heal one another and the world, and empowers us to carry them out. Like any good parent, God doesn’t try to force us into the shape God wants us to be. God gives us what we need to learn and grow, and a few nudges in the right direction along the way. In the Holy Spirit, God remains present throughout our lives but not in the most obvious way. And then God brings us, at the last, face to face with the “one and eternal glory” of the Trinity; still God’s children, but fully grown, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:17)

So if you ever find it frustrating that God won’t speak more clearly in your life, that God won’t intervene more actively in the world, remember that Joseph may have been a carpenter, but God is not. The “spirit of adoption” that “[bears] witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16) is the same flighty spirit that “blows where it chooses,” and that that’s no mistake. Because God has given us all that we need to grow up, to grow into our full stature as joint heirs with Christ—and God has given us the space we need to do it. Amen.

Sermon — May 23, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Years ago, when he was governor, Deval Patrick went to a town hall meeting in Lynn. A man stood up, and introduced the group he was with, and said he was speaking on behalf of the community of Iraqi refugees living in the area. Ahlan wa-sahlan! Governor Patrick said. “Welcome! Hello!” And his staffer, and the host of the town meeting, and the Iraqi refugees all stared at him for a second, and then the man speaking smiled and said to him, Ahlan bik! “Hello to you.” Nobody in the room knew that Governor Patrick had spent the better part of a year wandering around the Arabic-speaking half of Sudan after his Peace Corps position was canceled. It’s remarkable the kind of connection it can make to speak even just a few words in a person’s native tongue. (Unless it’s French. Never try to speak French to the French.)

But of course, language can just as easily divides us from one another as unite us. I’ll never forget the moment when Alice and I stepped into a sandwich shop in a small town outside Venice, heavily jet-lagged and—in Alice’s case—about five months pregnant, to be confronted with a glass case of unidentifiable sandwiches and a long menu in Italian only. “Excuse me,” I said with my terrible guide-book Italian, “do you speak English?” An apologetic shrug. “Spagnolo? Francese?” No. Clearly not a tourist sandwich shop. Unable to order lunch and on the verge of awkwardly walking out, we were suddenly rescued by a local man who was home for the week visiting his brother from his current home twenty minutes away from ours in Connecticut, who graciously translated the whole menu.

For all my love of language, I have to admit that even if we speak the same language, words just as often fail to communicate what we mean as they succeed. Some of you have been or are married. Some of you have worked for a boss or as part of a team. All of you, I know, have lived in the United States. And so you have firsthand experience of how easily communication can break down. We try again and again to express ourselves honestly and clearly, and it’s only rarely that we really feel heard and understood. As misunderstandings and miscommunications pile up, it can come to seem that we’re not even speaking the same language.

The Bible, of course, has a story to tell about why we can’t properly communicate with one another: “The Tower of Babel.” (Genesis 11) It’s been a few dozen generations since Noah and his family have emerged from the ark, and their descendants are still one big happy family. They have, the Bible says, “one language and the same words.” (Gen. 11:1) And they decide to build themselves a city, with a tower that stretches all the way up to heaven; so that, presumably, they might make themselves like gods. Like the gods in any ancient story about human pride, God undermines their project, “confus[ing] their language…so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” (Gen. 11:7) The one language of this one family splinters into the many languages of many peoples and, unable to communicate, they give up on their project and spread out throughout the world, leaving heaven safe from competition. God stops trying to work with all of humanity at once and chooses one people, the family of Abraham, through whom God will act in the world.

So it’s appropriate that on Pentecost, at the very moment when God’s kingdom begins to expand from the people of Israel to all the nations of the world, that God undoes the curse of Babel, at least for a moment. The two stories are mirror images. Humanity united tried to build itself a tower up to God, so God scattered them throughout the world and mixed up their languages. Now God is going to gather the people who have been scattered and to reunite them into one people of God, so God comes down among them and gives them the ability to speak to and understand one another again.

This is the miracle of Pentecost. The wind and the fire are impressive. But the point is the gift of language: the gift given to the disciples, on the one hand, to “speak in other languages,” (Acts 2:4) and to the crowd, on the other, to “hear, each of us, in our own native language,” (Acts 2:7) what the disciples are saying.

Some might want to “demythologize” these stories, seeing them as myths told to explain something about the way the world is. So Babel is just a story told to explain why people speak different languages. Pentecost is just a story told to explain how the gospel spreads from the small band of Jewish disciples in Jerusalem to Jews and Gentiles throughout the known world. But even if Pentecost were made up to explain the power of the early Christian message, it would be impressive. We’re talking about the message spreading to “Parthians, Medes, Elamites,” (over in Iran), “residents of Mesopotamia,” (that’s Iraq) “Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia…Phyrgia and Pamphylia” (now all in Turkey), Egypt and Libya, Crete and Arabia, and even to the imperial city of Rome. And all within a few short years.

I like to believe this story of Pentecost. Maybe you have doubts. But without a doubt, the Holy Spirit’s power to help us speak is not a myth. It’s a gift. And it’s a gift we need, badly.

It starts with prayer. Our imperfect ability to speak and to understand applies to our relationship with God as much as our relationships with one another. It’s hard to pray! Those of us who are Episcopalians, used to the formal cadences of our liturgy, sometimes find it intimidating to pray in our own words. Even if that’s not the case, we sometimes just don’t know how to put our prayers into words, or even what we need to pray for. “We do not know how to pray as we ought,” Paul writes. (Romans 8:26) “But,” he continues, “that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (8:26) It’s the wisdom of the title of Anne Lamott’s wonderful little book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. We do not need to have the words to pray, we do not even need to know exactly what we’re praying for, we only need to want to pray and the Holy Spirit will pray for us in words that are beyond human words, because while even our most beautiful prayers can’t come close to building that tower all the way up to heaven, the “God who searches our hearts” has come down among us to hear those prayers. (8:27)

And it doesn’t stop there. Because the story of Pentecost isn’t a story of private prayer. It’s a story of evangelism, of people publicly sharing the good news of the great deeds that God has done for them, of being given the power to express them in terms that other people can understand, and of being given the gift of hearing them in a way that makes sense.

What great deeds has God done for you? If you are here right now listening to this, I guarantee you have a story to tell. God must have done something in your life, the Holy Spirit must have moved somehow in your heart, for you to be here this morning, sitting on Zoom or inside with a mask on, instead of enjoying yet another amazing spring day. It’s been fifteen months. You’re not here out of habit any more.

And this is all evangelism is. We don’t tell people that they’re going to burn. We don’t try to convince them that what we believe is true. We speak, as best we can, “about God’s deeds of power,” (Acts 2:11) about the things that God has been and done for us, and we trust the Holy Spirit to translate them, to give us the power to speak in words that others can understand, and to give the power to hear them in a way that connects with their own lives.

In the end, all this is God’s work, and not ours. If you’re as much a language-lover as I, you might have noticed that the disciples’ role in this story is passive, and God’s is active, until they receive the Holy Spirit. The disciples were all together, and heard a sound, and saw a flame, and “were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:1-4)—and then “they began to speak.” (2:4) All we can do is put ourselves in the right place. All we can do is bring ourselves to church, online or in-person. All we can do is adopt the posture of prayer. All we can do is to share our stories of faith. And then we wait, and we pray, and the Holy Spirit speaks in us and through us in ways we’ll never understand and may never realize for years. Like many things, the miracle of Pentecost is “now and not yet.” The renewal of our ability to speak and to hear began two thousand years ago and is still incomplete. So for now, we wait for things to unfold. For as Jesus says, the story is still incomplete: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12–13)

Well, “I still have many things to say to you,” but this sermon’s long enough—“you cannot bear them now.” For now, I simply pray for the Holy Spirit’s gift of tongue: for the promise to be fulfilled that we may hear another more clearly, and speak to one another more honestly; that our language may become the things that brings us together and not what drives us apart, so that “when the Spirit of truth comes,” she may guide us “into all the truth.” Amen.

Sermon — May 16, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

We like to think that you can replicate something extraordinary, if only you had the recipe for the secret sauce that makes it so. Want to live a healthier life and maximize your fitness and performance? Grab a copy Tom’s Brady The TB12 Method, which promises to teach you the secrets to his success for just $13.60 on Amazon. (Plant-based protein power and electrolyte supplement not included.) Want to learn to cook like the chef in an iconic restaurant? You’re in luck. Last summer, The New Yorker reviewed a service that delivers meal kits featuring restaurant favorites. You could buy, for example, the “burger au poivre” from Raoul’s in SoHo, which ships in a box containing four raw patties, peppercorns, cheese, sauce, buns, and a sheet of cooking instructions. Do you want to reignite a romantic relationship and recapture the passion of the all-too-brief “honeymoon phase”? You can find a million articles on the ten easy steps to go back to the way things were before you realized you’d be stuck with this person and all their habits forever.

These are three very different problems, but they’re really one problem, the problem that the 19^th-century German sociologist Max Weber called “the routinization of charisma.” Weber studied religion and politics and found a common pattern. A movement begins with an inspiring and charismatic leader—a Muhammad or a Jesus, a Donald Trump or Barack Obama—whose authority comes from their own personal characteristics and achievements, and the relationships they have with their followers. The problem comes in the next generation. How do you turn this leader’s charisma into a bureaucracy’s “routine,” a recipe that can be repeated by less-charismatic followers to achieve the same results? How can you recapture the spark and the success of that first experience, and keep it going in the long run?

It’s exactly the problem that the disciples face this Sunday in Acts. On Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, that day—forty days after Jesus’ resurrection—when the risen Lord finally stopped walking around with the disciples, and ascended into the heavens, leaving them without a leader. And next Sunday, we’ll celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples for the first time, leading them into miraculous deeds.

But this Sunday, the disciples are alone. They have to figure out how to fill the hole left in the roster of Twelve Disciples left by Judas’ betrayal, and—to the Apostles’ credit—they don’t try to replicate Jesus’ charismatic way of calling his disciples and turn it into a bureaucratic routine. There’s no committee with a five-step strategic plan. They cast lots, they draw straws, knowing that if God chooses, God can and will load the dice.

Soon enough, the Holy Spirit will arrive, and the disciples will be out of their dilemma. The Holy Spirit has plenty of charisma. The very word “charismatic” comes, in fact, from the charismata, the “gifts” poured out by the Holy Spirit. Time and again the Holy Spirit will lead them into extraordinary things, and there’s very little that’s routine about the life of the early Church.

But these ten days between the ascent of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit are where we live most of our lives. We fall in love on a warm summer evening, and then we spend decades of our lives trying to recapture its magic as we live through winter, spring, and fall. We eat the perfect meal somewhere, and then spend hours in the kitchen failing to reproduce it. We sit in church one day and find, like John Wesley, that our hearts have suddenly been “strangely warmed”; and five years later, having gone through EfM or accepted the call to serve as Vestry members, we find ourselves sitting through yet another meeting about the furnace. So how do we recover that charisma, that spark? How do we get back to the way things used to be?

We don’t, I think that Jesus wants to say. There’s something better that we do instead.

“I am coming to you,” Jesus says to God, praying for the disciples at the Last Supper, but speaking as if he’s already gone. “I am no longer in the world—but they are in the world.” (John 17:11) They are “from the world,” (17:6) but “they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” (7:14, 16) “I am coming to you,” (17:11) he says, but “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.” (17:16) “The world,” here, has a kind of double meaning. It means the world in general, good and bad. But it’s also John’s shorthand for all those forces that are opposed to God’s grace, for what we call in our baptismal liturgy “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” (BCP p. 302)

Jesus was in the world, but he is not from the world, and he’s not of the world. He doesn’t belong to the powers that shape our life in this world. We are from this world, and long after Jesus is gone, we remain in this world. But we are not of the world, any more than he is.

Jesus has returned to the Father, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and Christians are sometimes tempted to think that this is what Christianity is all about: a recipe, a blueprint, a JC33 method with ten easy steps to help us, one day, ascend to be in heaven with God.

Christianity is not a recipe, it’s a gift; or, more precisely, it’s the story of a gift. As Christians, our task is not to replicate Jesus’ life but to bear witness to it, to give testimony about it. “And this is our testimony,” John writes, “that God gave us eternal life.” (1 John 5:11) God gave us eternal life, and “whoever has the Son has life,” has life, here and now, already. We do not need to ascend into heaven to be with God, although we will—we can already live eternal life here and now, whenever we live in the faith, and hope, and love that will be made complete in heaven, whenever we “have [this] testimony in [our] hearts,” (1 John 5:10) we live the life of that other world to which Jesus has gone before us, even though we live still in this world, because we are in this world—but not of it.

So this is what we do, in the gap between the Ascension and Pentecost, in the long and boring days between inspiration and renewal. We remain in the world, in ordinary life, not trying to replicate the extraordinary gift we’ve been given, but living in a way that bears witness to its power.

Tom Brady’s greatest legacy, after all, won’t be that he left us The TB12 Method for diet and exercise. It will be that he inspired thousands of athletes young and old to grow in strength and skill. A good restaurant’s purpose isn’t to give us recipes that we can replicate at home. It’s to give us a meal we’ll never forget. A relationship isn’t about reenacting the first date or trying to recapture the honeymoon period. It’s about living faithfully in a way that honors the continued power of that spark of love to shape our lives together so that the years and decades after the honeymoon is over, for all their frustration and tedium, see us growing into a deeper kind of love.

It’s not our task to routinize that charisma, to recreate that first extraordinary thing—and thank God! Because (news flash) we can’t. I don’t care what dietary supplements you take, or how precisely you follow that recipe, or how many Cosmo articles you read, you will never be Tom Brady. You will never take that perfect bite again. You will never feel the way you did on that last first date. But we have been given a gift, and we have been given an invitation to bear witness to that grace, so that, sustained by the power of Jesus’ prayer and by the new gift of the Holy Spirit, we might live faithfully and lovingly in the long days between the Ascensions and the Pentecosts of our lives. Amen.