Sermon — December 6, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

For two years, my cell phone used to drop every phone call I made on a certain stretch of my commute. Without fail, just as I drove past Walden Pond on the border between Lincoln and Concord and passed the famous cabin site where Henry David Thoreau had retreated to the woods, my cell service would cut out, as if the ghost of Thoreau himself was reaching out to block my call: a little moment of victory for the wilderness in the heart of suburbia.

Thoreau wrote in his book Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” It’s easy to make fun of Thoreau’s gravity about his time in the wilderness. Thoreau’s tiny home in the woods wasn’t a remote cabin somewhere deep in northern Maine. The cabin site just a twenty-minute walk from downtown Concord, a walk his mother famously took from time to time to pick up his laundry and bring him some lunch. It wasn’t exactly the Oregon Trail out there.

John the Baptist, too, turned to the wilderness to discover what was most essential. When John wanted to lead the people toward a life of repentance and holiness, he didn’t go to the Temple, where major sacrifices were offered twice daily amid a constant hum of smaller prayers and offering; he didn’t go to the synagogue, where the people prayed together every day and studied on the Sabbath. He went out into the wilderness. But John’s wilderness was not much further from civilization than Thoreau’s was; not even thirty miles outside Jerusalem, an easy day’s travel for the crowds who came to see him preach and to be baptized in the Jordan. And in fact, if his wilderness had been more remote, his ministry would have failed. The crowds couldn’t come to hear John’s message if he’d been too far away for them to find.

Both Henry David Thoreau and John the Baptist recognized that it’s not a place’s distance from civilization or its terrain or its vegetation that makes a place a wilderness; it is, in a sense, its strangeness, its distinction from ordinary life. And so, Thoreau leaves bustling nineteenth-century Concord for a one-room cabin by a nearby pond, and John dresses himself in camel’s-hair and lives off the land, and they straddle the border of society: one foot out in the wilderness to give a new perspective on their ordinary lives, and one foot staying in contact with the world to share what they’ve learned.

It’s in this sense that we are living in the wilderness now. When I look back over family photos and memories from these months, I’m struck by the wild juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unbelievable: a selfie with Murray sitting on my top of me, playing with a dandelion, while I lie on the grass, masked in the midst of an eerily-empty park on a warm spring day; a photo of Alice and I both “working from home” in the car, she in the front seat and I in the back; the cheery music still playing loudly in the grocery store as cashiers and customers shout at each other to be heard across six feet of plexiglass and surgical masks. It’s this uncanny resemblance to the ordinary that really gets me. It’s not as though we’re living in the apocalypse our movies imagine, the aftermath of nuclear war or an asteroid strike. It’s just like ordinary life in the status quo ante, but twisted and blurred at the edges into something that’s just close enough to the normal to feel bizarre.

But it’s in this strangeness that God comes to dwell.

Isaiah 40 marks a new moment in the history of the people of Israel. The first thirty-nine chapters of the book tell the story of Isaiah’s ministry and prophecies in the city of Jerusalem, as it faces multiple invasions and the threat of destruction. The city escapes once, and the people become over-confident. In Isaiah 39, the prophet predicts the city’s fall, and then the story seems to leap in time. When chapter 40 begin, it’s clear that the prophesied destruction has come. The war has been lost, the holy city has been destroyed, and the people have been carried off into exile. Their homes are gone, their lives are uprooted; they’ve been taken to live as hostages in a strange land. They’re living in the wilderness if anyone ever has.

And yet the prophet opens on a reassuring note: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” (Isaiah 40:1) “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear.” (40:9) There’s good news to be shared with the people, and the whole city should be shouting it from the mountaintops. And what is this good news? What are these glad tidings? Simply this: “Here is your God!” (40:9)

“Here is your God.” Your God is here. Not back in Jerusalem, living in the ruined sanctuary of the holy Temple. Not back in all the cities of Judah from which you came, the familiar lives you’ve had to leave behind. But here with you in the wilderness.

And it’s here in the wilderness that you must prepare God’s way.

There’s a funny thing about the Bible that I’ve always loved: it has no punctuation. Commas and periods and quotation marks weren’t invented for thousands of years after the Biblical texts were first written down; the ones you see printed are just modern interpretations, placed there by the translators to make the Bible easier to read. And so, there are these two slightly different ways to read a single quote in two of our readings today. The Gospel of Mark quotes Isaiah to help us understand the ministry of John the Baptist, and it quotes the verse like this: “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” (Mark 1:3) John is, after all, someone crying out in the wilderness; so it makes perfect sense. But the quote from Isaiah itself seems more like it reads: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord…’” (Isaiah 40:3) “A voice crying out in the wilderness—‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” “A voice crying out—‘In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’” Do you see the difference? In Mark, John goes out to the wilderness, and the people flock to see him there, and he tells them: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” And they go back home, to their ordinary, civilized lives, and some of them take his teaching to heart. But in Isaiah, the people are stuck in the wilderness. They can’t simply take a day trip out to see John’s strange life. They’re living their own strange lives. And the prophet’s voice cries out to them nonetheless: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.”

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. In the midst of this strangeness, make God’s paths straight. In this time of Advent, in this time of waiting, look into your hearts and out into your lives; smooth out the rough places that keep you from loving God and your family and your neighbor, and straighten out the crooked paths that lead you away from God’s love. Don’t wait to be restored to ordinary life. Don’t wait for things to be “normal” again. Because God doesn’t dwell in the holy city, God doesn’t dwell in The Way Things Were, God doesn’t dwell in this or any temple. “Get you up to a high mountain…lift up your voice with strength…do not fear…[for] here is your God.” (Isaiah 40:9)

It can be hard to feel God’s presence while we’re here in the wilderness. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. If the people already felt comforted, Isaiah wouldn’t have to shout “Comfort, comfort ye my people!” We can’t force that spiritual comfort on ourselves. We can’t push away our anxiety or our despair, our exhaustion, anger, or fear. We can’t force God to come to us “with might,” to feed us “like a shepherd,” to “gather” us like “lambs in his arms.” (Isaiah 40:10–11) Because the work of building a highway through our spiritual desert is ultimately God’s, not ours. The story of our salvation, of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, is God’s not ours.

But we can do our small part to prepare the way for God to come in. We can make straight the crooked paths that turn us away from God. We can chip away at our rough places, and trust the Holy Spirit to smooth them out in time. So, as our offertory hymn goes,

Make ye straight what long was crooked,
make the rougher places plain;
let your hearts be true and humble,
as befits his holy reign.

For the glory of the Lord
now o’er earth is shed abroad;
and all flesh shall see the token
that his word is never broken.

Amen.

Sermon — November 29, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” (Mark 13:33)

On Christmas Eve, most American children will be so excited they’ll hardly be able to sleep. Full of cookies and hot chocolate, with the promise of presents coming just hours away, they’ll finally crash into bed, leaving their parents just hours to finish decorating and wrapping, with even less time for Santa Claus to come and eat the proverbial cookies left out by the fire. And then come four or five in the morning, the kids will be up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to check whether Santa came this year; and their parents will share another bleary-eyed Christmas morning, exhausted but (hopefully) happy.

Now, Germans have a slightly different way of exhausting the family on Christmas Eve. My mother’s side of the family are all German-American, and we inherited some traditions from the old country, including the tradition of exchanging presents on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. So for years as kids, my mother and aunt would spend hours and hours of Advent creating a list; not a list of presents they wanted, but a list of activities to pass the day. They’d wake up in the morning and start checking items off the list. Ride our bikes around the neighborhood: check. Go swing on the swing sets: check. Play a few hand of gin rummy: check. By the time they’d finished off the whole list, it would be… only 10 a.m., with eight agonizing hours to wait. By the end of the evening they’d climb into bed tired out from playing and from waiting, well-fed, and worn out with the joy of their new gifts. And their parents would get a good night’s sleep.

Waiting itself is exhausting. No doubt. It’s a remarkable thing, but anxious alertness really does wear you out, even if you’re doing literally nothing other than waiting; in fact, especially if you’re doing nothing other than waiting. When you’re waiting for something exciting or frightening, your sympathetic nervous system gets your body ready to go. Like a driver warming up a car, it ignites all your systems, getting ready to drive at the drop: your heart beats faster, your blood pumps at a higher pressure, your muscles tense, and this all takes more work than just sitting around, relaxing. And so ironically, the longer we’re waiting anxiously for something to come, the less ready we are to face it; when it finally arrives, we’re exhausted, not prepared—especially if we haven’t managed to come up with any good distractions.

In Advent, we wait and we watch. We live in the moment between two different realities. We’re suspended between what the Collect for the Day calls “this mortal life” and “the last day,” the world of human history “in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility” and the world of “glorious majesty,” “when he shall come again…to judge both the living and the dead.” We hope and we pray and we wait for our Savior to be born, a new light shining in the world in the darkest days of the year. And we hope and we pray and we wait for our Savior to return, in his own mysterious way, and to dispel the darkness once and for all.

This Advent, more than ever, we live suspended between two realities. We live in hope, with the joyful news of multiple vaccines more effective than the scientists had dreamed, coming, just around the corner. And we live in fear and anxiety, as the virus spreads, as the days get colder and our world grows darker. We remember the love and the care that people have shown for one another in the last nine months; and we acknowledge how exhausted we are by everything we’ve had to do—and not do.

“Beware,” Jesus says, “keep alert… Keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” (Mark 13:33–37) If we take it literally, it’s not the best advice. This kind of constant vigilance, this unsleeping alertness, might work for one night. If you’re young enough, you might even recover by the next day. But day after day, waiting, watching, not just for a week or a month or a year but for generation after generation and century after century, waiting two thousand years and more for the master of the house to return? It’s impossible; the human body can’t take it. “Keep awake” on this two-thousand-year, Final-Day-of-Judgment scale simply cannot be what Jesus literally means.

But there’s a smaller scale of alertness that we sometimes miss in our focus on bigger things. Over and over again this year, I’ve been praying that same prayer Isaiah prays: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” (Isaiah 64:1) You may have prayed similar things. Come down, God; do the awesome deeds that we expect. Come down and heal the sick; hide your face from us no more. Come down and heal our nation; reshape us like clay into a better form. Come down and make your name known—for we are your people! “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” I’ve had enough of 2020. Make it stop.

But in all our anxiety For All This To Be Over, though, I think we miss all the ways in which God has torn open the heavens and come down, the ways in which God walks among us even now. In our exhaustion and our despair, in our anxiety and alertness, we so wear ourselves out that we’re too tired to notice the presence of God right before our eyes. In our anxiety to get to the great joy of our Christmas-Eve presents, we miss out on all the little joys of our Christmas-Eve activities: the hard work of pedaling around the block, the exhilaration of swinging high into the air, the satisfaction of beating our big sister at cards.

This is the level where Paul’s prayer for the Corinthians operates. It’s not an exhortation to stay awake and alert; it’s not a prayer to God to come down, soon; it’s a prayer of thanksgiving. Paul gives thanks for the grace that the church has received from God, the grace that strengthens them and sustains them as they wait for the coming of Christ. Paul has no anxiety about whether God will come again; “God is faithful,” after all, he writes. (1 Cor. 1:9) Paul simply gives thanks for all those gifts of the Spirit that the members of the church receive each day, the million little gifts that give them strength enough to make it to the end.

From time to time over the last nine months, I’ve had a few moments when I’ve been alert enough to be grateful for the gifts in front of me: for the excuseto say no to a meeting because I need to be with my child, for the necessity of coming up with no places and ways to play, for the sheer joy of even a few strange Sundays together in church. More often than not these days, I’m resentful, not grateful, but it’s that shift I want to cultivate: from “when will this be over, God?” to “help me to see you here and now, God.”

My mother’s Christmas-Eve list of activities never lasted through the day, but it was a good start. So what’s on your Advent list? How are you going to make it through the next few months? What will give you the spiritual strength to appreciate those parts of this time that are good, and to the rest? How will you rest enough to stay awake to God’s presence already in our midst? “For you do not know when the time[s] will come” when you will see him; not just one big time on Christmas or on Judgment Day, but a dozen little times every day.

Amen.

Sermon — November 22, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

A few weeks after I started here, a parishioner from my old church in Lincoln passed away. It wasn’t a tragic death; she died in her home at the age of 99, surrounded by family, at the end of a long and, in fact, heroic life. I say “heroic” because that’s what she was: a hero.

I had only learned this the year before, when she was presented with a Congressional Gold Medal at the age of 98, but Patricia Warner, three quarters of a century before I knew her, had once been a spy. In 1942, her husband—a naval officer—had been killed in combat in the Second World War. Patricia, aged twenty-two, promptly headed to a Navy recruiting office to join up. On learning that the Navy didn’t take widows, she turned to a younger, scrappier service: the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services, OSS—America’s first modern spy agency.

During the war, she was stationed in Spain, where she helped smuggle downed American and British air crews out of occupied France. When Allied airplanes were shot down over Europe, the Belgian and French Resistance would try to rescue any survivors, hide them, and bring them through a kind of underground railroad all the way to the Spanish border. Then British and American agents could transport them through Spain to the British base at Gibraltar and bring them home. Spain remained neutral during the war, but its leader was a dictator sympathetic to the German cause, and it was full of German military and intelligence officers.

So Pat went undercover as a flamenco dancer, gathering information on German activities and recruiting friendly agents to the Allied cause, sending Morse code from her apartment and arranging for submarines to pick up downed fighter pilots off the coast.

Now I tell you all this, not just because it’s a cool story, and not just because I once applied for an internship to be a CIA analyst—I was rejected—but because this is, in a sense, exactly what we Christians are: spies embedded deep behind enemy lines.

This Sunday morning, the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday before a new liturgical year begins in Advent, is often called the feast of “Christ the King.” It’s a fairly recent feast, as far as church calendars go. The Pope only created it in 1925, soon after Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. In the face of a rising tide of fascism, the Church emphasized the struggle between two kinds of kingdom: the empires of the world, with their values of power, wealth, and domination, and their bombastic, demagogic dictators; and the kingdom of God, with its values of compassion, love, and peace, and its self-sacrificing ruler, Christ the King. The feast of Christ the King stands at the transition between two great seasons of the Church: the season of Advent, when we quietly await the arrival of Jesus our newborn King, the Messiah, the Prince of Peace; and the long season after Pentecost, when we recognize that Christ still lives and reigns in the Church, and we seek to follow him and obey.

The kingdom of Christ is a kingdom that’s both “now and not yet.” We proclaim that that little baby who lay in a manger two thousand years ago was and is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; yet we know as well that his kingdom is incomplete. We believe that God will come to set the world aright; yet we can see clearly that it hasn’t happened yet.

Christ’s reign over the earth is something like the French government-in-exile during World War Two. It was the legitimate government of France; there were French citizens who obeyed it, served it, gave their lives for it; but its land was occupied by a hostile foreign power. And while it was a true that a climactic moment of liberation was going to come, for years people did their best to live faithfully deep behind enemy lines—maybe with the help of the occasional spy.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us this conflict between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus returns in glory and separates the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the unrighteous, and he uses a simple test. It’s not whether they call themselves Christians or Jews, Hindus, Muslims, or atheists. It’s not whether they’re active members of their local church. It’s not even whether they’re upstanding and well-respected citizens. It’s whether they gave food to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty; whether they welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, tended the sick and visited the imprisoned, because, Christ the King says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Whether they knew it or not, when these sheep were caring for one another, they were meeting Jesus face to face. The same Christ who becomes present in the Eucharistic bread and wine becomes present in people who are sick or hungry or locked behind bars. And woe to us, the ancient Christians used to preach, when we clothe the Body of Christ in silver and fine silk in the Church and bow down in awe, while we leave his Body hungry in the street and turn away our eyes while he asks us for something to eat.

If this is what the kingdom of God looks like, then it seems clear that we’re not living in it yet. Despite our best efforts, we do not manage to feed all those who are hungry, and to clothe all those who are naked, let alone to care for all those who are sick or in prison. And we do display that hypocrisy that honors Christ’s body in the Church and ignores it in the streets; at least most of us do, at least much of the time.

But God is coming back to set things right. And that’s the real story here. The kingdom of God is not just a set of ideals or values that we ought to follow. It’s a real kingdom, it’s a real government; it’s in exile now, but it’s going to return in force. This is what the “shepherd” imagery of the prophet Ezekiel is all about. “Shepherd” was a common image for a king, who leads and guides and cares for the people like a flock. And, God says, after generations of human kings have failed to care for their people, “I myself will search for my sheep, and seek them out… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep… and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them with justice.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 15-16) It’s this “coming again” to lead the sheep, this “coming in glory” with “all the angels” (Matthew 25:31) to “restore all things,” that we await in Advent. It’s the D-Day of the Christian story, the final liberation that will end with the kingdom of peace, and love, and justice, the kingdom of God that feeds the hungry and heals the sick, finally ruling the world.

But that day has not yet come. We’re left here in this world, like a bunch of spies, living in a hostile kingdom, but doing our best to help our cause. We can’t liberate France all on our own. We can’t feed all the hungry on our own. We can’t end the pandemic on our own. Those victories are up to forces beyond our control. But we can feed a few people who are hungry. We can visit a few people who are imprisoned. We can slow the virus enough so that just a few fewer people might be sick and die. These little differences will never be enough to change the world. But to one person, from one person, they can mean everything.

So here we are, spies for the kingdom of God, living subversively as agents of God’s love in an often-unloving world, slowly chipping away at the reign of cruelty, violence, and destruction until—one day—our God returns to reign. We don’t know when that final victory will come, and we’ll see Christ returning in glory; but we do know when we can see him walking among us now, because he’s told us where to look.

So where, O undercover Christian, have you seen Christ this week without knowing it? Where have you seen someone hungry, for food or for meaning, and how could you feed them? Where have you seen someone thirsty, for water or for God, and how can you give them something to drink? Where have you seen someone sick or imprisoned, in body, mind, or spirit, and how can you give them relief? Because this is our mission while we’re here behind enemy lines: to seek out our neighbors when they need us and to help, to smuggle them out of the kingdom of this world and into the kingdom of God’s love—and there, in them, to meet our Lord and God. For “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40) Amen.