Author Archives: Greg Johnston

Making History

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about history. Not just because we’re living through extraordinary times in world history and our nation’s history, which we are, but also because we’re doing some of our own work of creating history right now.

Our Annual Meeting is coming up in a few weeks and I’ve been working on planning for annual reports, which are a kind of writing history, a way of telling the story of who we were and what our church did in 2020.

But at the same time I’ve been digging around in older history. We’re getting ready to do some construction in the church office and we had to clear out a big closet that’s full of archival materials, of letters and correspondence and records from the 1870s and 1880s and beyond. My favorite ones are the letters from Rev. Cutler (of course), planning for the 100th anniversary of the church in 1940, and inviting people to submit a memory, or make a donation, or come and celebrate with St. John’s. My absolute favorite letters are the ones saying “no” because people found some extraordinarily polite ways to say, “No, I can’t help you.”

It strikes me, though, that none of them thought they were writing history. The notion that one of their pieces of stationery with a careful note would become a part of the historical record, the idea that I, eighty years later, would be reading what they’d written, would seem bizarre.

But that’s what we’re all doing, all the time. Every action we take every day, everything that we say to another person, everything that we do, is creating part of our world history and of our own personal histories. There may be a casual compliment that you give, or a harsh word you wish you hadn’t spoken, that’s remembered years down the road; that shapes somebody, that transforms the path that they’re walking through life. And all of that is history.

So as we ponder how to remember 2020, remember also that the way we talk about our pasts shapes our futures; the way we think about our past shapes the way we live our lives in the present, and the way we will live our lives for years to come. So when you think about 2020—when you think about 2021!—I pray that you do it in the spirit of love and hope that God has given us by the Holy Spirit, who gives us faith for a brighter world to come.

Epiphanies

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We tend to think of “epiphanies” as something that we have, “Eureka!” moments, sudden flashes of inspiration that lead us to realize something we never knew before. The Three Wise Men, after all must have had an epiphany when they saw the star shining in the East, pointing them toward Bethlehem; and when they arrived, they must have had another epiphany, realizing that this baby in front of them was the Son of God. Not many of us have these star-shining-in-the-sky moments, although sometimes we do. And so, it can be easy to wonder: “Have I ever had an epiphany?”

But the season of Epiphany is not so much about our sudden flashes of inspiration. It’s more about God’s sudden flashes of revelation. The stories that we’ll read in the gospels during the season of Epiphany are all about Jesus revealing himself in strange and mysterious ways. Largely, the disciples and the people around him don’t realize what he’s saying. We hear the stories of Jesus’ baptism, of calling his disciples, of doing strange things like leaving town when people ask him to heal them. It’s only in retrospect that the disciples can make sense of any of this. Jesus’ Epiphany is not so much a star shining in the East leading them toward Bethlehem as it is a dim light shining in their past that illuminates the path they’ve already walked.

I think more of us have this kind of epiphany, and that’s all right! That’s exactly the way it tends to go in the Bible. We aren’t, after all the wise ones who have studied astrology for years. We’re more like those disciples: not really understanding what’s going, on a little hapless, sometimes failing, but trying, always trying, to follow Jesus and—when we look back—seeing all the ways that he’s revealed himself to us.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” — Christmas Eve

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“In the Bleak Midwinter” — Christmas Eve

 
 
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Sermon — December 24, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Do you know the Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”? I didn’t grow up with it, but it’s grown on me over the years. This year, especially, it seems to say it all:

In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.

“In the Bleak Midwinter,” we gather in the cold, the earth frozen “hard as iron,” the water “like a stone.” We gather at a moment of great darkness, and great light; of great suffering, and great hope; of painful sadness, and joyful anticipation.

We gather, in other words, in a moment that distils to its purest essence what it is to be human. This is it. This is all it’s ever been: sickness and death and compassion and hope, powerlessness and pain and rejoicing and love; the mixed-up emotional soundtrack to life. In ordinary times it’s fainter, with the volume dial turned halfway down, but this is it. This is what it is to be human beings: fragile, and beautiful, and loved.

And this is what it is God chose to be.

If there’s comfort, in any year, in the compassion of the Christmas story, it must be this year. At Christmas, we make the extraordinary claim that in Jesus, God became human. God looked down on our world, as beautiful and broken two thousand years ago as it is today, and God had a choice. God could wash everything away in another Flood and start afresh. God could give up, set an out-of-office reply to our prayers and fly away to another part of the multiverse. God could delegate, could send another prophet to tell us where we’d gone wrong and how to make things right.

 But that’s not what God did.

God saw how often we say “no” to following the way of love, and invited one woman to say yes. God saw how powerless we are over the circumstances of our lives, and chose to walk among us, not as a mighty warrior or an influential legislator but as a newborn baby, the most helpless creature in the world. God saw the mess that human life’s become, and did the only thing a loving Parent could; God drew near to us, became one of us, became Emmanuel, “God with us.”

In Jesus of Nazareth, God walked among us. God knew the hunger and the fear of a newborn waking up for the hundredth time in a night. God knew the frustration of a toddler trying to stack his blocks too high. God knew the sorrow of losing a close friend, and the joy of eating and drinking together. God felt the deepest pain a human being could feel. God knew what it was to be betrayed; God knew what it was to die alone.

God knew, and God knows, what it is to be human, and in our deepest, darkest moments God sees us, and knows us, and loves us. And in the moments of our greatest pain, God himself is there with us, because the Christ whose birth we celebrate this Christmas is above all else the compassionate, loving God made flesh, bringing our pain up into God and God’s healing love down among us.

But this isn’t the whole story. Our God is not just a compassionate friend, a “Wonderful Counselor,” but a “Mighty God,” (Isaiah 9:6) a “Prince of Peace” sitting upon “the throne of David” “from this time onward and forevermore,” whose “authority shall grow continually,” and in whose kingdom “there shall be endless peace.” (Isaiah 9:9, 9:7)

God, in other words, didn’t just come among us to feel our pain, and then to return to heaven with a bit more empathy for the human condition. God came to change the world. In Jesus, God comes as a leader, a ruler, a “Prince.” God comes to us and starts a movement, and invites us to follow. God teaches us to love one another. God empowers us to love one another. And then God asks us to love one another, with Jesus himself leading the way.

The one line of “In the Bleak Midwinter” that gets me every time is this: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. “Our God, heaven cannot hold him.” God’s love is so great that it spills out of heaven and splashes onto earth. God’s Holy Spirit flows out and fills us all, fills us to the brim and keeps pouring, so that God’s love overflows out of us and we love one another. Sometimes we don’t even know that it’s happening. Sometimes we don’t believe that it is. Sometimes we look at the world and we ask, “Where is God?”

And the answer is: Right here! Right now. Yes, God is up “in heaven” empathizing with us, and loving us. But “heaven cannot hold him.” God is not locked away in heaven. God is here, now, with us, acting in us and through us and for us, the hidden force in every act of human love. In every nurse’s gentle touch, in every neighbor’s grocery run, in every single sacrifice we make for one another, the Holy Spirit flows through us, the light of Christ that shines brightly on this holy night shines through us.

So look for that light. Carry that light. Spread that light this Christmas season and forevermore. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11) Amen.