Sermon — October 11, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“They have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” (Exodus 32:8)

The story’s almost comical. These are the same people, after all, who, just a short time ago, saw God part the Red Sea. They’ve seen God hold back the waters on either side as they walked across on dry land. They’ve seen the smoke as the fiery cloud of God’s presence descended on the holy mountain. They’ve heard the voice of God speaking to them out of the cloud and fire, and been afraid.

And now, just a few days later, it’s like a ’90s teenage comedy: Father Moses goes away for the weekend and takes too long coming back, and the kids throw a house party. Uncle Aaron, Moses’ own brother, is left in charge, and he’s kind of a pushover. Moses has been gone, communing with God for forty days and forty nights, and the people are over it. “We don’t know what happened to Moses and his ‘God,’” they seem to say. “But—you can make us a god!” And Aaron, inexplicably, does.

“Give me your jewelry,” he says, “Your earrings, your bracelets, your necklaces. I’ll make you a god.” And he melts them down, and casts them in his handy idol-mold—which he just has lying around—and out pops this little golden calf.

And the people go nuts. “Oh my God!” Literally! “This is our God! This is the one who brought us up out of Israel!” And they build an altar, and they offer sacrifices, and they sit down for a Gathering-Sunday Welcome-Back Cookout. And God is not amused.

But we are!

It’s often hard to hear the humor in the Bible through the millennia, but the Bible’s parodies of idolatry make a certain amount of sense. The Prophet Isaiah, to take just one example, teases the idea of worshiping a wooden statue of a god. A craftsman, he says, cuts down a tree, and saws it in half. One half he chops into firewood, and uses it cook his dinner; the other half he carves into a god and worships! (Isaiah 44:16–17 ESV) How did you know which half of the log was supposed to be which? Are you sure you didn’t burn your god by accident and start worshiping the firewood? This simplistic kind of idol-worship was so easy to mock that even the ancient Greek philosophers got in on the game. Sophisticated Greeks and Romans, even pagans, didn’t really believe that idols were gods. And so it’s baffling to see the Israelites make this kind of mistake. The medieval Jewish commentator Nachmanides even thinks this is proof that the people didn’t really worship the golden calf. Something else must have been going on. After all, he writes, “no one in the world could be so stupid as to think that the gold in their ears brought them out of Egypt.”^[1] More recently, of course, these kinds of satires may bring up a certain discomfort. After all, we live in a world of religious pluralism. We want to respect difference, not mock it. Why should it matter to me whether another person’s religion has statues of their gods?

Well, to be honest, it shouldn’t. And indeed, God’s commandments about creating idols were also for God’s own people, for our own religion. But on a much more important level, I think this focus on literal idolatry, on the literal worship of statues of the gods, makes it harder to see the problem of our own, deeper idolatry.

It’s too easy for us to think like this: Idols are statues of gods; Worship is a religious ceremony; I do not perform religious ceremonies to statues of gods; therefore I do not worship idols. Check. Second Commandment accomplished. Sermon finished. See you next week.

But “worshiping idols” means a lot more than that. The word “worship” itself originates as the smooshing together (that’s a technical term) of two older English words: “worth” and “-ship.” “Worth” as in “value”; “-ship” as in “citizenship,” “discipleship,” “fellowship.” (Not a sailing ship.) Worship, first and foremost, is “worth-ship,” the state of being worthy, of being valuable. So we sing hymns, and give thanks, and we pray to God, and we call these things “worship”; but we do them because God is worthy of them, and that’s what worship really means. We believe God to be worthy beyond measure; and we believe that God is the measure of our worth. If God is what is ultimately good, in other words, then our own goodness is measured by how God-shaped our lives are.

You could say, then, that there are lots of things we worship in this world, lots of things to which we ascribe ultimate value and from which we derive our own value. They’re different over time. Very young children “worship” their parents. A parent’s word is the highest law of the land—even if it’s hard to follow the law—and a parent’s love is the fundamental source of a child’s own sense of self-worth. For older children, and especially for teenagers, worship shifts from parents to friends and peers, whose opinions and tastes are extremely important; and in turn, the ins and outs of those relationships determine what we think of our own value. As we grow and change, we pick up other measures of our worth—the right college or the right job, the right home in the right neighborhood, the right schools for our kids or the right vacation destinations. Like the Israelites melting down their earrings into gods, we take the things we value and turn them into values. We pursue them because they’re worthy and worthwhile; and, in turn, our nearness to these things of worth begins to shape our own worth. They begin to become gods.

Of course, we do this in the church, as well. We take things that are means to an end, like measurements of worship attendance or of financial giving2, and turn them into ends in themselves. We pour our energy into upholding our traditions and maintaining our buildings, and sometimes we forget to ask whether they’re helping us grow in faith. We measure ourselves against the church decades ago, and we sometimes forget that a smaller congregation in a building that needs repair is no less spiritually vibrant than a comfortable collection of Christians in, you know, a watertight church.

That’s not to say these things are bad themselves. A parent’s love, a friendship, an education; meaningful work, a comfortable home, a relaxing trip—these are good things. Like rings of gold in the ears of the Israelites, they’re beautiful things. They’re good to have, so long as we remember that we are us, and God is God, and these things are things. The problem comes when we blur the lines, when we melt our earrings down and shape them into gods, when they become the goal and ultimate value of our lives. The problem comes when, like the townspeople in Jesus’ parable, we receive an invitation to God’s magnificent banquet and turn away worship other things; to tend to our own fields, to go about our own business.

The parables in the Gospel of Matthew often use a kind of exaggeration to make their point. God always seems to be destroying people or burning down their cities, casting them into the outer darkness for RSVPing “No” to a wedding or showing up to a black-tie affair in business casual. Fair enough. Maybe that’s another Sunday’s sermon.

But buried within this parable is a taste of God’s remarkable love. “Go,” God says, “into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” And God’s servants go and gather “all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” (Matthew 22:9-10)

God doesn’t measure us in the ways we measure ourselves, by any of the ways we compare and judge and distinguish between one another. Instead God goes out into the streets and calls everyone, “good and bad,” and fills the wedding hall. God does have other laws and other measurements, this “wedding robe” in which we must be clothed. But the “wedding robe” isn’t something you can buy in a store. It’s love. Love, after all, as the sixth-century Pope Gregory the Great wrote, “is what our Creator himself possessed when he came to the marriage feast to join the church to himself.”^[2]

These days, we all face problems of discernment and prioritization. Every day, we prioritize. As individuals and as a society, we rank things in order of importance and urgency: restaurants or schools? Playdates or grandparents? The subway or the supermarket? But there are larger questions, too. What are the things we valued and chased after before the pandemic that weren’t worthy of our worship? What were the standards by which we once measured ourselves that we ought to leave behind? What are the new practices and new priorities we’ve discovered that are shaped like love, shaped like God? What are the beautiful things we can’t wait to see again? What, in other words, are the idols—and what are the earrings? What are the parts of our lives that have distracted us from the love of God and love of neighbor—and what are the things of which we’d be proud to say, “This is our God”?

^[1] Michael Carasik ed., Exodus, The Commentators’ Bible. Accordance electronic ed. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005), paragraph 5317.

^[2] Manlio Simonetti and Thomas C Oden, eds. Matthew 14–28. vol. 1b of Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. ICCS/Accordance electronic ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 146.

Sermon — October 4, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”
(Exodus 20:19)

I’m sure you all know the name Nobel, as in “Nobel Peace Prize”; you may even know that the prize is named after Alfred Nobel. But most people don’t know very much about Alfred Nobel, so forgive me if you do. Alfred Nobel of Peace-Prize fame was an arms manufacturer, an industrialist and innovator who transformed his steel company into a major producer of cannons and industrial and military explosives.

Nobel’s most influential creation, though, was dynamite. Alfred and his brother Emil were experimenting with nitroglycerin as young men, trying to find a way to stabilize it for industrial use. Nitroglycerin is a powerful explosive, the sort of thing that’s really useful in mining or construction; but it’s unstable. Even a small bump can set it off into a huge blast. And so first, Alfred invented a way to detonate it from afar with a blasting cap, allowing the engineers to create a safe distance between themselves and the explosion. Later that same year, Alfred’s brother Emil died in an accident while continuing to experiment. Alfred continued his work trying to make nitroglycerin safer, and within a few years he’d come up with an idea. If he could mix the volatile liquid nitroglycerin with something inert and absorbent, he might be able to stabilize it enough to make it safe to carry around, but still explosive enough to be useful. He tried cement, coal, even sawdust; some combinations were still too volatile, some rendered the explosive useless.

And finally, Alfred Nobel came upon his solution: diatomaceous earth, the crumbled remains of fossilized algae, the perfect substance that, when blended with nitroglycerin, created a stable, malleable, powerful industrial explosive: dynamite.

“You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” I love this verse; I sometimes tell it as a joke about parish ministry. “You speak to us, Father, and we’ll listen; but don’t let God speak to us.” But within the whole system of ancient Israelite religion, it’s not a joke. It’s deadly serious, and it makes perfect sense. Holiness is a force, charged with incredible power, and when it comes into contact with moral or ritual impurity, it creates a powerful reaction, like matter and antimatter colliding.

God knows this is dangerous. The people know it, too, and they take appropriate precautions. Just a chapter earlier, God warns Moses that the cloud of the presence of the Lord will descend on Mount Sinai. “Set limits for the people all around it,” God says, and tell them, “‘Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain will die.” (Ex. 19:11-12) And so the people’s fear of hearing the voice of God isn’t a frozen-chosen punchline or a joke about how we want to outsource religion to the priests. It’s a faithful attempt to respond to what God commands.

In any case, the Lord God descends on the holy mountain in fire, wrapping it in smoke, and as the blast of the trumpets crescendos God delivers to the people ten commandments. (Depending how you count.) And the people are afraid. And they stand far off, lest they accidentally touch the live wire of the word of God and get zapped.

They make sure to keep the commandments, but carved into two tablets of stone. They listen for God’s word, but spoken through the words of Moses. They yearn to encounter God, but they do it through stories written down on a scroll, and prophets preaching in the street. They begin millennia-long project of Judaism and Christianity: mediating the raw power of God through holy books and rituals, sacred garments and liturgies, anything that can contain and circumscribe the volatile power of God.

And I’m not saying this is wrong. We’re Episcopalians, not a Pentecostals; in other words, our spiritual life relies on the patterns and the prayers of a long tradition at least as much as the sudden inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Mixing the raw, explosive holiness of God with the diatomaceous earth of religion renders it just a little bit more predictable, a little bit less dangerous, a little easier for us to mold and use in our spiritual construction work.

Sometimes, of course, the mixture’s too inert. There are millions of Christians around the world who could never be detonated into any kind of action, who will never allow themselves to be challenged or transformed. There’s too much sawdust in the blend. Equally, though, moments of great Christian revival have often faced the problem of charismatic preachers gone bad; of people, believing themselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, who explode at the smallest jolt, wreaking havoc on the people and the communities around them. So there’s nothing wrong with trying to stabilize the dangerous power of the Word of God.

In fact, God does it all the time. This is what the parable’s about. God plants a vineyard, and puts his people in it. God doesn’t come and speak to the people directly. Instead, God sends her prophets to carry the Word of God, and the people don’t listen. They drive them away. The mixture is too inert. God tries again and again, and nothing changes, and so finally God sends his Son, Jesus, thinking that will do the trick—surely now they’ll listen. God sends the Word of God itself, the pure explosive power of God; in all its power, but as a human being, united to humanity itself. And in Jesus, the explosive power of God becomes portable and stable and walks among us, ready to detonate that dangerous spiritual charge inside our hearts from a safe and reasonable distance.

The flaw in all of this, of course, is that most of us don’t buy it. We don’t think the same way that the ancient Israelites did three thousand years ago, or the way that Jesus and other Jews did two thousand years ago. We don’t really believe that the holiness of God is a dangerous thing. God doesn’t zap us if we come too close to the altar. The whole dynamite metaphor is nice, but the Word of God isn’t actually like nitroglycerin. It’s not really explosive—at least not in that cloud-of-fire-around-Mount-Sinai kind of way.

But maybe it’s just a question of what kind of danger this really is. If God speaks to us, we won’t actually die. But when we hear and listen to and follow Jesus, there are parts of us that die. There are parts of us that idolize our own power, our own reputation, our own wealth. There are parts of us that cling to our own self-righteousness, that secretly love our manifold addictions; and if we let God speak to us, these things may die. The Word of God is dangerous not because it hurts us in our true selves, but because it can rip away the falsest parts of ourselves—which are often, ironically, the parts we hold most dear.

Our books and our liturgies and our rituals are not God’s last and best attempt at making spiritual dynamite. Prophets and priests, bishops and Bibles, can bring the Word close to us; but they’re not quite strong enough to blast away the miles of rock around our hearts, to roll away the stones that separate us from God. So Jesus comes to us, not simply proclaiming the good news, but as Good News. He drills down and plants his dynamite deep within us and blows open a mine shaft through our souls, revealing the gold that lies hidden beneath the surface.

In practice, this looks very different for different people. Sometimes, it’s the love of a spouse or a friend breaking open our defenses, giving us the safety and permission to be vulnerable, to show the deepest, darkest parts of our lives, and to start to heal. Sometimes, it’s a Biblical verse or a line of a hymn or (heaven forbid) a sermon that comes back to us, again and again, that changes how we look at the world, that turns us toward a new way of being. Sometimes, it’s a sudden event that throws our lives into chaos, but gives us a chance to build something new and maybe better in the ruins. (Sound familiar?)

It’s almost always easier, in these situations, to call the whole thing off. In the short term, it feels safer. It’s frightening, out there, with “the thunder and lightning,” and “the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” (Ex 20:18) It’s safer to say no, to try to piece our old selves back together, to say to the professionals: “You speak to us, and we will listen; but don’t let God speak to us.” Because sometimes, we’re not ready for these parts of us to die.

But we do have the choice. We can rebuild. We can take those shattered pieces of our lives and create something new, not just a mended version of the life God’s blown apart, but a better one, a truer one, with a foundation stronger than we ever could have imagined, a life that’s founded not on our own fragile senses of self but on God’s—for

‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.’
(Matthew 21:42) Amen.

Sermon — September 27, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

In the novel Morgan’s Passing, the writer Anne Tyler tells the story of a man who’s not quite what he seems. The story opens with Morgan watching a puppet show in a park on a weekend afternoon. After a few minutes, the puppeteer comes out and asks, “Is there a doctor here?” Everyone sits in silence for a minute or so, and then Morgan stands up, walks over to the man, and asks what’s wrong. It turns out that the puppeteer’s wife is pregnant and she’s just gone into labor. So, Morgan puts them in his car and they head off to the hospital. While they’re still only halfway there, they realize they’re too late. The baby’s coming. So Morgan sends the father-to-be down the street to get some supplies, and delivers the baby. Then he bundles the family back into the car—I guess this was in the days before newborn car seats—and drops them off at the emergency room before heading on his way.

At the hospital, after they’ve had some time to recover, the new parents ask around: “Where’s Dr. Morgan? We want to thank him for his help.”

“Dr. Morgan?” comes the reply from the obstetric department. “There’s no Dr. Morgan here.”

A few months later, they’re pushing the baby in the stroller and they see him, right there—it’s the man who helped them! They show him how healthy the baby is, and they tell him how strange it was that the hospital hadn’t been able to find him.

“Oh! I’m no doctor…” he readily admits. “I run a hardware store. But you needed a doctor. And, to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to do.” In fact, he’d been doing it for years, serving as a doctor, a lawyer, a pastor, a therapist; whatever the moment called for, whatever profession people thought they needed.

But never, he added, never a plumber or a butcher; “they would find me out in twenty seconds.”[1]

Now, I don’t condone the unlicensed practice of medicine or of law. But I do condone—in fact, I strongly encourage—the unlicensed practice of Christianity.

After all, that’s more or less what the story and the parable in today’s gospel are all about. The chief priests and the elders, the licensed religious practitioners of their day, see Jesus teaching in the Temple and ask him, effectively, “Sorry—who are you? And who gave you approval to teach in this place?”

Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, turns the question around. They ask who gave him authority to teach; he asks them who gave John the Baptist authority to teach, knowing that there’s no way they’d insult such a popular figure by saying he shouldn’t have been preaching. But in effect, here, Jesus is playing Morgan. What matters in the end, he seems to say, is not who’s authorized the preacher to preach, but what it is he’s preaching. It’s not whether you’re a board-certified obstetrician—it’s whether you can catch the baby.

And then Jesus takes another step. “Someone had two children,” he says, “and told the first: Go work in the vineyard.” And the child grumbled about it and said no, but showed up to work. And the parent went and said to the second child, “Go work in the vineyard.” “Yes sir, sure thing, right away!” And a few hours later, he’s still sitting there on the couch. So, which one did what the parent wanted? (Matthew 21:28-31)

It’s not a trick question. It’s as obvious as it sounds. And that’s what makes it so pointed. It’s not about who you are, whether you say that you’re a chief priest or an elder, an obstetrician or a Christian. It’s not even about what you say or what you claim to believe; you can say you’ll work in the vineyard and never go. It’s about what you do.

And in fact, this is what Jesus means by “believing.” “John,” he says—and this is his cousin John the Baptist—“John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.” (Matthew 21:32) Believing, in the sense Jesus means it, isn’t only something that happens inside your head, “believing” that John is a prophet. It’s not only something that comes out of your mouth: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ…” And it’s not only something that you feel in your heart. It’s all of these things, but it’s something more.

Believing in John the Baptist, believing in Jesus our Messiah, means doing something. Changing. Repenting. Not “repenting” the way the guy with the scary sign means it who stands down by Fenway after a game, promising the crowds they’ll burn in hell if they don’t accept Jesus as their Savior. “Repenting” in another sense: reorienting yourself internally in a way that shapes the way you live your life externally. Not because you’re frightened of a terrifying punishment, but because you’re following an inspiring leader. Because you accept the authority by which Jesus teaches, and so when you hear him calling you to work in the vineyard, you turn and follow him down the path that leads you there.

This is what ministry is. I don’t mean my ordained ministry. I mean all of our ministry, all the ways in which we love God and our neighbor as ordinary human beings. We wander through our ordinary lives, until one day, we hear a call. We turn a little bit, in one direction or another. Our path becomes a little clearer. We start to walk a little faster. And soon enough, sometimes without even noticing it, we’re far away from where we would have been, because even a tiny fork in the road creates a huge distance as you walk. (Just look at where Main St. and Bunker Hill St. start in the Neck, and where they end.)

You may not think you’ve heard this kind of call, or experienced this kind of gentle “repentance.” Too often in the Church we limit the meaning “vocation” to “ordination.” You might not the things that you do in your everyday life as a ministry. Maybe you’ve always thought of your life in separate slices: work, family, hobbies, church. But if you follow the logic of the parable, it becomes clear that it doesn’t matter whether our work in the vineyard happens through the Church or outside the Church, whether we think of the ways we love and care for one another as a Christian ministry or simple humanity. We don’t need to form a committee; we don’t even need the Rector’s approval! Because it doesn’t really matter, in the end, what we say about our work or how we talk about it. What matter is whether we do it.

I’ve said this before to a handful of people, and I’ll say it again and again. I want our life together to start from “yes.” The parable teaches us that saying “yes” is not enough. Point taken. But it’s a good start. If you come to me with an idea for something you want to do, for a ministry you want to create, I will try my best to say yes. (If you come to me with an idea for something you want me to do, I reserve the right to say “no.” And, buyer beware, if it’s something you think someone should do, I’ll assume you’re volunteering.)

Right now, in this strange Covid short-term, that’s sometimes hard. There are things we wish we could do that we can’t, or things we think should be safe that somebody else says are not. Fair enough. But we will emerge one day from all of this, and our lives will look different. There will be things we left behind in March that will never re-emerge. There will be new possibilities we never would have imagined.

I hope that we rise to the challenge together. I hope that we discover new ministries as we serve one another and our community. But even more than that, I hope that we discover the ways in which our whole lives are ministries; I hope we learn to recognize that holy voice in our everyday lives that’s asking us to go and work, as we slowly find our feet drawn toward the vineyard.

May we, like Morgan, uncertain and unqualified as we are, answer the call. May we, like the reluctant child, grumpy though we may be, do the work. May we receive, to quote from our Collect for this morning, “the fullness of [God’s] grace, that we, running to obtain [God’s] promises, may become partakers of [God’s] heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Amen.

[1] Retold in Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 130-131.