Sermon — April 4, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

A few weeks ago, not long after I received my second Pfizer dose, I went down to a local coffeeshop to get some work done while Murray playing at home. I bought a cup of coffee and a croissant, and sat down at a table spaced carefully six feet apart from the neighboring customer. And I pulled my book out of my briefcase, and I took my croissant out of its little wax-paper sandwich bag, and I just could not convince myself, however vaccinated I may be, to take off my mask and eat it. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Sitting in there casually and drinking a cup of coffee just felt too strange, however safe it may really have been.

“When they looked up,” Mark writes, “they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back… and they were alarmed.” (Mark 16:4-5)

Some of you, I’m sure, are more courageous or adaptable than I am. But I also know that some of you have had a similar experience—or maybe you will soon. Maybe you’ll wake up one morning two weeks after your final dose of one of these extraordinary vaccines, with the stone that’s been locking you away for the last year finally rolled away, and suddenly discover, as I did, that not only are you relieved, not only are you elated; you’re also still afraid. It’s going to be a slow resurrection.

The Easter story in the Gospel of Mark is just right the year 2021. There’s no warm and friendly Jesus, risen from the grave and greeting his old friends with a hug. Mark gives us an empty tomb, and frightened followers. Jesus’ most faithful disciples, Mary and Mary and Salome, go to mourn, to be with Jesus for the last time, but—like so many people this year—they can’t carry out those simple rites of saying goodbye. Then a young man, an angel, perhaps, tells them what they never would have guessed. He’s not there, and his body hasn’t been stolen; he is risen. He’s going to meet them in Galilee, and they should tell the disciples. And instead they flee in terror and amazement, and tell no one anything, “for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8) And so the gospel ends.

Mark writes the shortest of any of the four resurrection stories. It’s the only one in which Jesus himself never appears to the disciples. It’s so abrupt, in fact, that later scribes would add two separate additional endings to the book to try to smooth it out.

But this abrupt original ending, this story that ends halfway through the resurrection, is the perfect one for this year where we meet Easter halfway through our own rebirth into new life. And it teaches us three things that I want to remember on this second-strangest of all possible Easters.

First: the resurrection takes time. This is why we have Holy Week and not just Easter Day. In fact, it’s why we have an Easter season, fifty days long, and not just the one day of Easter. Jesus is not rescued from the Cross before his death. He doesn’t suddenly wake up after they take him down to bury him. He lies in the grave until the third day—through the long afternoon and evening on Friday, through twenty-four long hours on Saturday, until the early hours of dawn on Sunday, when finally “the sabbath was over” and a new day had begun. (Mark 16:1) And even then, when the disciples find that the stone has been rolled away, their resurrection experience isn’t over. Jesus isn’t there. They have to go, the young man tells them, back to Galilee; they need to walk the long roads that led them to this day, to find Jesus again.

And so they do. At least, we hope they do; Mark doesn’t tell us. All Mark tells us is that they are afraid, and this is the second lesson for us this Easter—the disciples are not, initially, relaxed and joyful; they’re alarmed, terrified, amazed. There is no joy in this Easter story, not yet, but fear. Mary and Mary and Salome have been experiencing intense and sudden grief after an unexpected death. These women are the only disciples who were brave enough to follow Jesus to the end, but you can imagine their fear: are we the next to go? Are the police even now knocking at our door? They have been expecting to weep together, to mourn Jesus’ death together, and instead they find—nothing. And they are alarmed.

They’re alarmed in part because they find not the risen Christ but an empty tomb. And this is the third thing that Mark’s gospel tells us about Easter. The Easter story is a story of resurrection, not resuscitation. It’s not a story, in other words, in which Jesus emerges from the tomb intact, the same man he had been before his death but alive again. That’s what happens to Lazarus in the Gospel of John; but it’s not what happens to Jesus. Jesus doesn’t reappear at all in this resurrection story, but when he appears to the disciples in the other gospels they don’t recognize him, not at first. Jesus is risen, but in another sense he’s gone. He hasn’t risen from the tomb to spend three more decades with his followers and friends. He’s risen into a brief flowering of new life on earth, before he ascends into a transformed life in heaven. The man they loved and lost will soon be gone, Resurrection or not.

It almost feels too obvious to say, but we’re living through a very similar kind of resurrection now. It’s slow. And it’s frightening. And the new life that’s being reborn is different from what the old life was.

Some of you, like me, will take a while to adjust psychologically to this new reality in which the stone has been rolled away and we are free to leave our tombs. Some of you will be afraid to go back to school or to work. Some of you will be nervous to visit your relatives or your friends. Most of us will need some time to reshape or habits and our anxieties, to wrap our heads around this new reality. After waiting twelve long months for the day to come when things could go back to normal, I’ve finally come to grips with the truth that there will never be a day when we flip that switch and return to the world we once knew. Instead, there will be weeks, and months, maybe years, where we slowly steer ourselves towards something new.

That doesn’t mean we have to leave the best parts of our old lives behind. In fact, that’s precisely the opposite of what the young man at the tomb tells the disciples. They’re to return home to their old lives in Galilee.

But there are two ways to go back to Galilee. We can go back as if nothing ever happened. We can try to forget the whole nightmare of these difficult days, try to pick up our old fishing nets as if we’d never laid them down, try to get back to normal, for better or for worse. Or we can go back with eyes peeled for the resurrection. We can go back wondering how things will change, and watching to see where Jesus is leading us into deeper lives of love. We can go back to the way things were; or we can go back to make them the way we never dreamed they could be.

There’s a gift in this slow resurrection, as strange as it may be. Because for all our hope and prayer and desire to return to our old ways of life, they weren’t perfect. There were things each one of us needed to leave behind. There were things that we, as a society and as a church, needed to leave behind. At the very least, the last year has forced us to reconsider our own priorities, our own balance of time with family and friends and extracurriculars, our own balance between work and home and church and fun. And the slowness of our resurrection this spring, as impatient as we may be, has given us the time to reshape our lives, to reorder our loves, in accordance with the lessons we have learned.

So that’s my hope and my prayer in this joyful season of Easter as the stone is rolled away before our eyes. I pray that we take that stone’s slow roll as an opportunity to adjust; that we take our fears and anxieties as a reminder to be gentle with ourselves and with each other; that we join in the resurrection of this world and not its resuscitation, guided by the life-giving Spirit that raised Jesus out of the tomb and bore him into a new and transformed life. Amen.

Sermon — April 2, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.’
he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’”
(Hebrews 10:16-17)

It sometimes feels as though the days since last April have been not just one long Lent but one long Good Friday. It’s been a year of extraordinary suffering and death. It’s been a year in which many people have felt betrayed and abandoned by the very institutions that were supposed to care for them or their parents or their children; a year of isolation perhaps less intense than Jesus’ deep loneliness on the cross, but a thousand times more prolonged.

But there’s another, less-obvious way in which we’ve had a Good-Friday year, and that is the profound sense that so many people have had of constantly letting someone down. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to read the New York Times’s “Primal Scream.” In a stroke of brilliance the journalists set up a voicemail box with the invitation: “Are you a parent who’s tired as [heck]? Call us and scream after the beep.” And boy, did people call.

The callers’ emotions range from anxiety to frustration to exhaustion; from despair at the public-health situation and anger at their employers to rage at their spouses and exasperation with their beloved children. But there was one quotation that particularly struck me, because I’ve heard it from others, and felt it myself: “I wish I had the energy to scream. All my energy just goes into getting through every day, until I can go to sleep. I have three kids,” the caller adds for context, “all in virtual schools since March, and work full time. And it just feels like failing, every day, at everything I do.” And whether you’re a parent or not, working or not, I imagine you’ve felt, at some point, that feeling—that you don’t have enough right now, you are not enough right now, to handle all of this.

There is, as the author of Hebrews puts it, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, a law that is written in our hearts and on our minds, a law that is exacting and demanding; a law that allows no wiggle-room and gives no warnings; a law that commands us, to borrow Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

Our society’s form of perfectionism is different, of course, from this Christian perfection; but Christian perfection is equally demanding and equally unattainable. While perfectionism demands that we juggle a dozen glass balls at once and never break a single one, Christian perfection insists that we see the world with God’s eyes and respond to the world with God’s patient love at all times. Jesus commands us, as I noted at our Maundy Thursday service last night, to “love one another; just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34) But this is a man speaking who’s about to give his life for you, and he demands that you show that same self-sacrificial love.

The story of Good Friday is the story of the disciples’ failure to love as Jesus has loved, the story of their betrayal and denial and abandonment in the face of his patient and enduring love. But every day is the story of our failure to love one another as God has loved us. In the new covenant that we’ve received in Christ God has put the law of perfect love inside our hearts and written it on our minds. We love imperfectly, all the same.

But then, “he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’” And what a gift this is. In the very same breath in which God promises to write the law on our hearts, God promises to forgive our lawlessness and forget our sins. “Love one another,” God commands us, “as I have loved you”; “love your neighbor as yourself”; “Be perfect!”— but I won’t remember if you’re not.

It’s a juxtaposition that the Lutheran tradition often abbreviates as “Law and Gospel.” The “Law” is all the burden of expectation and commandment and measurement that holds us to a standard we can never hope to achieve. The Law is a good and inspiring and beautiful thing—“love your neighbor as yourself,” it commands—but for imperfect people, a perfect law is always and impossible thing. The “Gospel,” on the other hand, is the good news, the liberating grace of God, the promise that in our darkest moments, as surely as in our brightest ones—in our most quotidian mediocrity as in our most inspired aspirations—God is there, forgiving us and loving us all the same.

The Good News of Good Friday is not that, with a little prayer and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, you can become a more perfect person. The Good News is that you’re never going to fail, or that your failures aren’t real. It’s precisely that you are, and always will be, imperfect. You can have the closest relationship with Jesus that anyone could imagine, you could have the strongest faith in the world, you could be a saint as holy as Peter himself—but in real life you will inevitably fail, again and again, and again, sometimes three times before breakfast. But God  will forget it, again and again and again, and again and again and again, and again, and again…

This “good news” is profoundly different from the forces that shape our psychology, whether religious or secular. Maybe your struggle isn’t perfectionism, per se. But everyone one of us has been given a law, by our parents or our preachers or our peers, that puts us to shame; every one of us has been taught a standard by which we sometimes judge ourselves a failure. If you never feel like you’re failing, in fact, it may be a bad sign; in an imperfect and unloving world, it’s often been observed, the people with the highest self-esteem turn out to be the sociopaths.

And when we arrive at Good Friday, carrying the baggage of a lifetime of the laws that tell us that we fail, we find a very different story: an innocent God the law says ought to die, laying down his life for us in the ultimate forgiveness of all our lawlessness. There is no day that better shows our human failure to love God than the day on which we nailed God to the cross; there is no day that better shows God’s love for us in all our brokenness than the day on which God died to set us free.

The law that is written on our hearts demands perfection, and we fail. But the Gospel, the good news, is that Christ takes for granted all our failure and imperfection, and he forgave it already long ago. Christ our great high priest has entered into the heavenly Temple and “opened for us the curtain” that separated us from God, making one final offering and sacrifice for sin. All our sin—all the burden of the shame of our imperfection—to paraphrase one of my favorite hymns, “has been nailed to the cross, and we bear it no more—praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

We don’t have to be perfect. So then, what do we do?

Like all good writers, the author of Hebrews concludes with a list of three strong verbs: “let us approach,” “let us hold fast,” “let us consider.”

“Let us approach with true hearts in the assurance of faith.” (Heb. 10:22) Let us come before God, in other words, not distracted by the anxiety of our imperfection, but reveling in the vastness of God’s love. In worship and in prayer, at home and at work and in the church, let us rest in the assurance that God knows and loves us in all our imperfection, that God forgives us in all our failures.

And “let us hold fast to the confession of our hope.” (Heb. 10:23) In the stormiest days of our lives, when the wind and the waves of world events or family feuds or our own minds threaten to sink our little rafts, when all we can do is to utter that “primal scream” into the void of a voicemail box, let us hold fast to the anchor of our hope; let us remember God’s promise of resurrection, God’s promise to transform the world into the kingdom of God’s love. For “the one who’s made the promise is faithful.”

And “let us consider how to provoke one another,” not to irritation or to anger, but “to love and good deeds…encouraging one another all the more.” (Heb. 10:25) Let us remember, in other words, that the story of sin and redemption, of Law and Gospel, of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, is not a private or a personal story; it is our story, a story we live together. Our shame isolates us from one another. Let our forgiveness draw us closer to one another. We need one another’s encouragement; we need one another’s provocation to love. We need one another’s hope when we are hopeless; we need one another’s prayer when we cannot find the words to pray.

So, imperfect as we are, let us approach God in the assurance that comes from faith; let us hold fast to the confession of our hope; and let us provoke one another to ever-greater acts of love, remembering always that when our faith fails, God is faithful; when our hope fades, God is hopeful; when our love for God is dim, God’s love for us shines more brightly than we can imagine—even on the darkest day of his life. Amen.

Sermon — April 1, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — March 28, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

When I was in college, I did a summer internship in Governor Patrick’s Office of Constituent Services. At its best, this meant helping connect people to the right state agencies to solve their problems, or even getting them on the phone with a real person from, for example, the RMV Ombudsman’s Office. At its worst, this meant being the low-ranking punching-bag fielding random Bay Staters’ complaints about their governor. In retrospect, it wasn’t bad preparation for the priesthood.

I’d received a grant, so I was the only intern there full-time, which meant I had some special privileges. For example, on most I got to open all the mail that had been sent to the Governor, to be sorted and handled appropriately. And it was a special delight that hot summer that I got to do it in a cool, quiet room by myself, away from the constantly-ringing phones. (I just tried not to think about the fact that this was so I didn’t expose anyone else if any of the envelopes contained anthrax.)

On occasion that summer—but more often when I was filing older correspondence down the hall—I’d run into a very strange envelope, containing two things: first, an outraged letter protesting the disgusting fiscal policy of “Taxachusetts,” coated in a fine, brown dust; and second, the source of the dust, a single bag of tea.

You may have thought it was a rumor, but I can assure you that in the early, chaotic days of the grassroots Tea Party movement, there were in fact people mailing bags of tea to their elected officials in protest of taxation. And sometimes we filed them for posterity.

Of course, we’re Bostonians here, and so whether or not we agree with the modern Tea Party, we all know what the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party means: patriotism, rebellion, resistance against unjust taxation; political values that can be evoked, however comically, by a single bag of tea.

And so, while you may not recognize the symbols themselves, you might be able to understand what Jesus is doing when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people wave their palms. It was a symbol that the people in the crowd would have recognized, as surely as we recognize the symbolism of a Tea Party. They had heard the ancient words of the prophet Zechariah, repeated over and over during the long years of Greek and Roman occupation. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!” Zechariah proclaimed. “Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zech. 9:9) There’s nothing glorious about a donkey, of course, any more than there’s something rebellious about a bag of Lipton tea. But the people celebrate because of what it means: the return of the king.

As Jesus begins to ride into the city on his humble mount, the people respond with even more symbols. Some spread their cloaks on the ground to protect even this humble steed’s hoofs from becoming dirty, as they’d done for newly-coronated kings in the days of old. (2 Kings 9:13). Others cut branches from alongside the road and waved them as they’d done in patriotic parades and military triumphs for generations, (1 Macc. 13:51; 2 Macc 10:7) the hadas and aravah and etrog—the myrtle and willow and citron—and most of all, the lulav, the leafy branches of the date palm. Okay, we mostly talk about the palms, but these were the four species of leafy greens used in the festival of Sukkot, a huge national celebration. Along with the menorah, they were the most recognizable symbols of Jewish national identity in Jesus’ day, a millennium before the Star of David was created. These were such cherished national symbols that the armies fighting for Jewish independence in the century after Jesus’ death stamped them onto their coins alongside phrases like, “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”

So when the people see this charismatic teacher riding into the city on a donkey like Zechariah’s long-imagined king, they react with the most powerful symbols they can. They shield his feet like a newly-crowned ruler. They wave their leafy branches like so many colorful flags. They cry out, “Hosanna!” (Aramaic for, “Save us, we pray!”) “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11:9–10)

Even the Roman regime couldn’t miss the point. Here was yet another pretender to the throne—so the Romans would think—another man hungry for power, claiming descent from David through some murky paternal line, gathering a band of rebels to seize the royal city.

But it’s not going to mean what they think.

There are many parallels between the prophecies of Zechariah and the life and death of Jesus. Zechariah imagines an “anointed one” (4:14) who is accused by Satan, (3:1) a royal “Branch” who will “command peace to the nations” (3:8, 9:10). A king whose life will be valued at thirty pieces of silver thrown into the treasury, (11:12-13) and on whose great day of triumph “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord.” (14:21)

But the thing that distinguishes Zechariah’s vision from all the palm-waving rebels to come is that it’s not a human being who will return to rule as king. The kings have failed. “Render true judgments,” Zechariah says God has commanded them, “show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another. But they refused to listen, and turned a stubborn shoulder.” (Zechariah 7:9–11) “Thus says the LORD,” Zechariah proclaims, “I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.” (Zech. 8:3) “I will encamp at my house as a guard,” says God, “so that no one shall march to and fro; no oppressor shall again overrun them, for now I have seen with my own eyes. Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you!” (Zech. 9:8-9) Lo, your king comes—not some long-forgotten descendant of an ancient king, not some guerilla leader from the desert hills; the Lord Godself is coming to reign.

In the church I grew up in, we didn’t do this whole weird “Passion Sunday” thing. Jesus entered the city in triumph on Palm Sunday. He was betrayed in darkness of Maundy Thursday. He was put to death on Good Friday. They’re completely separate events. Why roll them into one? This strange Episcopalian “Passion Sunday,” I thought at first, must just be a compromise. We know that most people won’t show up on Good Friday, but we don’t want them to skip straight from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter, without Jesus’ suffering and death in between; and so we move the passion from Good Friday back to Palm Sunday.

But really, this isn’t it at all. The reason we move so quickly from the royal procession to the excruciating passion is not that nobody’s going to come to church on Good Friday. It’s that this is what it looks like when God is king. The Roman soldiers don’t realize what they’re doing when they clothe him in imperial purple and twist together a crown, when they kneel in mock homage and proclaim him “King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:17-19) But when the patriotic crowd has faded in to the background, when the disciples have hurried into hiding, when even Peter has denied knowing Jesus and turned away, it’s left to these sarcastic soldiers to attend his coronation, to crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross and leave him to die, beneath the inscription naming his crime: “The King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:26)

And they’re right. Because it’s this moment of self-sacrificial love that shows what it means for Jesus to be king. He’s not there so that the ordinary folks’ coats get dirty to keep his shining stallion’s hoofs clean. He’s there to kneel at their dirty feet, and wash them with his own hands. He’s not there to gather an army to overthrow the Roman state by force, a path of violence that could only and historically would only lead to disaster. He’s there to give himself alone to spare his people from destruction. He’s not there to scheme against his family, turning royal against royal as he clings to the throne in old age. He’s there to ascend into heaven, handing power to his followers a mere forty days after he rises from the dead.

He’s there to show us another way. He’s there to give us the power to rule, and to do better than we had before—not to “devise evil in our hearts,” as the kings of old, not to “oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor,” but to “show kindness and mercy.” Not to seize power as the kings and queens of our own lives, but to enter into citizenship in his heavenly kingdom.

So I invite you to join me, this Holy Week, as Jesus establishes his kingdom of love; to see him, in all the shame and pain of his last days, in all the glory and triumph of his resurrection—so that we might know what it truly means to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” Amen.