Sermon — June 9, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Have you ever heard the one about the college undergrad who wanders into a debate about the nature of free will?

So, a group of philosophy professors is meeting for their monthly faculty lunch. And they’re arguing about free will. Do we, as human beings, have control over our actions, or are they just the result of physical or biological processes beyond our control?

 “Look, people are responsible for their actions,” one professor says over lunch. “Yes, of course they’re shaped by their experiences of the past. But we know that mature human beings make choices all the time between right and wrong. We have free will, and we’re responsible for what we do with it.”

“Oh, come on!” says the second one. “We can’t just work off intuition. Psychology clearly show that our brains make decisions for us before we’ve even consciously realized it, and then we come up with the rationalizations after. Our wills aren’t free at all; our actions are just the result of biology. Empirical science shows that free will is an illusion.”

“Science?” asks the third. “You want to talk about science? Don’t you know anything about how the advent of quantum physics has opened our eyes to a non-deterministic model of causality!?” Things are really heating up.

Just then, a sophomore who’s wandered into the room pipes up. “I’m not so sure about free will. I walked in here, and I saw your lunch buffet, and— I know it was wrong, and I knew I shouldn’t do it, but, well… I just couldn’t stop myself. I ate all the cookies.”

From the Christian theological perspective, at least, there are really two different questions about free will: “Do we have free will?” as in, are the choices we make totally determined by some outside thing, by biology or physics or even by God, or are they under our control? But there’s another question, too— “Do we have free will?” as in, “When we make a decision, whether that’s really an individual choice or determined by some outside force—can we actually follow through?” Are our wills free? Or are they somehow in chains?

The Apostle Paul famously wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) You may know the feeling. Our cookie-eating student certainly does. It’s what Martin Luther called, somewhat ominously, The Bondage of the Will, the fact that the human will is, in some sense, constrained; that there’s some gap between our conscious decision-making processes, and the things we actually do. And I think this is the more relevant question about free will. With all due respect to our philosophical friends, few people are bothered day to day about whether their decisions are predetermined by biology or physics or not; but many people struggle with the inadequacy of their willpower to carry out those decisions.

It’s a pattern that dates back all the way to the beginning of humankind, to this foundational story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had free will, and they gave it away. They received the command from God never to eat the fruit of the tree that stood in the middle of the Garden. But they ate it, anyway.

They try to pass the blame along. Both Adam and Eve try to claim that they didn’t have free will, that their actions had some cause outside themselves. “The woman whom you gave me,” says Adam, trying to pin the blame not only on Eve but on God, “she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” (Gen. 3:12) Then God turns to Eve: Don’t look at me! she seems to say. “The serpent tricked me, and I ate!” (Gen. 3:13)

It’s not a very good defense. God entrusted them with the freedom to choose, but told them not to eat the fruit, but they did it anyway, and so God put enmity between the serpent in the Garden and the woman, and between their descendants. And this sounds just about right, because here we are, all these generations later, still struggling against our demons.

You often find Jesus battling demons, too. That’s not just a cute segue from one reading to the next. Much of Jesus’ time, in his early ministry, especially in this early Gospel of Mark, is spent casting out demons of one kind or another. Before he even begins teaching the disciples anything, in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, here he is, so renowned for his demon-fighting skills that people have begun to speculate. Is he a demon himself? Or at least, demon-possessed? Is he a sorcerer who calls on one dark power to defeat another?

Not at all, Jesus replies. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” (Mark 3:23-24) To use evil to cast out evil would only weaken itself.

Jesus isn’t evil, or using evil powers. I assume we can all agree on that.

But Jesus continues with an interesting image, that’s a little less obvious: “No one can enter the Strong One’s house,” he says, “and plunder his property, without first tying up the Strong One; then indeed the house can be plundered.” (Mark 3:27) Of all the metaphors we have for who Jesus is and what Jesus does, this has to be one of the strangest: Jesus Christ, Burglar.

Here’s one way to understand what Jesus means: The house is the world in which we live. The Strong One is the spiritual force of evil, violence, and despair that Jews and Christians have sometimes personified as Satan or the serpent. Jesus’ ultimate battle is not with any of the smaller forces of evil, the demons that afflicted people in their lives. Jesus first needs to confront the great power, the Strong One himself, and tie him up; and when that power is bound, then the property in the house can be plundered; when the Strong One is held captive, then we can be freed.  

This is, ultimately, the story of Jesus’ life, and of his journey toward the Cross. Jesus is headed toward a struggle against all the powers that hold us down, against the power of Death itself. And we live now, as always, in the in-between time, when Jesus’ victory has begun, but is not yet complete; when the Strong One has been bound, but we’re not yet fully free.

And so we have the ability to love. We have the ability to will and to work for the good. But our wills are not yet completely free to do what’s right, as perfectly as we might want.

So there’s the bad news: the human will isn’t free. We will never reach the place of perfect self-control, in which our conscious decisions and our actions are always perfectly aligned. We’ll never even reach the place in which our decisions or our values are exactly what they should be. We’ll never quite love God with our whole hearts. It’s unlikely that we’ll love our neighbors as ourselves; that bar can be very high, depending on the neighbor. We’ll come here, again and again, with the need to confess our smaller sins, our gossip or apathy, our harsh words or our imperfect compassion—and sometimes even bigger ones.

But that’s good news, too: the human will isn’t free. If you find yourself, coming here, again and again, just as imperfect as the week before— It’s not just you. And I don’t mean that to pass along the blame (“The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the fruit!”) I mean it as an antidote to shame. There’s no shame in being an imperfect person, in having imperfect control over your will. That’s not an individual flaw. That’s the human condition. And everyone else faces that struggle, too.

 But there’s even better news than that, and it’s this: We’re not facing that struggle alone. The Holy Spirit is with you, in all the decisions and all the actions of daily life, strengthening you, helping you grow toward a more consistent and a more compassionate kind of love; pray for the Holy Spirit to guide you in those decisions and in those actions, when you need God’s help. Jesus has already gone before you, to bind up the Strong One so that you can be free, even if imperfectly so. And God is beckoning you forward, inviting you into a renewed and restored life, raising you up just as Jesus was raised (2 Cor. 4:14). So “do not lose heart,” as Paul says. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed, day by day.”  Amen.

Sermon — June 2, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride,” one 16^th-century Hebrew hymn begins, “Let’s welcome the face of Shabbat. To greet Shabbat let’s go, let’s be gone, for she is the wellspring of blessing… Shake yourself free, rise from the dust, dress in your garments of splendor, my people.” And to this day, in synagogues all around the world, this song is sung on Friday at dusk, to welcome the arrival of the Sabbath day of rest on Saturday. The hymn captures the joy of a day of rest at the end of a long week of work. Who among us has wanted to sing, on a Friday afternoon, “Shake yourself free, rise from the dust!” It’s a liturgical TGIF, literally.

It reminds me of something my friend Meg used to say, more informally. Meg was doing a master’s degree in Jewish Studies when I was in seminary, and we ended up taking a bunch of classes together, including one with a discussion section that met early Friday afternoon, just a few hours before Shabbat began. I remember Meg leaving class one day as exams loomed over us and we were all studying hard, and saying goodbye—not with the traditional Shabbat Shalom, “Have a peaceful Shabbat,” but with a hopeful and joyous phrase that I will never forget: “Shabbat sh’almost!” Thank God it’s Friday.

But keeping the Sabbath isn’t always pure joy. I think of the story of the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire. Going into the 1924 Olympics, Liddell was favored to win the 100 meter dash. But he ultimately refused to run because the heats for the 100 were being held on a Sunday, and as a good Scottish Presbyterian, he refused to violate the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy for something so frivolous as a footrace. The story has a happy ending—Liddell ended up winning the 400m race in Paris—but it’s a good example of the burden that observing the Sabbath can be in a world that doesn’t expect it.

You might think that we live in the best of both worlds. In our culture, many of us get two days off from work at the end of the week, not just one. We should have twice the TGIF joy as a 16^th-century Jewish hymn writer. And at the same time, the days of wet-blanket Puritan restrictions are behind us. Shops and restaurants are open on Sundays. No one will scold you if they see you having fun on the Lord’s Day. And yet—I think we desperately need the Sabbath more than ever, these days.

The origins of the Sabbath stretch back to the beginning of time. On six days, God worked to create the universe; on the seventh day, God rested. And you, too, are to rest, God told the ancient Israelites. Not just the privileged who can afford to take the day of, or the especially devout who want to keep it holy; but everyone: you, your son, your daughter, your ox, your donkey; even the people from foreign lands living among you; even the people you have enslaved will rest, God tells them, because you remember that you were enslaved, and made to work without rest. (Deut. 5:14-15) And the descendants of those Israelites whom Pharaoh had enslaved vowed never again to give up the opportunity to rest.

The Jewish people were considered remarkable in the ancient world, in fact, for the custom of the Sabbath day. Ancient writers commented on this peculiar ethnic custom of taking a day off each work, something no other ancient people did. But the Sabbath was vital to Jewish life. Observing it is not just taking a day off from work. It’s taking a day off from work so that you can be with family, and community, and God. On the Sabbath, the people of God enter an alternate reality. They are free from the hierarchies of the everyday, in which their lives are determined by the boss’s instructions, or by the demands of productivity. And they enter a time of community and presence. “The Sabbath,” the great 20^th-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

The Christian relationship to the Sabbath has always been complicated by Jesus’ own complicated relationship to the Sabbath, which is often misunderstood. Consider our two stories in Mark today. It may seem at first glance as if Jesus is rejecting the Sabbath entirely, flagrantly violating the Sabbath commandments. But this is only the case if you assume that the Pharisees are right about what is and isn’t allowed. Jesus’ disciples pluck some grain from the fields to eat; the Pharisees ask, “why are they doing what’s not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) But this is begging the question. It’s not lawful on the Sabbath to work; but the commandment doesn’t explain what this means. Are the disciples working on the Sabbath? None of them are grain-pluckers by trade. The rabbinic tradition would later codify thirty-nine categories of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but in the centuries around Jesus’ life it was all still open for debate.

Could you require your employees to work on the Sabbath? Absolutely not, and Jesus doesn’t say you could. Should you go to the syngagogue, to read and pray on the Sabbath? Yes, and Jesus regularly did. Could you save a person’s life, even if it meant violating one of the other laws? Yes, and any Orthodox rabbi today would tell you that you are in fact commanded to break the Sabbath to save a life. Should you heal someone today who could be healed tomorrow? Well, that was where Jesus and the Pharisees are having their debate.

If you assume that Sabbath observance is narrow and defined, it might seem that Jesus is rejecting it. But if you recognize that the debate over the Sabbath was in fact very broad, it seems clearer that Jesus is just participating in that debate. For Jesus, the emphasis seems to be on the joy of the Sabbath, an invitation from God to rest and be restored, rather than a series of limits to be obeyed. To eat and to be healed are part of that Sabbath restoration and rest.

Plucking a bit of grain when you’re hungry and walking through a field, is not like working for Pharaoh seven days a week. It’s not even quite like working in your own field, if that’s what you do every day. To say to someone, “stretch out your hand,” and to heal them as they do, is not work. Not for Jesus. It’s not something that distracts people from the presence of God, that defiles a holy day. It’s something that points them to God, that shows them God’s miraculous presence in their midst.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind,” Jesus says, “not humankind for the sabbath.” (2:27) And so he embraces the Sabbath principle of rest, that builds up humankind, and he tends to lean in the direction of allowing anything that builds us up, rather than discouraging anything that could be work.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind.” The Sabbath was made for you. God has invited you to cease your work; to lay aside, for one day, the things that others are demanding of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, and to take time to be with your community or family and with God, in a realm “where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

Embracing the Sabbath today is not about going back to some imagined golden age, where everyone spent a day together in rest and prayer. We’ll probably never return to a world in which shops and restaurants are closed on Sundays, so retail and service workers can have a the day off, too. And in fact, we’re moving in the other direction. It’s hard to get that Sabbath rest when your work can buzz at you from your project, any time. And whether you have paid work or not, we all have “work” from which we need to rest, housework and volunteer work and the thousand small chores that we feel like we should do, and it’s hard to assert our freedom from them.

But Sabbath is good. Rest is good. And so, I want to invite you to think: What is your Sabbath time, and how can you observe it and keep it holy? Maybe for you it’s on Sunday morning, here, or on Saturday some time. Maybe it’s Friday family movie night, where you can order takeout and watch the same four movies over and over again. Maybe it’s the Wednesday-morning walking group where you have some time to reconnect with friends. Maybe it really is a day, a full day where you can put down the phone, and turn off the TV, and be present with the people around you. Or maybe for you, the Sabbath is a place, where you can go during the week and simply be, and not do. But in the end, the Sabbath is really an alternate reality, a way of being in which you are free to stop for a while and rest.

Wherever the Sabbath is, whenever the Sabbath is, God made it for you. And God’s inviting you to accept it. It can be very hard to unplug, to put down the list of todos, to stop working and let yourself rest. But if you can find that Sabbath place in your life, if you can “shake yourself free, [and] rise from the dust,” you just might find you look forward to it more than anything else, and when it approaches, you find yourself thinking: Shabbat sh’almost! The Sabbath is almost here.

Sermon — May 26, 2024 — Trinity Sunday

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s an emotion that our ancestors sometimes called “fear,” and which we’re more likely to understand if we call it “awe”: a feeling of reverence and wonder mixed with dread, inspired by finding yourself in the presence of something you can’t even begin to wrap your mind around. It’s something I remember feeling when I was ten years old or so, standing on a transparent footbridge above a waterfall, and suddenly realizing that there was nothing supporting me but some long-retired engineer’s calculations and a prayer. It’s what I felt when we were sent home from the hospital with a newborn baby, just a couple days old, and all the nurses and the helpers were gone, and I just remember thinking: “You’re leaving this thing with us?” It’s what I felt the first time I got the phone call to plan my first funeral, as a new priest; to be the one to bear witness to a family’s grief and to be with them through their process of mourning and remembrance.

When our ancestors talked about “the fear of the Lord,” this is what they meant—not that God is scary or intimidating. Not that we should be afraid of God’s eternal punishment. But that our God is an awesome god, in the full sense of the word—because the vastness and the strangeness of God has the power to fill us with awe.

Awe is what Isaiah felt, more than 2500 years ago, when he was confronted with the prospect of speaking the word of God to the people of God, and that same awe is what many modern preachers feel when we step into the pulpit: “Woe is me! I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips”—no offense— “yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5) How could we presume to follow “The Word of the Lord” with any word of our own?

 One of my go-to prayers on a Sunday morning comes from a Lutheran book called the Minister’s Prayer Book, a set of daily devotions for pastors. In good Lutheran fashion, this book has a relatively low view of human perfection and a high view of God’s grace and mercy, and so in a section entitled “Prayers of Preparation for Ministry, On Sunday,” my favorite prayer reads: “Lord God, you have appointed me to be a…pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and were it not for your help, I would long since have ruined it all. Therefore I cry unto you… Lord, use me as your instrument, only do not forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.” (The book rotates between my desk and the sacristy, throughout the year, but it’s never far away.)

I don’t say this to fish for compliments. (I know you all think I’m great.) And I don’t think it reveals some hidden psychopathology. I say it because it’s true for me. Congregations entrust their pastors with many things—not just an hour of your time on Sunday mornings, which we’d better not waste, but the most precious and fragile moments in your lives, and a pastor who mishandles that trust can be just as devastating, in his own way, as a structural engineer whose hand slips on the slide rule. And so I approach my work with a certain sense of awe. But this isn’t just true for priests. I think it might be true for you, as well. The things we do in our lives are really important. Some of us are nurses or doctors entrusted with people’s health; some of us are teachers, or parents, entrusted with the care of children—all of us are human beings living as neighbors of one another and as stewards of God’s creation, and in these roles we are entrusted with incredible, precious, and fragile things. And from time to time I suspect we all feel that overwhelming awe—that reverence mixed with dread that comes when we suddenly doubt that we’re not quit up to the task.

Life is a series of challenges we are not adequate to face.

And yet.

Isaiah despairs. How can I be a prophet? How can I speak on God’s behalf? I am a man of unclean lips. But God does not despair. God doesn’t put Isaiah on a Performance Improvement Plan, and fire him if his prophecies don’t work out. God doesn’t criticize Isaiah from afar, or judge him for his many imperfections. God doesn’t say, “Stop worrying, you’ll be fine!” God sends a seraph with a coal from the altar and touches his lips. And you might think this is a painful thing, and maybe it was. But it’s not about the pain. It’s not a punishment. A sacrifice in the Temple would be made by burning incense, or grain, or meat at the altar. This live coal is the instrument of that sacrifice, the means of making an offering to God. God sees Isaiah, in all his imperfection. God sees him unable or unwilling to approach the holy place, and God reaches out. God brings the holy place to him, and marks him as holy, and says, You are worthy of offering yourself to God. And so when God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah has the strength to answer that call, with confidence—and maybe still with dread—“Here am I.”

 In his Letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims the same cycle of God’s grace, the same invitation to become something greater than we think that we can be. None of us is Jesus, Paul readily admits. None of us is perfect; earlier in the letter, Paul reminds us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) But even though we are not the perfect Son of God, we are children of God; not by nature, but by adoption.

  And this is an extraordinary thing to say. “You have received a spirit of adoption,” Paul writes, and the Spirit itself bears witness that you “are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the loving, perfect God-made-flesh who has always been God’s equal and heir. And yet God has chosen us, sometimes loving but rarely perfect, to be the siblings and equals of Christ. God has chosen us, God has chosen you, to inherit the kingdom of God. That awesome God, that One whose voice breaks the cedar trees, whose voice splits the flames in fire, so majestic that even just the hem of his robe fills the whole Temple, so vast that the overwhelming expanse of the Milky Way is just a drop in his Creation, has chosen you, in all your frailty, or inadequacy, or imperfection, to be a child of God, a sibling of Christ. And you are.

On the Sunday after Pentecost every year, we observe Trinity Sunday, a day devoted to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, to the proposition that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God. And this somewhat technical subject can sometimes drain that sense of awe. But the Trinity is not the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is God. And what’s so interesting about Christianity is not the doctrine of God; what’s interesting about Christianity is God, and what touches us the most is not what we think about God, but what God does in our lives.

So think, for a minute: Where do you feel the way Isaiah feels? Where is that sense of inadequacy for you? Where do you feel unworthy, or imperfect? If God appeared to you, and said, “I need you to—[fill in the blank],” what is it that would make you respond, “Woe is me!” because you were certain that you could not?

The Holy Spirit, is working in you, even now. The Spirit is working in you to bring about new life. The Spirit bears witness with your Spirit that you are a child of God, that you are good and you are loved. In your Isaiah place, whatever it is, in all your feelings of dread, in the sense that you’re not quite up to the task, God reaches out. God sends a seraph with a live coal in its hand, to say that you are worthy to offer yourself to God; that God knows your imperfection and God wants you nevertheless, and when God asks “Whom shall I send?” you are enough to answer, “Here am I; send me!”