Sermon — November 17, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I met a traveller from an antique land,                           (Not me, personally. It’s a poem.)
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The disciples roll up to the Temple in Jerusalem like the bumpkins that they are, gawking at the sights of the big city. As Jesus walks out of the Temple, having just said something wise about a poor widow who gave away her last two pennies there, one of the disciples says, “Wow! Rabbi! Have you seen how big these stones are? And the buildings! Look! They’re… they’re really big, too!” (Mark 13:1)

You might be surprised at this disciple’s surprise. After all, there were three great festivals a year, on which faithful Jews would travel to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple. Galilee’s not so far away. It would’ve been normal to do what Jesus’ parents did, and to come down, several times a year and for big family events as well, to offer a sacrifice there. This disciple may not be the most pious; maybe he’s stayed home the last few years, and it shows.

But to be fair, the Temple had been under construction for years, refurbished and rebuilt over the course of decades, beginning during the reign of Herod the Great. Over the course of Jesus’ life, the set of buildings around the Temple was transformed. What began as a few buildings around the Temple itself, which stood ten stories high or more, had been built up into a thirty-five acre Temple Mount surrounded by retaining walls; all in all, about a quarter of the size of ancient Jerusalem. Put another way: While the Temple itself was about the size of this church, the walls around the Temple Mount would’ve stretched to the Whole Foods parking lot in one direction, and up to the Monument in the other.

So fair enough. If you saw a building project of this scope grow over the course of your life, maybe all that you could say would be: “What large stones!”

But Jesus only looks at him and says: “Do you see these great buildings?” (13:2) “Well, yeah,” you can imagine the disciple might’ve thought to himself, “Wasn’t I just saying how big they are?” But Jesus isn’t done. “Do you see these big buildings?” he says. “Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:2)

Downer. But Jesus was right. Well, particularly pedantic readers of the Bible will sometimes point out that Jesus is actually wrong; that the Western Wall of the Temple Mount still stands to this day, a place of prayer for the Jewish people for two thousand years, ever since the Temple itself Mount was destroyed. But really, this only strengthens the point. Jesus was right: just a few decades after his death, at the end of the failed rebellion against Rome, all had been thrown down but one partial wall. And none of it would ever be rebuilt.

But of course, Rome itself was thrown down soon enough. The Roman Republic had already failed. The old gods would be next, Roman temples replaced as thoroughly as the Temple had been destroyed as new Emperors began to worship the man old Emperors had killed. And then the Empire collapsed, and only the ruins remained of its ancient glory, amid the medieval cities that rose up throughout the West, as nations and kingdoms rose and fell and rose and fell.

Human history, in fact, is an unbroken cycle of things being thrown down and new things being built. Every civilization seems to think that it is the greatest that has ever been, and that the End of History is surely near; and every one declines and falls in turn.

Jesus is right. Sooner or later, “all will be thrown down.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley knew this when he wrote the poem with which I began. Shelley was inspired by tales of ancient Egypt, whose extraordinary culture was only just being rediscovered in the early 19^th century when he wrote that poem. “Ozymandias” is a Greek form of the name of Pharaoh Ramesses II, who really was one of the great figures in human history, probably the most powerful person to walk the Earth in 500 years or so.

Shelley envisions a statue worthy of the man, a form that would’ve towered over the crowds with a look of stern command. The pharaohs were worshiped as gods, and Ramesses was one of the greatest of them all. The statue addressed any who might think to challenge his grandeur and his might:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

And as two centuries of English teachers have pointed out, there’s a double meaning here. The statue sends a message to conquered lands and subjugated peoples, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” You will never be as powerful as I. But there’s a message for later times, as well. “Look on my works, ye Mighty.” See the ruins of my kingdom, forgotten for centuries after it crumbled into dust. See my “shattered visage,” as it crumbles into sand, next to a couple of legs, without a torso to be found. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Because if this is what remains of my great nation and my great reign—What will remain of you in 3500 years?

I think that there are a couple ways to take this, one bad, one good.

The bad way, I think, is to respond with despair. I’m sorry to say, your life will one day come to an end. This civilization will also decline. This building, into which so much energy and care have been poured for so many generations, will one day be thrown down, and not one stone will be left. So what’s the point? You might ask. It’s all just going to end up buried in the sand.

There’s half an answer in our reading from Daniel today, and it’s the promise that this world is not the end. That when we are forgotten after a hundred or a thousand years, we are remembered still by God. The world may go through anguish, time and time again, but in the end, “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake… [and] those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky.” (Daniel 12:1–3) The measure of our greatness is not how large our monuments and buildings are. It’s not whether we still inspire fear in the nations of the world. It’s the fact that we still receive God’s love, however great or small, however weak or mighty we are.

But there’s a second half to this good news, as well, and it’s not off in heaven. It’s right here. “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus says. You may “hear of wars and rumors of wars…but the end is still to come.” This is all just “the beginning of the birth pangs.” (Mark 13:8)

I myself have never given birth. But I’m told it’s often worth it, in the end.

Yes, the Temple was cast down. And so was ancient Rome. But something else emerged. And that thing fell, and something else came next. Chaos and catastrophe recur. That’s human life. Everything we build will be destroyed. But that’s not a reason not to build it. That’s exactly why we must build, and rebuild, and rebuild again.

Because those buildings are beautiful and those stones are large. Because those relationships give us life and those communities teach us to love. Because when all our monuments have crumbled into dust, nothing can take away the acts of love we left behind. And even in some of the most anguishing times, something new is being born; in fact, nothing new is born in any other way.

So yes, one day this “all will be thrown down.” Our greatest achievements will collapse into the sand. So will our worst mistakes, for what it’s worth. And yes, one day you all will “shine like stars,” and the glory of that heavenly life will reflect the depth of God’s great love. But it is also true that the things that we build here matter, for as long as they remain. They’re temporary, and transient, but so is everything else. Our past has crumbled away, and our future is still far off, but right here, the things we build together remain, and we live in them—because we can try to remember the past, and we can pray for a better future, but we can start building a beautiful present together, today.

Sermon — November 10, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Today’s sermon began with a bit of an extended preamble about prayer in challenging times, followed by a prayer; you can listen to this all in the audio, but there is not a written text. The text of the sermon proper is included below.

I don’t have much to say about the scribes, who like to wear long robes, and have the best seats, who tend—if we’re being honest with ourselves—to say some rather long prayers. I just might risk hypocrisy with that, today.

And I don’t want to say much about the poor widow who comes, and puts her last two coins into the Temple treasury. It’s too easy, on the week before our Stewardship Ingathering, to make this one about giving money to the church; and that’s not really what I want to do today.

But I do want to say something about what to do when you’re at the end of your rope; when you’ve worked as hard as you can, and done everything you can, and it hasn’t worked; and it feels like hope is lost.

Because that’s exactly where Elijah finds this woman who lives at Zarephath, in our first reading today.

It’s worth saying that, throughout the ancient Near East, we have evidence of laws that tried to provide for widows and orphans, that tried to establish some kind of social safety net for those who didn’t have the property, or labor, or the family support to provide for themselves. And it’s not just that this woman and her child have fallen through the cracks; there’s been a drought, and food is scarce, and there simply isn’t enough to go around. She has nothing prepared to offer Elijah. Her pantry is empty, just a cup of flour or so, and a little bit of oil, and there’s nothing else.

We can assume she’s prayed for rain, and so has everyone else. We can assume she’s asked for help, and there just isn’t enough to share. And so here she is, at the end of the line, and her story is deeply sad. Her plan is just to go, and cook what she has left; and then that’s it for them.

And this strange man, this man she doesn’t know, comes to her and says, “Do that; but give me some as well.”

And she does. And that is an extraordinary thing. He’s not her son. He’s not her neighbor. He’s not even her fellow-citizen, because she lives in Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, in Phoenicia; and he’s an Israelite. He’s crossed the border to her, and the only document he has is the word of God telling him to go. And I can tell you, because I have studied these two tongues, that she could understand his words, but she could hear it in his voice that he was not from here. And yet she took a quarter-cup of her last cup of flour, and baked a little bread for him, as well.

And that’s the generosity of desperation, because this is all they have, and then their lives will end; so why not give a little bit away?

And “the jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.”

Now—Miracles are not a great answer to the concrete problems of the world. Faith alone cannot solve the problems of world hunger, or of drought, problems that have plagued humankind throughout history, however hard they’ve prayed or not. Such concrete miracles are rare. But every day, God works miracles of the heart. And so I don’t exactly want to give you any advice. But I want you to tell how I used my flour this week, and I want to invite you to think, when you find yourself at the end of the line, about how you might use yours.

So like I said, I was up for about half of Tuesday night—which did give me some valuable sermon-writing time, as I lay in bed—and then Wednesday is a day when I’m home with Murray for the day and Alice is at work. And so I got up, on Wednesday, after a couple hours’ sleep, and spent the rest of the day with a child whose sleep had been blissfully undisturbed. We read a chapter of our history book about the Alaric the Goth and the fall of the Roman Empire, and did some single-digit math—this is a humanities family, to be clear—and we went out for a walk on a beautiful, warm day. And at the end of this long and high-energy day, I found that I was not as exhausted as I sometimes am. I was feeling better than I had when I woke up. In fact, I was feeling better than I had the last night when I went to bed.

I had very little left in me on Wednesday morning, and I gave some of it away; and I found that “the jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail.” And I know exactly why. Not only had I not spent the day entirely in my head, as I had for those sleepless hours at night; but I had spent my day loving someone, in a very concrete way.

I don’t know what it is that has you at the end of your rope today. If it’s not the election, it may well be something else. But I do know that sometimes, when you’re all at of flour, paradoxically it can help to try to give some of it away. Not to give more of yourself away to whatever it is that has you drained. But to spend some of your energy, in a very concrete way, on something else that’s fueled by love.

Because while miracles of bread and oil are rare, miracles of the heart are not, and you just might find a new abundance at the very moment that you give what you have away.

Sermon — November 3, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Is anyone here familiar with the work of Belinda Carlisle?

In the 1980s, she wrote some pretty interesting things that touched on what Christian theologians call “eschatology,” the study of the “last things.” Eschatology means thinking about what exactly we mean when we say, in the Nicene Creed, that we look for “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” And in many ways Carlisle’s work really resonates with our first two readings today, which are two of my favorite passages in the Bible, these powerful visions Isaiah and John the Divine had of a new heaven and a new earth.

You may think you have no idea who or what I’m talking about right now, but I think it’s very likely that that you have, in fact, heard Belinda Carlisle’s reflection on life in the new Jerusalem. It goes like this: “Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth!”

That isn’t even really a joke.

“They say in Heaven, love comes first,” she sings. Well, that’s certainly true, theologically speaking. “We’ll make Heaven a place on Earth,” she goes on—which I think is supposed to be, like, a romantic thing, but it actually works really well as a statement of Christian ethics. And then she really gives us a keen theological insight in the bridge: “In this world, we’re just beginning / to understand the miracle of living.” Belinda: That’ll preach.

Now, I don’t know if Belinda Carlisle is a woman of faith. The nature of the music video implies that she might have something more earthy in mind with this metaphor; also, there are a lot of people dancing around with globes. (Never mind.)

But I have to say: If Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a place on earth” is over on one side of a theological spectrum, and the most common ideas of what “heaven” means in our culture are on the other, then you have to admit that the view that you find reflected in the prophecies of Isaiah and of John is a lot closer to Ms. Carlisle’s than you might think.

Both the prophet Isaiah, in the 8^th century BC or so, and the seer John the Divine, in the 1^st century after Christ, envision “the world to come” not as one in which we leave this world behind and go away to be with God, but one in which God comes down to earth to be with us. Isaiah sees God coming to the people “on this mountain,” on Mount Zion in Jerusalem itself. (25:6) The Lord of hosts will host “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines.” The good things of this world aren’t left behind, they’re embraced, enriched, and multiplied. But the hard things of this world are wiped away. The shroud cast over us is destroyed, the sheet that’s spread over us is removed; in other words, God swallows up death itself, and wipes away the tears from our eyes. (25:7-8)

In the Book of Revelation, John picks up that same thread. He sees a new heaven and a new earth, a holy city coming down to us from God. John sees God dwelling with us as God’s people, and “wiping every tear from our eyes.” For “See? The home of God is among mortals.” (Rev. 21:3)

That’s very different from the way we tend to think about things in 2024, even in the church. When we think about the life of the world to come, when we reflect on what happens after death, we tend to talk about how someone has gone away to be with God in their eternal home in what is, hopefully, “The Good Place.” But wait! Revelation seems to say. It’s not so much that our true home is out there, somewhere, with God. It’s that God’s true home is here with us. The world to come will be a better place not because we’ve left this world behind, but because this world has been transformed by the presence of a holy and living and loving God.

In other words: “Ooh! Heaven is a place on earth.” And what we think of as heaven, the place where the souls of all the departed rest in the hands of God, is exactly that, a resting place where they wait until the resurrection of the dead, when we will live again with them once more.

Which sounds, to me, even better than all the harps.

I don’t know what’s happening in your soul this All Saints’ Day.

Perhaps you’re here, mourning the loss of someone in your life who’s died, very recently or very long ago. Perhaps one or two of the names in our prayers today, silent or out loud, will make you choke up, and you won’t be able to say the response, because that pain is still there. And I have to admit, that might be the case for me, too. Or maybe hearing one of those names will fill your heart with gratitude for their life, and remind you of their love. Maybe both. And there’s a reason that we pause, together, once a year, to say these prayers.

Perhaps you’re here, rather anxious about the election process that is already simmering along, and will reach full boil on Tuesday, and will not, by the grace of God, boil over when it is decided some time in the next few weeks. Perhaps it’s one outcome or the other that keeps you up at night. Perhaps it’s concern about the safety and stability of the work of American democracy itself. Perhaps it’s the estrangement that our politics have caused in your life, from other people with whom you no longer want to speak. And there’s a reason that we pause, together, not once every four years but every year, to hear these words from long ago about a holy city coming down to us from God.

Perhaps you’re simply enjoying your life in this world; maybe things are good, and you don’t want to think about leaving them behind. Perhaps you love your family and your friends, your work, your life. Perhaps you don’t; maybe things aren’t so good. Maybe your body hurts. Maybe you’re sick, and tired. Maybe there’s or two that you wouldn’t mind having wiped away from your eyes. And—not to repeat myself too much—there’s a reason we pause every year, to remember that the life of the world to come is a life like this one, but with the goodness deepened and the sorrows wiped away.

When God raised Jesus from the dead, we believe, it wasn’t the end of the story of the Resurrection; it was the first glimpse of the life of the world to come. However incredible it is, the Christian hope is that we will one day live again in a world where “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

And there’s good news there. But there’s also a challenge.

I’ll never forget an afternoon workshop I spent sitting in the undercroft beneath the chapel of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. For those who don’t know, SSJE is an order of Episcopal monks who have a monastery just up the river, right on Mem Drive in Cambridge. It was a workshop on “community,” in all its beauty and complexity. And I think it was Brother Curtis Almquist and Brother David Vryhof, two very dear, kind, loving men who’ve spent a long time living in close quarters with a group of other monks, who—like all human beings—sometimes have rough edges.

So during the Q&A, somebody described a conflict they were having with someone. I can’t remember what it was. But I do remember that Curtis listened to them carefully, and he replied—And this is my Curtis impression—“Mm. Mm. …Mm. God loves you. God loves you so much. God wants to spend eternity with you. And them. Together.”

If you’re missing someone who’s gone, this All Saints’ Day, the good news is that God wants to spend eternity with you, and them, together. And if you’re struggling to understand, this All Saints’ Day, how someone could be voting differently from you, how someone could support someone who’s so clearly the wrong choice for the office of the President, then that’s the challenge: God wants to spend eternity with you, and them, and that candidate for office, together. Surely we can’t really believe that the political beliefs of the people with whom we disagree are enough to separate them from the love of God. And so we’re left with the unpleasant fact that we’re going to have to find a way to live together. And we might as well start practicing now.

And that’s the invitation, here. We can begin to live, even now, as if we are in that holy city to come. We can begin to live, even now, as if our lives are governed by compassion and love. We can participate in the process by which God is making all things new, already, here and now. We can try to draw back the curtain and let the heavenly reality lying behind all things be revealed, because, as it turns out, heaven will one day be “a place on earth.”