Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Forty Days

Posted on by

The rain of the Flood fell for forty days and forty nights, just as long as Moses communed with God on the mountaintop and as Elijah journeyed to reach the cave where he’d meet God in a still, small voice. (Genesis 7:12; Exodus 24:18; 2 Kings 19:8-12) Jesus wrestled with his demons for forty days after his baptism; he appeared to the disciples for forty days after his resurrection before ascending into heaven forever. (Mark 1:13; Acts 1:3)

“Forty days” is an interesting length of time. It’s not forever, as any of us who’ve counted the 346 days since our last “normal” Sunday know. But by no means is it a short amount of time, as any of us giving something up or taking something on for Lent will learn. The forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter are just the right amount of time, it seems, for us to speak to God and listen for God’s voice; to struggle with temptation and witness miracles; to journey across the desert or try to stay afloat in our hermetically-sealed arks.

Except they aren’t forty days, are they?

You’ll notice, if you do the math, that there are forty-six days until Easter. You’ll notice, too, if you’re very bored during a Sunday service and start starting at the bulletin, that we call them Sundays in Lent and not Sundays of Lent. Each Sunday during this season is a miniature Easter, a joyful feast plopped in among forty days of solemn fasts, but not one of them; so the traditional fasts of Lent are relaxed on Sundays, and the forty-days of Lent are really forty-six, minus Sundays.

There’s a power in that idea, for me, this year. This winter has been unrelenting in its monotony. Day after freezing day, I wish for a break—for one trip to a library, one visit with family, one warm spring day to play outside. We live our ordinary lives in natural patterns of work and rest, of stress and relaxation, of business and leisure, but there’s no such thing as a COVID vacation. (Unless, I suppose, New Zealand would let you in.) I think one of the many difficult things about this year has been its refusal to relax its grip: an Easter with little joy, a summer that felt like it never really began, a Christmas strange and sad for so many of us. We need that break, one day in seven, to make it through the other days.

I’m sorry to say I haven’t solved that problem. If only any of us could! But if the pandemic won’t relax its grip, we may have to loosen ours; to take one day out of seven, and let go of our resentments and frustrations, anxieties and self-criticisms, and simply be who we are, as we are, where we are.

So if you do nothing else to mark this Lent, try to loosen the pressure you put on yourself, just one day out of seven, to somehow be okay in extraordinary times. God knows that will be hard enough work for one Lent!

“Letting Go”

Posted on by

“Letting Go”

 
 
00:00 / 14:04
 
1X
 

Sermon — February 14, 2021 (Lectionary Readings)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

What do we do when something we love is changing and disappearing?

This is the question that Elisha faces in the Old Testament story, as he’s reminded over and over that his relationship with his beloved teacher Elijah is about to end. It’s the question Peter and James and John can’t answer, when Jesus tells them he’s going to die and then takes them up on a mountain and appears transfigured, as they’ve never seen him before. It’s the question all of us face in our ordinary lives, as our marriages and children and jobs change and transition; it’s what all of us face in this extraordinary time, as we mourn the simple pleasures we’ve lost over the last year.

What do we do when the things we love disappear? Do we chase after them? Try to hold onto them? Freeze in fear? Or could there possibly be a different and maybe-better way?

I want to start with today’s gospel reading. To understand what’s going on, it will help to turn the Bible back a few pages. We’ve spent most of the last few weeks reading stories from the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, and now we’ve leapt ahead in time, because on this last Sunday before Lent we always read the story of the Transfiguration. The story comes at the halfway point in Jesus’ ministry and in the Gospel. Jesus is done wandering around Galilee, healing people and teaching. Just as we begin our journey through Lent toward Holy Week, Jesus is beginning his own journey to Jerusalem, toward his trial and death. He’s just told his disciples that he must suffer, and be rejected, and die and rise again—and he’s told them that those who want to follow him will need to take up their own crosses, as well. The disciples are in denial, and try to argue with him, but Jesus is having none of it. He knows where he’s headed.

But for now, he takes his closest friends, and brings them up onto the mountain, and they discover who he really is. Moses and Elijah appear, the literal embodiments of all the Law and the Prophets—what we’d now call “the Old Testament.” The whole Bible, the whole Law and all the Prophets, point toward this man, at this moment. And the dazzling light of the glory of God shines through Jesus, who stands before them in “raiment…shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.” (Mark 9:3 KJV) (I’m not sure what a fuller is, but I always liked that one in the King James Version.)

And the disciples are “terrified.” (Mark 9:6)

And Peter, seemingly at a loss for words, suggests that they should build three little tents.

It’s clear from the story that Peter’s suggestion is wrong, although Jesus doesn’t say so, explicitly. For millennia people have argued about exactly why. Is it that Peter equates the divine Son of God with these two human prophets, and honors them equally? Is it that he tries to build God a physical home, when God wants to dwell within us? Is it that his suggestion is completely inadequate when faced with such an astounding display—that the glory of the Lord appears to him in all its splendor and all he can think to say is, “Okay! Okay! We’ll… we’ll pitch you a tent!”

Peter, of course, is baffled. “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” (Mark 9:6) He was terrified, I think, not only of this sudden transformation from a human teacher into something unbelievably more; but terrified, as well, by Jesus’ prediction of his own death. His closest friend and teacher is disappearing before his very eyes, and even in the few days he has left with them, he’s been transformed beyond recognition.

So what does Peter do? He tries to keep him in place.

It’s not so much that Peter wants to keep Jesus confined up on the mountaintop. The thing he wants to build him isn’t a temple, but a tent; he uses the same word he would have used for the Tabernacle, the portable tent-shrine that the Israelites long before had carried around with them on their wilderness wanderings. He knows that Elijah had ascended into heaven before his death, and perhaps he’d heard echoes of the same tradition about Moses; now he sees them descend to earth, and worries that they’re going to take Jesus back with them! So perhaps, he thinks, he can put it off a while. If only he can build a tent that’s nice enough, perhaps they’ll stay with him, forever! And this miraculous ministry he’s witnessed, this amazing time he’s spent with Jesus on earth, will never have to change.

But he’s rambling, afraid; he doesn’t know what to say, and this is all he’s got.

The prophet Elisha starts out with a similar attitude. This story is a typical Biblical combination of loyalty and comedy. Elijah knows his time on earth is drawing to a close; Elisha, his student and closest companion, is in denial. Three times Elijah tells him, “Stay here; for the Lord has sent me” to the next town over. (2 Kgs 2:1, 4, 6) Three times Elisha swears by God and by Elijah that “I will not leave you.” (2 Kgs 2:2, 4, 6) In Bethel, the prophets see Elijah pass and ask him, “Do you know that God is taking him away?” “I know!” he says, “Be quiet.” (2:3) And then again at Jericho, “Do you know that today God is taking him away?” “I! Know! Be! Quiet!” (2:5)

Peter and Elijah are in slightly different kinds of denial, but to more or less the same effect. Peter, who had rebuked Jesus when Jesus told the disciples that he would have to suffer and die (Mark 8:32) now tries to find some way to hang onto him. Elisha, who knows that Elijah’s going to disappear, still tries to stop anyone else from talking about it, and follows him to the very end.

But here, the two stories diverge, and I think we can learn something from what Elisha does. They’ve finally reached the Jordan, and Elijah has performed one final miracle, and he turns and asks Elisha, “What can I do for you, before I’m taken away?” And Elisha, wise despite all his denial, asks exactly the right thing: “Please, let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” (2 Kgs 2:9)

“Most of us in the West today,” writes the therapist and marriage counselor Esther Perel, “will have two or three marriages or committed relationships in our lifetime. [Those] daring enough to try…may find themselves having all of them with the same person.” Even those of us, in other words, who marry one person and stay married to them our whole lives, have more than one marriage. Perhaps there’s the first marriage, of romance and adventure; the second marriage, of child-raising or home-making and the long, slow trajectories of careers and family life; the third marriage, of retirement and travel; the fourth marriage, of sickness and death, of mourning and remembrance. Some people get divorced and remarried between those marriages; some have them all with one.

The same thing’s true of all our relationships. You can raise ten different children but only really have two; you can have five or six friendships with the same one close friend; you can work two or three different jobs over time without ever leaving your desk. And we all know you can be a member of three or four different churches, sometimes in the same parish and sometimes not.

We have all left behind old versions of our lives this past year. Our work has looked different than it did; our relationships with our spouses or kids or grandkids have been different from what we’d imagined; our retirements and travel and volunteering have been wildly different than we’d planned. And it’s natural to grieve those things, and want the ones that we’ve lost to come back.

But I alsp think that as we go through these transitions, Elisha’s insight can be helpful. His final prayer before Elijah disappears, you’ll remember, was not “Don’t go! Stay with me forever!” It was, “Let me inherit a double share of your spirit.”

As the last versions of our lives disappear from our sight, we face a choice. Do we deny that anything’s going to change until the very last moment, following it from town to town until the bitter end? Do we try to keep it with us, building a shrine to it up on the mountain?

Or do we pray to inherit a double share of its spirit; do we try, in other words, to carry the best of the stage that’s passing away into the new one that’s being born? Do we try to take what we have learned and how we’ve grown in the past, and bring them with us into the future?

As we begin to emerge from hibernation this year, that’s my prayer. Not that we return to the way things were. But that we rebuild our lives with the double-spirit of the best parts of the past: that we take up the mantle of the things that gave us life in 2019, and rejoice to wear them again; that we lay down the things that brought us down, and give ourselves permission to let them go; that we may “behold by faith the light of [Christ’s] countenance” in the last version of our lives as it passes away, and “be changed into his likeness from glory to glory” as we are reborn into new versions of ourselves. 

Quiet Confidence

Posted on by

More or less everyone I talk to these days is feeling tired. (Not just those of us who were up for an hour and a half last night with an irate toddler, but everyone!) It’s been a long year, to say the least. And it’s been almost exactly a year, depending on how you count; a little more than a year since the first positive case in Massachusetts, almost eleven months since schools closed here, and everything else closed with them.

It’s been a year that’s taken endurance and strength, even when we haven’t felt like we’ve had them. And the last few weeks have been difficult in their own ways, as snow and ice and cold weather keep us even more indoors than we have been, as the happy memories of sociable walks outside with friends and outdoor dining are further and further away, as new variants are on the rise. There are glimmers of hope of course—a number of you have been vaccinated or have appointments to be—but it’s been a long winter at the end of a long year, and while the end is in sight, it’s not exactly close.

I don’t have any wise theological reflection or clever allegory to share this morning, but I do have something that we can always turn to when we don’t have anything to say. I do have a prayer.

In fact, it’s one of my favorite prayers. You can find it in your prayer book on page 832: the prayer “For Quiet Confidence.” It goes like this:

O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Wherever you’re reading this, whenever you’re reading this, I hope you can take thirty seconds to say that prayer again, and pray for quiet confidence, pray for returning and rest, pray that you may be still and know that God is God—whatever else is happening around you.

“Everyone’s Searching for You!”

Posted on by

“Everyone’s Searching for You!”

 
 
00:00 / 10:53
 
1X
 

A few days ago, I was in a workshop on mental health and wellness during the pandemic. At one point we broke into small groups, and I heard in two people’s words a summary of the conundrum of this year. One participant, crammed into a haphazard working-from-home space while two little kids screamed upstairs, quietly said, “I haven’t been alone for an hour in ten months.” Another one, sitting in the beautiful living room of the house where he lived alone: “I’ve never been this lonely in my life.”

It’s the irony of 2020. Without a doubt, COVID-19 is one of the defining shared human experiences of the last two hundred years. You could ask anybody anywhere in the world what their experience of this year has been like, and they will have something extraordinary to say. In recent history, only World War 2 has had such a global effect on ordinary life.

But there’s very little shared about this shared experience. That’s one of the many cruel things about it, in fact. We have, on the one hand, families with all the adults trying to work from home while their kids try to learn from home, waking up early in the morning to send emails while the kids are still asleep and staying up late to finish off the inbox, constantly available to work and to family and never fully present to either one.

And on the other hand, we have—the opposite, in all its many forms. Families suffering from the massive increases in unemployment, doubling or tripling the usual volume of clients at food pantries, month after month. People in jobs too hands-on to work from home, literally risking their lives day after day. Retired people and seniors cut off from their children and grandchildren, from their friends and churches, in a time of tremendous anxiety and fear, with all the usual supports gone. Lonely children whose first written words will include “Mute” and “Start Video,” because they’re learning to read on Zoom.

Most of us who’re still able to have work and human connection are overwhelmed by the demands of both; most of us who have solitude or free time are crushed by its unending expanse. In an ordinary time, of course, we’d shift things around a bit. The lonely, isolated grandparents could help the overwhelmed parents with the kids, and so on. But of course, this year, that’s just the thing we cannot do.

It strikes me that Jesus knew both sides of this. In today’s gospel story, of course, we see him over-worked and under-rested. They bring to Jesus “all who [are] sick or possessed with demons.” (Mark 1:32) He heals “many,” but it could never be enough, because they pile in and flock to him until “the whole city [is] gathered around the door.” (Mark 1:33-34) You’ll notice that they start bringing them to him to be healed “that evening, at sundown” (Mark 1:32); we can only imagine that he heals them late into the night, until he finally begs off to get some rest, leaving many more disappointed at the door. And then he gets up “early in the morning,” long before dawn, “while it was still very dark,” and goes to pray. (Mark 1:35) Jesus is burning the candle at both ends, but at least he knows how to take time for himself to be with God.

But no! Even there his disciples hound him, hunting him down in the desert and, when they finally find him, they bring him news he already knows too well: “Everyone is searching for you!” (Mark 1:37) As if he didn’t already know. As if that wasn’t why he was out here, at cold, dark, dawn.

Soon enough, though, he’ll know the other end of things too well. It won’t be too long before his popularity fades, and the crowds disappear. Soon enough, in fact, he’ll be alone. He’ll have all the space he needs to pray in the dark garden at Gethsemane, and he’ll pray in anguish as his friends fall asleep around him. (Mark 14:34-42) They’ll finally stop demanding his attention, and deny they know him. They’ll stop pressing in on him to feel his healing touch, and leave him alone with God up on the cross, until even God seems to abandon him and he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) And the bystanders, like some kind of ancient social-distancing experts, can only comfort him from yards away, with a bit of sour wine on a sponge at the end of a stick. (Mark 15:36) Jesus will know, soon enough, the depths of loneliness and fear. And if you’ve been there recently—he’s been there, too.
For now, though, Jesus is at the other end of things. For now, Jesus is not abandoned, but overrun. So what does Jesus do, now, overwhelmed? “Let us go on,” he says, “to another town.” (Mark 1:38) “No,” he seems to say, “I can’t help. Not now.”

I have a bad habit sometimes, in my sermons, of undermining my own best efforts at volunteer recruitment. And so I tremble to preach on this story today, in which people beg an overworked and overwhelmed Jesus for his volunteer ministry, and he declines.
The secret, though, is that Jesus doesn’t exactly say “no” to this call for help. He doesn’t even say “not right now.” What he says, instead, is something different: “not right here.” He does not say, “let us go to bed,” but “let us go on to the neighboring towns,” to heal and preach and serve somewhere else, not to stop entirely.

Nobody here is a full-time minister of this Church—and that’s not a comment about my compensation. For five hundred years, Episcopal priests have been married, have had families, have had divided attention and energy between their ministries of love in the Church and the home. And in the last fifty years or so, we’ve done a much better job of recognizing that laypeople are ministers of this Church, every bit as much as clergy. The core of the priest’s calling to ministry happens within the institutional life of the Church; the core of most laypeople’s ministry happens in the home, or at work, or in their neighborhood, but it’s every bit as much a ministry as mine.

Over time, the shape of our lives’ ministries shift and change. We step back from church to focus on our families and our work; we retire and our children move out and we can finally give more time to the church! Some of you, I know, have finally booked vaccine appointments and are overflowing with energy to share here and with your families. And whatever these transitions may be, they usually don’t mean we’re stepping back from ministry, because wherever we go to love God and our neighbor—whatever we do to heal the sick or comfort the afflicted, care for the poor or welcome children as Jesus did—we are ministers of Christ in that place. And in fact, the whole point of our ministry here—of everything we’ll discuss at our Annual Meeting in a few minutes—is precisely to transform us and equip us for our ministry there, out there.

So may we all, at the end of this exhausting year, find the renewed strength that the prophet Isaiah promises. May God “give power to the faint, and strengthen the powerless” (Isaiah 40:28); may God guide us in our ministries, in our church and in our homes and in our world, that we may “mount up with wings like eagles,” that we may “run and not be weary,” that we may “walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28, 31)

Giving Thanks

Posted on by

On Tuesday, forty days after Christmas, we celebrated the Feast of the Presentation: the day, forty days after Jesus’ birth, when, following Jewish law, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus up to the Temple to give thanks for the safe and healthy birth of their child.

The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple; illustration from a 19th-20th c. Ethiopian Gospel manuscript.

If you’ve ever been with a six-week-old baby, you know that there’s a lot to give thanks for. But you also know that it’s a difficult time, and that it will continue to be difficult for years into the future—well into that baby’s adulthood! There are many sleepless nights and much heartbreak ahead. And yet they paused, at that moment, to give thanks for the good things that had already happened.

For me, there’s a lesson in that for this year. We are still in a difficult time, but we don’t need to wait for things to be perfect to give thanks for what’s good. Tuesday night, we had the last meeting of this Vestry before we elect new members at our Annual Meeting, and we gave thanks for their ministry. On Sunday, we’ll have our Annual Meeting, and we’ll look at the year that is past. We’ll recognize the difficulty, but we’ll also celebrate what has been good and give thanks to God for keeping us together this year, because we don’t need to wait for everything to be perfect before we can give thanks for what is good.

That’s as true in our own lives as it is in the church. So give thanks today for whatever is good, even if there’s plenty that’s bad, as well.