Sermon — December 13, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances;
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
(1 Thess. 5:16-18)

Have you ever heard of “Laughter Yoga”?

It’s no joke. It’s a serious, albeit playful, practice. Participants begin with clapping, stretching, and other exercises to loosen up, physically and socially.  They do some breathing exercises to prepare themselves. And then they laugh at nothing at all, and for no reason at all. The leader just begins—hahahahahahahahaha!—and everyone joins in.

The theory is simple, although maybe counterintuitive. Our emotions, according to psychologists, aren’t thoughts we have in our minds, or things we feel in our hearts; they are embodied states. If we embody a different emotion, we actually begin to feel it. If we tense up our muscles and scrunch up our faces, we feel worse. If we loosen out our limbs and force ourselves to laugh, we feel better. Psychologists have done dozens of studies along these lines; even something as simple as holding a pencil in your mouth in a way that forces your mouth into the shape of a smile has been shown to improve your mood!

Laughter yoga may sound like nonsense to you. But don’t worry. Science is on the case. One 2019 literature review and meta-analysis surveyed the many studies that have been done of laughter, concluding not only that “laughter-inducing therapies may improve depression, anxiety, and perceived stress,” but that things like laughter yoga that used forced, simulated laughter were actually more effective than spontaneous, humorous laughter; an hour of “laughter yoga” was something like twice as effective as an hour of sketch comedy as a treatment for depression, anxiety, or stress.[1]

There are a lot of difficult commandments in the New Testament. “Give to everyone who asks from you.” (Luke 6:30) “Be patient with everyone.” (1 Thess. 5:14) “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:31) But I think today’s epistle has one of the most difficult ones: “Rejoice always.” (1 Thess. 5:16)

It reminds me of a favorite saying of some of my family members, one which I’ve never liked: “Choose joy.” (Sorry, Mom, if you’re listening.) When I’ve been going through a rough time in life and heard the phrase “choose joy,” or seen it stamped across the cover of a book, I’ve always been tempted to reply like an elementary schooler: “I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.” If I could just choose joy—if I could just choose to feel joyful—wouldn’t that be great?

It’s been a difficult year, and like many people, I’m more inclined to gripe than to rejoice. I’ve spent most of 2020 either sad or angry, either mourning all the big and small losses of this year, or raging against all the institutions and leaders who I think have let us down. It feels satisfying, at times, to dwell on this anger; it gives me a sense of satisfaction to mull on how right I am and how wrong the school system, or the library, or the government is.

“Rejoice always,” “give thanks in all circumstances,” is a high bar in any year. But this year? Impossible.

It’s worth recalling, for a moment, who Paul was writing to, and why, and when. The first letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest part of the New Testament. It’s written before the Gospels, before the Acts of the Apostles, before any of Paul’s other letters. Paul writes it to a church who are grieving, and anxious, and beginning to despair. It’s been three decades since Jesus died and rose again. These early Christians thought the world was going to change, and it has—kind of. But mostly, it’s just grinding on. Their friends and mentors in the church are aging and dying. They’re beginning to face persecution. But mostly they’re just enduring the tedium and disappointment of a life lived waiting for a future that never quite arrives.

And Paul writes to them, “Rejoice always… Give thanks in all circumstances.” And you can almost hear the rhyme in the back of their minds: “We would if we could, but we can’t—so we won’t.”

This Third Sunday of Advent is sometimes called “Gaudete Sunday.” “Gaudete” is Latin for “rejoice,” and it’s the first word of a traditional text used on this day in the Mass: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.” We follow our two purple candles of repentance with a pink one of joy, and some churches even swap their purple out for pink vestments and altar hangings. It’s the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Joy; and three thousand Americans died each day this week. It’s hard to feel joyful on a Sunday like this.

But “rejoice always” doesn’t mean “always feel joyful.” Do you see what I mean? Paul never tells the Thessalonians to feel joy, to feel gratitude. He never says, “don’t worry, be happy.” He doesn’t command feel certain emotions. He commands them to do certain things. Give thanks in all circumstances. Pray without ceasing. Rejoice always.

We can’t force ourselves to feel things we don’t feel. We can’t simply will ourselves into feeling that this isolated Christmas season is a season as joyful as any other. But we can cultivate practices of rejoicing.

We can listen to as much Christmas music as we want, even though it’s only Advent. We can decorate our churches and our homes—and by the way, if you haven’t seen the beautiful greenery decorating our church, take a stroll by and look. We can call an old friend on the phone, we can write a thank-you note a week, we can take five minutes each day—just five minutes—and sit and pray to God and be quiet.

“The one who calls you,” Paul writes, “is faithful,” (1 Thess. 5:24) and faithfulness is all he asks in return. Goes doesn’t ask that we feel joyful every minute; but that we rejoice on every kind of day, good or bad. Not that we feel grateful every minute; but that we give thanks in every kind of circumstance. Not that we have perfect spiritual lives, but that we never forsake our practices of prayer. Because it’s this faithful practice of rejoicing—this “non-spontaneous” laughter into the void—that will help carry us through until we feel joy again. Because we will feel joy, again and again and again, as our Psalm this morning reminds us:
“Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.”(Ps. 126:6-7)

So if you’re feeling joyful today—rejoice! It will be easy. If you’re feeling sad—rejoice! It might be hard. But it might help. Do one thing, just one thing, that you love to do to celebrate your life. Because we can’t control the circumstances of our lives. But we can choose joy; or, at least, “rejoice always.” Amen.

[1] C. Natalie van der Wal, Robin N. Kok, “Laughter-inducing therapies: Systematic review and meta-analysis,” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 232,2019,Pages 473-488,ISSN 0277-9536,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.02.018.(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619300851)

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.