Sermon — November 8, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. The next few months, I thought, were going to be some of the hardest of our lives, and I wanted to do my part. In thirty years, when my grandkids interviewed me for their school history class about what I’d done during the great coronavirus pandemic of 2020, I wanted to have a good answer. I wasn’t a doctor or an EMT or a grocery-store clerk, but I wanted to be able to say that I’d done my part. And so I threw myself into caring for other people in the midst of a catastrophe, doing way more than I could handle.

As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something. It wasn’t a sprint, and it wasn’t a marathon. There was no defined distance we were going to run. I couldn’t carefully manage my energy to have just enough to reach the finish, and then be able to take some vacation and collapse just on the other side. It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months. It was never going to work to push as hard as we could to get to the end, and then collapse six inches past the finish line. We had to wait, and to wait, and to wait; and if we didn’t change how we lived our lives during the waiting, we would never be able to make it through.

I’m not sure these eight months of waiting really prepared me for the waiting of the last week, but in a sense they’re the same; not a sprint, not a marathon, no pre-determined finish line or end date; just waiting as sustainably as possible for something to change.

The early Christians thought a lot about waiting. There are clues, scattered throughout the New Testament, that the earliest followers of Jesus expected him to come back, in person, and soon. In this morning’s epistle, for example, Paul writes to the Thessalonians twenty or thirty years after Jesus has died, and tries to encourage them to be patient. Reading between the lines of the letter, it seems that they’re concerned about their church members who have died before Jesus returned. These faithful people waited patiently for years, praying for Jesus to come back soon and rule the world—and it hadn’t happened yet, and they’d died before they could see that day. What a crushing blow for these faithful few to miss out on their victory. I don’t want to take this metaphor too far, but it was as though a fervent supporter of one political party or the other had died between Tuesday and today, never knowing who had won the election, never getting to celebrate their candidate’s success.

But no, Paul writes! The dead haven’t missed the opportunity to meet their Lord. The dead will see Christ again. In fact, they’re with him now. And they’ll see you again too, Paul says, on that day when all are reunited, when, “Lo! He comes with clouds descending.”

Paul comforts these early Christians with a message about the next world. But at the same time, he encourages them to live well in this world. Just a few verses before our reading begins, he urges them to love one another “more and more,to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you.” (1 Thessalonians 4:10–11) Don’t let Jesus’ return take you by surprise like a “thief in the night,” he says, but live each day as though it could be the day that Jesus returns. Live each moment as though you’re about to come face to face with Jesus.

And this, of course, is more or less exactly what Jesus himself teaches in the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids. It seems to have been the custom for the groom’s party and the bride’s party to meet somewhere between their two homes for the wedding, and so these bridesmaids have gone out for the wedding in joyful anticipation. But the groom is delayed. Some of the bridesmaids have extra oil for their lamps, so when the groom finally arrives, they still have enough fuel to light their way as they walk with him to the feast. But some have used theirs up, and they’re left in the dark. No wedding feast for you!

In other words, Jesus seems to say, I’m coming back, but I might be delayed. (Little did they know…) You expect me to come back soon, and it might not be so soon at all. In fact, it might not conform to any human sense of linear calendar time, but I won’t leave you standing at the altar. I promise that I’ll return. But in exchange, you need to be prepared. You need to wait well. You need to tend to your lamp, to stock up on oil, to make sure you don’t burn through everything you have in the first few hours (or, as the case may be, the first few centuries). You need to live each moment as though I’m about to return, because when I do—there won’t be time to pop down to the corner store for more oil for that lamp. The time to prepare will have passed.

Like I said, I’m a runner. People often ask what my favorite part of running is, and my stock answer is, “Stopping.” I like knowing when the race will end. But I don’t think it’s just me. I think this yearning for a result, this need to get to the next stage of something, is part of a deeper spiritual truth, a fact about humanity that pervades every part of our lives.

There’s a constant temptation, I think, to put life off until we round the next corner. Over and over, we set our sights on the next landmark, and procrastinate on change. “Once the kids are in college,” we say, “then we can focus on our marriage.” “Once we retire, then I’ll have more time to volunteer.” “Once this pandemic’s over, then I’ll cut back on the wine.” We tell ourselves the same lie in a thousand variation: once I reach the next stage, everything will be different; then I’ll do the things I know in my heart I should be doing now.

Of course, it never happens. The next stage arrives, and it comes with its own new stresses and worries, and we don’t do what we said we would, because while circumstances around us have changed, we are still the same. And the temporary holding patterns we created while we were waiting for things to change have become more-permanent habits.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I don’t mean to say that nothing about your life, or your family, or your job will ever change. But I do mean to say that they’ll never change on their own. The patterns and the habits that we create now while we wait are the ones that will continue after circumstances change. A a new job or a new president, a newly-empty nest or a newly-ended pandemic won’t actually fix the problem all at once.

Paul knew this. Jesus knew, too. They taught us that the moment for change isn’t some future when it seems like it will be easier. The moment is now. This isn’t some generic advice to “live in the moment,” to “drink life to the lees,” to suck all the pleasure every day. It’s something different. It takes time and work to learn to love one another “more and more,” as Paul writes. (1 Thess. 4:10) It takes attention, like a lamp carefully kept trimmed and burning. It takes time to reshape the habits of our hearts. We can’t just wait for the magical future to arrive; in fact, Jesus seems to say, when we reach that next stage, it will already be too late for us to change.

“Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13) Amen.

Sermon — November 1, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Do this in remembrance of me,” writes Dom Gregory Dix, one of the great 20^th-century scholars of the Eucharist, the 744^th page of his whopping tome on the Eucharist. “Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. [We] have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church… One could fill many pages with the reasons why [we] have done this,” Dix writes — and believe me, I just cut out about three paragraphs of examples — “One could fill many pages with the reasons… and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.”[1]

“Do this in remembrance of me,” on “a hundred thousand successive Sundays”—until, that is, this March 15.

It’s been a long time since any of us has done this. Eight months ago, I never could have imagined that this is what it would look like to start celebrating the Eucharist together again. I remember having so many conversations in March and April, serious and silly alike, that began, “When we’re all back together again…” It was in that early phase of the pandemic when many of us non-professionals still assumed there would be a switch flipped at some point: yesterday there was a plague, and today it’s under control and we can come back together, and celebrate together, and share this holy food and drink.

Of course, it didn’t go that way. Instead, here we are. A few of us, scattered around the church. More of us, still joining from afar. Gathering once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was.

But every Eucharist has always been this way.

Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. I’m not making a joke about church attendance. I mean that every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends. Every Sunday, we greet those we love and mourn those we’ve lost. Every Sunday, not just All Saints’ Sunday, we gather with “all [God’s] saints still striving,” and we waited to be reunited with “all [God’s] saints at rest.”

All Saints’ Day, after all, is not a day on which we celebrate all of the people the Church has officially canonized as saints, all at once. And it’s not only a day on which we pray for those who have died. It’s the day we celebrate and pray for all the saints, all the holy people of God, all those who have ever been baptized, past, present, and future, “from all tribes and peoples and languages.” (Rev. 7:9)

When we share the Eucharist, we join in a celebration that’s larger than any of us, larger than all of us together. When we “lift up [our] hearts,” we are “lift[ed] to the Lord.” We “[join] our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven.” We join in that heavenly worship John saw in his Revelation that transcends time and space, and we receive just a taste of that wonderful future, in which we “will hunger no more, and thirst no more… and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” (Rev .7:16-17) When we stand before this altar, in other words, we stand united with all the saints, and worship God side by side.

So no, not all of us can be in church today; probably not for quite a while. But God has been gathering her people now for going on three thousand years. God’s used to worship we would call “remote.” If God can raise the eyes of St. John the Divine into heaven so that he sees “a great multitude that no one could count,” (Rev. 7:9) from every place and every time, then surely God appreciates a miniature multitude of little Zoom squares from our little patch of the kingdom.

We don’t know when we’ll all be together again. We don’t know when the saints in church and the saints on Zoom and the saints who need a break from Zoom will worship together again. We don’t know when we saints on earth will be reunited to our long-lost saints in heaven. But, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) Amen.

[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Dacre Press, Adam and Charles Black (1945), 744.

Sermon — October 25, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Well, this is it. The heart of the matter. The core of Jesus’ message, the central tenets of Christianity, the two commandments on which, Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40)

They’re deceptively simple. For a preacher like me, they’re disappointingly simple. I’m a nerd, after all. I like history. I like to dig into the Biblical text to try to understand what was going on two or three thousand years ago, to parse out the theological differences between the Pharisees and the Sadducees and why it’s one group and not the other who’s testing Jesus with these questions; and then to do the sometimes-difficult work of connecting all that up to our lives today, and trying to understand how one of Jesus’ cryptic parables speaks to us across the millennia.

But Jesus’ message today isn’t a riddle. It’s not an obscure historical reference. It doesn’t need to be unwrapped, or clarified, or revealed. It’s simple: Love God with all you have. Love your neighbor as yourself.

But “simple,” I’m sorry to say, isn’t the same as “easy.”

People often quote the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” In other words, Chesterton says, it’s not that people have tried Christianity out for two thousand years, and found that it doesn’t work. It’s that they’ve taken a good look at Christianity, found that it’s too hard, and decided not to try it at all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself”? That’s a little much. We’ll stick with ordinary life; we’ll say in a vague way that we believe in God, we experience God in the world around us, and we try to help our neighbors in need when it’s not too inconvenient for us. Chesterton was pretty skeptical of your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Christian; he would probably say that most of us had found the Christian ideal hard, and left it untried.

I’m not sure, though, that this is exactly right. It’s not that we don’t try to love God and our neighbors; it’s just that we do it imperfectly. We do try to love God; but our minds are distracted, our souls are divided, our hearts are full of other, beautiful loves. We do try to love our neighbors. But to love our neighbors as ourselves? I have a hard enough time loving myself, and an even harder time loving my spouse as myself, and as much as I love the notion of extending that ideal of unconditional love to the entire world, I know that I will never actually place the good of others on the same level as my own good. Because that, after all, is what “love” means, for Jesus; not to feel warm-fuzzies about another person, but to act on their behalf, to work for their good, to lay down one’s own life for them.

So if the mission statement of the whole Church and of each individual Christian is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” then it’s a great mission—but undoubtedly, again and again, even when we admire it, even when we try so hard to live it out, we fail.

Lutherans often distinguish between Law and Gospel, between the hard and imposing commandments God lays down and the merciful love God extends when we fail to obey them. It’s not a distinction between the Old and New Testaments. There is Law in the Old Testament, and there is Gospel; there’s Law in the New Testament, and there’s Gospel. And it’s not a distinction between the bits we like and the bits we don’t of the Bible, between the cozy and kind and the harsh and violent. It’s a distinction, instead, between the standards God sets for us and the compassion God shows when we don’t live up to them.

So this passage from our Gospel reading is pure Law. There’s nothing more cozy and kind than saying that all the law and the prophets hang on these two Great Commandments of love. And yet there’s nothing that condemns us, as a human race and as individual human beings, more. It’s clear that this is a commandment we simply don’t live up to.

But paired, this morning, with this inspiring and imposing Law, I find a hint of relief in the story of the final moments of Moses.

Moses has walked a long road. God has called him away from his ordinary life to become the prophet of God and turned him into a leader. After the miraculous triumph of the Red Sea, Moses has been stuck with his grumbling people for forty years in the desert, condemned to wander because of their rebellions against God. And now, as the forty years draw to an end, they’ve finally reached the River Jordan, and they’re ready to cross over into the Promised Land. And Moses goes up onto a mountain, and he sees the whole land spread out before him, a land flowing with milk and honey, the final destination he’s been trying for decades to reach. And then he dies, his journey incomplete.

It’s the story that Dr. King, quoted with uncanny foresight in his final speech: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” he told the people of Memphis on April 3, 1968. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” And within a day, he was dead.

Maybe these last words of Moses and of Martin are an odd place to find good news. But I can’t help but find them comforting, these days. We try to love God with all our hearts, and all our souls, and all our minds; and our neighbors as ourselves. And we don’t do it right. We can’t. We try and try and try to grow in love, to keep walking in the Way that Jesus taught us, but we never quite arrive in the Promised Land, in a just world, in a state of spiritual perfection. And that’s okay. It’s not completely satisfying, I’ll admit. But if it’s good enough for Moses and for Martin Luther King, Jr., then it’s good enough for me.

In church life, in personal life, God knows in our national life, we walk a long road together. Sometimes it seems like we’re making progress toward a more perfect love; sometimes it feels like we’re just wandering in the wilderness. And I doubt that any of us will ever enter into that final Promised Land of perfection. That may sound depressing. But it can also be liberating. Because it means that no matter what—even if we never manage to love our neighbors as ourselves, even if we never manage to love God with our whole hearts—each step takes us closer to God’s love. So “walk in love,” as the familiar verse goes, “as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.” Amen. (Ephesians 5:2)