Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Entering Holy Week

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The tradition of holding special services on different days during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter—in other words, the tradition of Holy Week—began almost seventeen centuries ago, in the city of Jerusalem. Early Christians there, two or three hundred years after Jesus’ death, had begun celebrating a series of services at different locations that were important in that last week on the days when they would have taken place. So on Thursday night, they went to the upper room where Jesus had his Last Supper with his disciples before he died. On Friday, they went to the site of the crucifixion; on Saturday and Sunday, the site of the tomb and the resurrection. At each place, they’d hold a service, in a kind of pilgrimage to those important places in Jesus’ final week.

Holy Week is a kind of pilgrimage for us, too; not in space, but in time. It’s a way of methodically and slowly walking through these events of Jesus’ last days and the completion of his ministry: his death, his resurrection, the precious last moments with his disciples, and the anguishing last moments of grief and loss.

But like any pilgrimage, this isn’t about the past. It’s not about the places or the times we’re visiting. It’s about the present. It’s about our own lives.

There’s a beautiful invitation in the Easter Vigil before the long series of readings and psalms begins: “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history, how he saved his people in ages past; and let us pray that our God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption.” (BCP p. 288)

In the events of Holy Week, we always balance those two halves: hearing the record of God’s saving deeds in history, and praying that God will bring to each of us the fullness of that redemption. As year after year we re-enact these moments in Jesus’ last days, it’s important for us to remember that they’re always about what Jesus is doing in our present day. It’s not so much that we need to be like Jesus and wash one another’s feet; it’s that we need to understand what it means for Jesus to wash our feet. We don’t offer the sacrifice of Jesus again on the cross; we try to understand what that sacrifice on the cross two thousand years ago means today. And while we proclaim the resurrection Sunday after Sunday, we mark our Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday services with special celebration because there’s a reminder for us of the greatness of that triumph over all the powers of death and evil in the world. So I invite you, this Holy Week, to join in however much of that pilgrimage you can, whether it’s just Palm Sunday and Easter, or the full Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to the Vigil. Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history; and let us pray that God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption. Amen.

“If It Dies, It Bears Much Fruit”

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“If It Dies, It Bears Much Fruit”

 
 
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Sermon — March 21, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

When I was in high school, I was a fairly serious runner. The remarkable thing about running is how objective progress is. I could still rattle off the progression of my mile time or my best times on our home cross-country course or exactly how fast I ran each 400-meter repeat during a particular workout ten years ago. And while I was never the fastest guy on the team, I was pretty good. More importantly, though, cross-country and track became my life. The people I ran with were my closest friends, and—as an unusually-boring and responsible teenager—I ended up being appointed a captain for all three seasons of my senior year.

So I loved running, and I wanted to continue in college, but I was much too slow even to walk on to Harvard track and so I joined the Greater Boston Track Club instead. They were serious, mostly post-college guys, and I trained hard. I ran something like seventy miles a week around the Charles River, honed my speed with massive track workouts, and by the end of the year I had shaved my mile team down by a whopping four seconds—from 4:40 to 4:36.

Runners have sometimes observed that that level of training can leave your body in a state that’s almost like sickness. My toenails were constantly turning black and falling off from the repetitive motion. The smallest cold tended to give me a long-lasting, chesty cough that only went away when I was running. I was never injured or exhausted—my performance stayed high—but my body was in something like open rebellion.

Then I got hurt. On a twenty-three mile hike through the Presidentials in the White Mountains with two friends, I tweaked a muscle in my hip. My legs, you have to remember, had been finely tuned to run almost endlessly on the flat, paved paths around the Charles or Fresh Pond, or on the springy rubber of a track, not to scramble up a mountainside. But the only way to make it back to our camp was to keep walking, and so I did. By the time we made it home, I found that I could hardly run, and started cutting down. I tried, for a few weeks, to run less—just forty or fifty miles a week, give it a rest—and soon had to stop entirely and try to recover. I took some time off from the track club and rested. After six months or so, I was able to run again casually, but in a very different way. I’ve never again joined a team or a club. I’ve never again trained so hard I can’t shake a cough. And I’ve never, in the last decade, run a race.

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) I love this saying because it’s so obviously true in a literal sense. The question is not how to interpret what he says, but how to apply it to something other than an actual grain of wheat.

Of course he’s talking, on one level, about himself. This is Jesus’ final public teaching in the Gospel of John, and his final days are drawing near. But Jesus’ death, he seems to say, is not the abrupt and unfortunate end to a ministry that could’ve lasted for years. Instead, Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension are the culmination of his ministry. In the larger, mythological sense, the coming days will be the climax of the struggle between Jesus and all the forces of evil. “Now is the judgment of this world,” he says; “now the ruler of this world”—which is to say, the power of sin and evil and death itself, sometimes personified as “Satan”—“will be driven out.” (John 12:31) In a more tangible, historical way, it’s the moment where Jesus stops being a local teacher and becomes a global figure. The story starts with “some Greeks” coming to see him, meaning “some Gentiles,” some non-Jews, a symbol of Jesus movement spreading from his own people to the whole world. And indeed, Jesus says that “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32) It’s as if to be seen by all the people of the world, to draw all the people of the world to himself, Jesus needs to be raised up into the heavens. And in the simplest historical sense, Jesus is right. It’s not the brilliance of his teaching that spreads his movement around the world; it’s the incredible news of his death and resurrection.

So on one level, Jesus is talking about his own death here. If he lives to a ripe old age and passes away, a wise teacher, he remains one man. But if, at the right moment, he is sown in the ground, he will spring forth and bear much fruit. His small movement will spread and grow; his own body will become the seed for the Body of the Church. But even to say this is to lead inevitably to a second level of interpretation, because the Church, the fruit that grows from that grain, must also in turn “fall into the earth and die.”

I don’t mean this in the numerical and statistical sense that people mean when they say that “the church is dying.” I mean something less linear, more cyclical. Like a field of wheat, the Church is always somewhere in a process of rebirth. Our traditions and our ways of worshiping and talking about God grow and ripen, and then fall. If we plant them in fertile ground, they sometimes spring up and bear new and invigorating fruit. If we try to hold onto them, we’re left with a single husk of desiccated grain. We go through constant transformations and reformations, large and small, and there’s something appropriate about the image of the grain of wheat. When we’re trying to understand where God is leading the Church, we don’t need to make it up from scratch; we’re sowing the seeds of the past and watching for growth. Nor do we make changes out of envy of other traditions or denominations; we know that we’re a field of wheat, and that wheat doesn’t need to become blueberries to bear fruit. It probably goes without saying that during this long year, people have been planting seeds left and right, and there’s hope in that—we have a real chance to see where new life will grow. But there’s also grief. There are things about the way that church used to be that have died to plant those seeds.

Of course, there’s another level at which we need to apply what Jesus says. We need to apply it to ourselves. “Those who love their life,” he says, “lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) This is a hard verse to translate without giving the wrong impression. He’s not talking primarily, I don’t think, about “life” in the biological sense; the word he uses is psyche, “soul” in Greek. The “soul” is not the breath of life, the biological reality of life; it’s the form of life, the seat of the values and priorities that give shape to our lives. In a sense, it’s even close to the “way of life.” So you could almost paraphrase this, “those who hold their way of life dearly destroy it, and those who disdain it guard it for the age to come,” and that starts to move us back toward the grain of wheat.

Like grains of wheat, like the Church, we constantly go through cycles of growth and stagnation and rebirth. Different parts of our lives are constantly in different places in an unending cycle of bearing new fruit and withering away. It takes wisdom and discernment to know which is which, and it takes courage to let go of the seeds and plant them in the earth. It sometimes means giving something up that once nourished you, taking some of those grains of wheat and letting them die in the earth to seed new life. Because if we hold on too dearly to our present form of life, even as everything changes around us, we may well be destroying it.

One version of what it meant for me “to be a runner” is long gone. It died there somewhere halfway through a hike. It was one of the most important things in my life, but I know now that it was not feeding me. The cost was too high: the sleepless anxiety before a race; the obsession with measuring myself to the tenth or a second and the hundredth of a mile; the gruesome physical effects. But that grain of wheat fell into the ground and bore fruit, in a new form; not identical with the old plant, but a new life for the same species.

I don’t know what the equivalent is for you. I don’t know what’s changing in your life. I don’t know what seeds you’re holding in your hand, and wondering—consciously or not—what to do, whether to hold on or let them die. Sometimes there are things that have been at the core of our identities that we need to give up on to keep living our lives. And that can be hard; any change is hard, especially no, when so much has already changed. But God does not change. And God’s promise to be with us and love us doesn’t change. So I pray, in the words of our collect for today, that God may grant us to grace to love what God commands and desire what God promises, “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.

Missed Birthdays

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This month, millions of people around the world are missing their second birthday celebration in a row, including both my mother, whose birthday is in mid-March, and my wife, whose birthday is on the thirty-first. In fact, one of the last things that Alice and Murray and I did with other people last March before everything shut down was to go to a birthday celebration for our elementary-school-aged neighbor down the hall. Later in March, people didn’t feel much like celebrating, but we still tried to celebrate birthdays in our small ways. It was hard, though, to have a celebration, a real party where we could see the people we loved outside our own little family units.

Last Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was a day that the church sometimes calls “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from an old Latin introit, part of the liturgy for that days; it means, “Rejoice!” It’s a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent, when some of the rigor of the season is relaxed. Even the purple on the altar will sometimes be changed out for pink or rose, as a sign of joy. It’s the same thing that we do in Advent, on the third Sunday, which is why there’s a pink candle in your Advent wreath. It’s a moment of joy in a penitential, somber season.

There’s a lesson for me in that, about all of life. We recognize that even in the midst of sorrow, there’s always joy; and in the midst of joy, there’s always sorrow. On any given day in any normal time of life, I may be feeling joy, I may be feeling happiness; but there’s inevitably someone else who’s suffering grief or loss. The same goes the other way around: I may be feeling sadness or frustration, and someone else is feeling relief or contentment.

It’s important for us as human beings to recognize that we don’t always experience the same things at the same time, and while many of us have been united emotionally by our experience of this pandemic, it’s become clearer over time that we’ve also been divided—not just politically, but emotionally. We’ve experienced different parts of this time in different ways over time, depending on our own circumstances and personalities.

But there’s another lesson, too, which is the importance of rejoicing, even in a serious time, the importance of celebrating those small moments even when things are hard. The lesson of a tragedy like this pandemic is not that we shouldn’t rejoice—it’s that we should! We should appreciate those moments, we should celebrate those birthdays. Not in an unsafe way, but with real and genuine joy. We should recognize and mark those things that are important to us, because even if the world is hard, even if the world is full of sorrow and struggle, it is also full of joy. They don’t cancel each other out. You can’t do the math and add the up to a positive or negative number. They just exist there, alongside each other, always.

So rejoice in your joy. And weep in your sadness. And know that they’re always there together.

“Graceful and Frank”

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“Graceful and Frank”

 
 
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Sermon — March 14, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

Recently, Alice and I have been watching the Netflix original TV series Grace and Frankie. (And yes, I know this is two sermons in a row, but we really don’t watch that much TV. I promise.) The eponymous characters Grace and Frankie are two women who’ve never liked each other, pushed together in their 70s by a very 21st-century sitcom plot: their two husbands have each left them after forty years of marriage… for each other. The first season or so mostly follows the action as Robert and Sol—played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston—build their new life together, and their soon-to-be-ex-wives Grace and Frankie move in as roommates in the beach house the two families have long shared, with a colorful cast of four adult children thrown into the mix.

Grace and Frankie are the stars of the show, and they couldn’t be more different. Grace Hanson, played by Jane Fonda, is a preppy, WASPy, waspy, put-together cosmetics mogul, a woman who founded her own company based on perfecting women’s outward appearance and rose to the top. Frankie Bergstein, played by Lily Tomlin, is a hippy, spiritual, eccentric Jewish artist, whose sage-burning, throat-singing spirituality exasperates Grace time and again. You might wonder why they’re friends, and it turns out they’re not; they’ve just been tolerating each other for years because their husbands are law partners and, it turns out, partner partners.

I can’t help but think that their names are a kind of symbol of their personalities. Frankie is… frank: she’s honest, sincere; she tells the truth even when it makes people uncomfortable. Some might say she over-shares about the most intimate parts of her life—Grace certainly would—but she would simply say she’s a liberated and open-minded adult. I think “Grace,” on the other hand, is supposed to be ironic, or at least the name captures a paradox in the word “grace” itself. Grace is always graceful, always elegant and composed; but she is rarely gracious. She doesn’t often extend grace or compassion to anyone else, and when they offer it, she pushes it away. At one point in the very first episode, after they’ve both fled to the beach house, expecting to be alone and finding on another there instead, they start bickering. After one rude exchange, Frankie apologizes, “You hurt my feelings, so I lashed out.” Grace ignores it and pushes her away: “Please, please go somewhere else.” The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with,” and who better to suffer with than someone in exactly the same situation? But in her deepest misery, she doesn’t want Frankie’s apology or her compassion—she just wants to be left alone.

Our two New Testament readings for today are classics of the theology of grace. (We’ll get to frankness a little later.) Five hundred years ago, as what we now call the Protestant Reformation began, the reformers heard these beautiful passages speaking directly to them and to their own spiritual lives. “By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul writes to the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works.” (Eph. 2:8) It is God’s “rich mercy” and “great love” that “make us alive together with Christ,” that “raise us up with him and seat us with him in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 2:4-6) Try as we might, we could not by our own efforts launch ourselves into the heavens and reach God, so God came down among us and gave us the gift of eternal and abundant life. “Indeed,” John writes, “God didn’t send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save it. (John 3:17) “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

These words, which inspire many people today, in the context of late-medieval Christianity, when people like Martin Luther read them as the Reformation began. Medieval Western Christianity had a complex system of calculations of sin and penitence. Priests were trained to know exactly how many years each particular type of sin would add to your time in purgatory, and how many months each indulgence could knock off. If you asked a thoughtful medieval Catholic theologian, they would never tell you that you had to work hard to earn your way into God’s favor—but to many Christians, that’s exactly what it felt like.

The great reformers—Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Bucer and Thomas Cranmer, who created the first Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England—cut through all this complexity with the simple message they found in the New Testament, in Ephesians and John and many other books: the message of grace. You do not need to earn God’s love or your salvation; “it is the gift of God.” It’s not your hard work or your great virtue that saves you; it is God’s great love. Jesus didn’t come to “condemn the world”; he came to save you from condemnation, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life, not just a spiritual elite. This was the good news, in Greek the evangelion—the origin of words like “evangelical.”

To people like Luther, consumed with anxiety over every little sin, this came as a huge relief. But we live in different times, and it’s not always clear we feel the same. For one thing, in our secular corner of a religiously-diverse world, we may hear the exclusive and judgmental claim that “everyone who believes may have eternal life,” and not the inclusive and gracious one that “everyone who believes may have eternal life.” But even as Christians today our concerns are not those of the 16th century. Most of us Episcopalians are not wracked with guilt and anxious about eternal judgment. Our anxieties are different. Most of us spend more time worrying about human judgment, about our worth in one another’s eyes, and so we build up our protective shells. Like graceful Grace the cosmetic tycoon, we try our hardest to make it seem like everything’s okay, at least one the surface.

Grace, though, requires frankness. What I mean is that to accept God’s grace, to accept grace from anyone else, we need to be frank about ourselves. You know this if you’ve ever had to apologize for something; to accept the gift of forgiveness, you need to admit that you need it. To accept the gift of compassion and love, we need to admit—as Grace Hanson will, over the episodes of the first season, learn to do—that we are not self-sufficient, that we cannot be perfectly put together at all times.

You probably noticed that our readings this morning, for all their beauty, are not exactly optimistic. Each one of our readings blends a powerful proclamation of God’s grace with a frank evaluation of the human condition. Before it gets to God’s rich mercy, the letter to the Ephesians makes some pretty stark claims about the congregation’s earlier lives: they were “dead through trespasses and sins,” “following the desires of flesh and senses,” “by nature children of wrath.” (Eph. 2:1-3) It’s grim, maybe even a little exaggerated; but rhetorically, at least, it’s the depth of this depravity that highlights the very richness of God’s mercy. If God loves those of us who are “children of wrath” who are “dead through sin” with such great love—how much more will God’s loving grace extend to all of us who are just muddling through?

It’s the same with this odd first reading about the fiery snakes. We read it just because John refers to it in the first few verses here of the gospel reading, but it has a point. We live in a world that often “loves darkness rather than light,” (John 3:19) a world filled with venom and poison, and world that more often drives us to impatient complaints than to grateful endurance. God’s grace is not the whipped cream on top of the already-delicious ice-cream sundae of our world. It’s an intervention, a gift of love to a world in need of healing. But if we don’t recognize that we need to be healed, we’re not likely to respond graciously to the offer, and so like Grace we push it away. So we need to be frank. We need to be able to look honestly at our lives and admit that we are not perfect.

And what a relief. Because if it’s true for the Israelites wandering in the desert, and it’s true for the church gathered in the city of Ephesus, and it’s true in a Netflix original series, then it’s possible—just possible!—that’s it true for all of us. It’s just possible that none of us is perfect. That all of us are struggling; more or less, at different points, but never as put-together as we seem. We all need grace, and what a gift; because to recognize that we need grace enables us to accept it, and maybe even to extend it to someone else.

Because that is where the story ends; not with God loving us, but with us loving one another. Not with God forgiving us and having compassion on us, but with us compassionately forgiving one another. Christ has been raised up from the earth on the cross, and raised up from the tomb to new life, and raised up from the earth into heaven, and we have been raised with him—week after week we “lift up our hearts” to the Lord to bask in his love. But we’re still here. We can still “come to the light,” (John 3:21) we can still live out those “good works, which God prepared” for us “to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10) Not because we need them to be saved. Not because we need them to be loved. But because we are loved, and the gift of that love overflows, inevitably, into our love for others.

“By grace you have been saved,” Paul writes, and not because you are graceful. Not because you are frank. Not even because you are gracious. It is simply “the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:8) Even in your darkest moment, even in your deepest wrath, even in your most evil deeds, God would love you, God would die for you—not to condemn you, but to save you from condemnation.

So give yourself a break.

And, at least as importantly, give the people around you a break.

For some of us, I think, it’s harder to be gentle with our own imperfections. For others, it’s harder to be patient with other people’s foibles. But all of us—if we’re being frank—know what it is to need forgiveness, what it is to need compassion, what it is to need someone to extend us a little grace. And all of us can choose, by the grace of God, to offer that grace to others—as hard, moment to moment, as it may be—so that just as God has shown “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us,” (Eph. 2:7) so also we might share the riches of that grace with one another. Amen.

Waking Up

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There’s nothing quite like the sound of a city waking up in the spring: the birds, the garbage trucks, the construction noise beginning; a cacophony of humanity and nature that’s comforting to me as a city-dweller. It just screams “spring morning!”

And it reminds me that we’re beginning to come out of hibernation now, in many different ways, as individuals and as a society. We had happy news from the CDC this week that vaccinated grandparents can visit their kids and grandkids safely. Younger students have had the opportunity to return to at least hybrid education in schools. More and more of us have access to the vaccine. We’re beginning to make progress. The end is finally in sight.

I had a funny experience last week: immediately after I sent out our newsletter with a similar message about the end being in sight and the need to remain cautious while we waited for further guidance from the bishops, I received a message from our bishops with updated guidelines!

The bishops are targeting April 19 as the date to begin loosening restrictions on worship. (That’s a Monday, so Sunday, April 25.) At present, the bishops are strongly discouraging indoor, in-person worship; churches that are worshiping indoors have a capacity limit of 25. Beginning April 19, the bishops suggest that we can begin indoor, in-person worship again, and they are loosening the capacity limits pretty significantly, to a maximum of 75 people or 1/3 capacity or 6-foot distance between households, whichever is the lowest number and therefore the safest.

In our case, that would mean access to about 20 pews in our sanctuary, allowing indoor worship for a congregation that is, honestly, about our usual size. (Note that all other safety precautions will remain in place: universal masking, distancing, communion with bread only, no congregational singing, etc.)

We have not made any decisions. This is not an official announcement that on April 25, everyone can or should come back to worship indoors. The Vestry and our Reopening Advisory Committee and I will continue having conversations, but I wanted to share this news with you from the bishops about the future.

By that point, most vulnerable adults will have had the opportunity to receive the vaccine, but not all adults will have access, and children will not until later this year. We will, of course, continue online access to worship for the indefinite future, even when more people are returning to the Sanctuary.

We’ll also begin our outdoor garden services a little earlier than usual this year; rather than waiting until the summer, we’ll begin at some point this spring.

You’ll notice that April 25 is three weeks after Easter (April 4), so we won’t have a triumphant return for Easter Sunday this year, but we’ll still have our outdoor and online worship as planned.

I hope this gives some sense of a light at the end of the tunnel. I know that all of us are in different places right now; some are thrilled at this news, and some are cautious. Wherever you are, know that you are still a beloved member of this community, and we will not shut you out. Even as more of us return to the sanctuary, our online options will continue, and this new outdoor option may be another one you’d like to take up—even just to hear the birds on a Sunday morning!

So take care, and I hope you continue to have a holy and blessed Lent as we prepare for Holy Week and Easter, as the days lengthen, the sun returns, and we move toward a brighter and better future later this spring and summer.

Greg