Sermon — January 28, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last week, a YouTube video entitled “Police Called to Stop Filming During Piano Livestream” went viral, receiving over 7.5 million views in five days. It’s a thirty-minute video in which Brendan Kavanagh, a British teacher-turned-YouTuber, sits down at the public piano in St Pancras Station in London and begins playing, while a friend live streams video from a phone camera. Every few minutes, you see people stop by to watch for a while as he plays, then wander on. About ten minutes in, a woman approaches and he steps away from the piano. offering her a chance to play. Instead, she asks him whether he’s been recording, and tells him that she’s part of a group who are there to record a holiday greeting for a Chinese TV station;. They’ve signed a contract that says their images and voices can’t be used for anything else, and she wants him to remove them from the video.

This is where things go downhill. She asks him not to publish the video. He responds by saying that they’re in Britain, not in China, and that he’s allowed to film in public. The argument continues, and escalates, until they accuse him of racism and assault and call the police.

Two officers respond. One of them explains to the group that if they’re in public, he has the right to film. The other officer looks exhausted. She and the piano player are on first name terms. It’s clear she’s had to deal with him before. She keeps asking him to turn off the camera so they can talk without it going on his YouTube channel; he keeps responding that they’re in Britain, it’s a free country, and he has the right to film in a public place. And around and around they go, for thirty minutes of video: “Could you please respect people’s privacy when they ask you to?” vs. “I have the right to film them”—and, by the way, the right to make money off the video. Based on the YouTube views, I’d say he’s made tens of thousands of dollars this week.

If you replaced the piano player with the Christians in the ancient city of Corinth, and the very tired police officer with the very tired apostle Paul, you’d have our Epistle this morning, live-streamed to millions of viewers. Each situation exemplifies the same simple but important truth: Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Paul spends much of the First Letter to the Corinthians responding to some questions about community disputes, quoting parts of their questions and giving his replies. In this chapter he turns to an argument over whether it’s okay to eat meat that’s been sacrificed to idols—and at this point, your eyes may have glazed over, because this is not exactly a hot-button issue for the 21^st-century church.

So by way of context: eating meat, in the Corinthians’ world, religious sacrifice was an ordinary form of meat production. An animal would be brought to the temple of one of the various gods, and slaughtered. Some parts would be burned as an offering to the god, some parts given to the priests, and the rest used for a feast. The poorer people in the city would rarely have the chance to eat meat, except when it was distributed freely as part of a religious festival; the wealthier or more prestigious would often be invited to dine in the temple banquet hall, as part of civic or social events, which is what Paul’s mostly talking about. And this is a problem, for the Corinthian Christians, because they are just a few dozen converts living in a fully-pagan society.

Paul’s taught them to worship the one God of his own Jewish people, and to stay away from the worship of idols, from the traditional pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. But this would have a social cost. If they’re to avoid meat that’s been sacrificed to idols, the Corinthian Christians would have to stay away from family holidays and public celebrations; they’d have to turn down invitations to go out to eat.

But some of the Corinthians realize there’s a loophole. “All of us possess knowledge,” they write to Paul. (1 Cor. 8:1) We know that there really is “no God but one,” that “no idol in the world really exists.” (1 Cor. 8:4) We know, they say, that the Roman gods like Mars and Venus and Jupiter aren’t real, so we know that we’re not really worshiping them when we eat this food that’s been offered in their honor. The idols aren’t a temptation to us. We know it’s nothing but a meal. So we have every right to eat in their temples; we’re not worshiping any other god.

Now, I’m not sure their argument really works. But Paul doesn’t try to engage in a theological dispute. He simply replies: You know that it’s nothing but a meal; but not everyone does. (8:7) Your faith in the one God of Israel is strong; others’ faith is weak. You’re the leaders of the church; but what if one of the new members comes along, and sees you eating in the temple of some other god, and doesn’t realize that you’ve got your fingers crossed behind your back? What kind of an example are you setting if you lean on your deep understanding of theology to avoid having to change anything about your actual lives?

It’s pretty simple, Paul writes. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (8:1) Maybe on a theological level you have the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols, but all that does is puff you up. On the practical level you have the chance to love your neighbors, to help them turn away from idols and toward God, but you’ve chosen to make life easy for yourself instead. So “by your knowledge those weak believers are destroyed.” (1 Cor. 8:11)

The strongest Corinthian believers may well have the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols. But that doesn’t mean they should. And this incredibly specific, totally-irrelevant debate about ancient animal sacrifice turns out to be just another instance of the same rule: Even if you have the right to do something, sometimes it’s the wrong thing to do.

Paul didn’t make this idea up. It’s at the heart of the Incarnation, at the center of who Jesus is and what Jesus does. The eternal Word of God gives up everything to come down and be with us, because it’s more important to love us than to stay safe from harm. He is the Messiah, the anointed one, and yet unlike any other king, he sacrifices himself for his people, and not the other way around. Jesus has all the authority in the world; but he takes none of the power; and yet that sacrificial love turns out to be the most powerful thing of all. And—while I’m mostly spending this morning with Paul—you can see this pattern beginning in our gospel reading for today, in the story of the man possessed by an unclean spirit.

We science-minded Christians in 2024 might squirm in our seats, not sure that unclean spirits really exist. But in the ancient world, most people were convinced they did; and they might’ve expected someone with all that power to use the demons, not to cast them out. Magicians tried to control spirits and demons, to make them do their bidding. That’s exactly what Jesus doesn’t do. He isn’t a sorcerer, trying to gather an army of spirits to establish his own might. He could. He seems to have that authority over the spiritual world. But he chooses instead to use his power to heal. Given the choice between puffing himself up and building others up, Jesus chooses to help his weaker neighbor every time.

In our lives, we have the right to do so many things that are simply wrong, even though nobody could stop us from doing them. That’s half of what the meaning of freedom is: the freedom to do what we want, without anyone stopping us. We are free to things that we probably should not do. We can make a profit off a video of a confrontation with someone else. We can flaunt our wealth or our knowledge or our beliefs as proof that we are not like other people. It is our God-given right, enshrined in the United States Constitution, to be as rude as we want to the people around us, and nothing can ever take that right away.And we have the chance to do some things that are right, even though nobody can make us. And this is the other half of freedom is: the freedom to give up being right, for a minute, and do the right thing. That’s what love is, in a relationship or in a community: giving up the right to be right, for just a minute, and doing something nobody can force us to do. We are free to forgive one another, to give second and third and seventy-seventh chances that other people don’t deserve. We are free to help one another live better lives, in small ways and in big ones. We are free to follow in some small way in Jesus’ steps; to give up all the things that puff us up, so that in love, we might build other people up. And we might find, as Paul did, that if we claim to have knowledge, we turn out to know nothing; but when we choose instead to show love, God has been there, loving us all along.

Sermon — January 21, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying,
‘Get up, go to Nineveh…and proclaim to it in the message that I tell you.”
(Jonah 3:1–2)

The Book of Jonah is best known to children and casual readers as the one where that guy gets eaten by a whale. But to those in the know, Jonah has a reputation as the funniest book in the Bible, and it’s also one of the shortest. It’s really just a few pages: if you go home this afternoon and sit down and read it, you’ll probably find that it takes you longer to find a Bible and then find Jonah in the Bible than it does to actually read the book. But this short and funny book packs a serious theological punch, and it’s this: God has chosen to do extraordinary things through completely ordinary people—sometimes when they really don’t want it.

And Jonah really doesn’t want it. That’s where the whale comes in.

The Book of Jonah begins: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah… saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:1) Now Nineveh is a terrifying place, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire that destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and scattered ten of the twelve Israelite tribes, never to be heard from again. The Assyrians were a fierce and mighty people, whose primary contributions to human civilization were their invention of siege warfare and ethnic cleansing. But God tells Jonah to go and travel far to the east, to the Assyrian capital city, and to proclaim a message of divine judgment there.

So what does Jonah do? He goes down to the port city of Joppa, and gets on a ship, and heads straight west, toward Tarshish—as far away from Nineveh as he can get. (Jonah 1:3)

But he can’t get away that easily. The Lord God sends a storm, and the sea batters the ship as the sailors begin to panic, and call upon their gods. Jonah sleeps through it. They wake him up, and tell him, Come on! Pray with us! Pray to your god! And Jonah’s like, … Yeah you don’t really want me to pray to my god right now. Let’s do this instead: Throw me overboard, into the sea, and you’ll be fine. And so, with much drama and many prayers for forgiveness, they throw Jonah into the sea to save the ship.

But still, Jonah can’t escape. God send a fish (or a whale, or a prehistoric shark) to swallow Jonah up. And this is the point of the whale: not just that it’s cool that Jonah gets to live inside its stomach, but that even at the ends of the earth, even in the depths of the sea, Jonah can’t get away from God. He sings a psalm of lamentation and joy, one of the classics of ancient Hebrew poetry, and then the whale spits him up onto the shore.

And then our reading from this morning begins, and “the word of the Lord [comes] to Jonah a second time,” and God says, “Joooonnnaaaaaahhh… Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you.” And Jonah gets up, and goes, but he’s not happy about it, and he wants God to know it, so he does the bare minimum. Nineveh is a massive city, the author tells us, a three days’ walk wide, but Jonah goes barely a day’s walk in. It’s a mighty empire that needs to change its way, but Jonah’s sermon is beyond concise: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,” he says, and that’s all. (3:4) There’s no explanation why. There’s no next step, just a declaration of doom.

If Jonah walked into a preaching class and gave this one, his manuscript would come back from the professor with a big red F. But the Ninevites go nuts. The sermon really works. They dress in sackcloth and declare a fast. Not only humans, but animals will go without foods, the king declares; not only without food, but even without water. “Who knows?” the mighty Assyrian king declares. “God may relent and change his mind!” (3:9)

And God does. God changes God’s mind, the Book of Jonah says, and God doesn’t destroy the Ninevites after all.

And Jonah hates it. Hates it. Jonah gets so mad. And at the very end of the story, we finally learn what Jonah’s motivation was all along. “O Lord!” he says. “Didn’t I say that this would happen? That’s why I fled to Tarshish! For I knew,” he says in this ridiculous, accusatory tone, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” (4:2) Jonah’s anger is extreme, it becomes almost beyond words, until he prays to God, “Take my life, for it’s better for me to die than live!” (4:3) And God answers, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4:4) And Jonah replies, Hmph, and goes away to sulk.

I do the impression so well, of course, becomes I sometimes act this way. Just ask my wife.

I sometimes ask myself the question, when I’m reading or thinking about the Bible: If we only had this one book, what impression would it give us of God? What we would know about what God is like? And if you only had the Book of Jonah, the impression really wouldn’t be half bad.

The first thing you learn from the Book of Jonah is that God is willing to pursue you, personally and relentlessly, to the ends of the earth and into the depths of the sea. When God is calling, there is no escape; but neither does God begrudge you all your attempts to run away. God doesn’t punish Jonah for sailing to Tarshish when he should be schlepping to Nineveh; God keeps him safe in the belly of a whale. God doesn’t abandon Jonah as he continues to refuse; God waits, patiently and persistently, and when Jonah’s finally been spit back up onto dry land, God simply calls again: “Joooonaaaaaaahh…”

The second thing you learn is that God is willing to forgive. In fact, God is much more willing to forgive than we are. When the story begins, you think that Jonah runs away because he’s frightened, and that seems fair enough: anyone would be scared to go confront the mighty empire to the east. But it turns out that Jonah’s not scared that the Ninevites will arrest him, or something; he’s worried that they’ll listen to him, and change their ways, and that God might actually forgive them. Jonah quotes the words that all the prophets use when they praise the grace and mercy of God, but he twists them. It’s all in the tone: “I knew you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” You disgust me.

Now, we’re all a little bit like Jonah sometimes, right? We all hold grudges, we all keep score from time to time. There are people in all our lives whom we’re not ready to forgive, for one reason or another; and the idea that God might forgive them, even if we don’t… well, that’s not something that any of us want to hear.

And yet it’s important to remember, whenever we’re keeping score that way, that someone else is probably doing the same thing in reverse. We hold grudges against other people, and other people hold grudges against us. Sometimes maybe we need to be forgiven, in a way we’re not quite willing to forgive. However much we might like God to be strict with our enemies, in the end it’s probably a good thing to have a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in love. And the Book of Jonah doesn’t just tell us that this is what God is like; it shows us, in hilarious detail.

The third and final thing I learn from the Book of Jonah is this: God is not only capable of working through completely imperfect people; God is not only willing to navigate the messes we make of our lives; God seems to take delight in acting through all our limitations and peculiarities. When Jesus wants to gather a group of disciples, he doesn’t go for learned rabbis and mighty kings: he heads down to the bait shop, he gets a bunch of guys who know how to cast nets, guys who will, by the way, all run away from him by the end. When God wants to call a prophet, God doesn’t go for the perfect person who already knows everything about forgiveness and grace and love. God calls a prophet who needs to hear the same message that he’s supposed to preach. God calls Jonah, and Jonah runs away. And Jonah gets to feel what it’s like to be forgiven, before he’s invited to forgive.

It’s possible there’s someone out there, listening today, who feels drawn to the message of God’s mercy and grace and love, the message of God’s love revealed in Jesus that we celebrate every week, who is not yet perfect. In fact, I think I can say, without revealing privileged information, that there might even be more than one imperfect person in the room. I know, because I’m one of them. We imperfect people are sometimes less than perfectly patient. We’re sometimes less than perfectly gracious. But God knows that. God’s known it since the first human beings were alive. And God wants us anyway, God wants you anyway, imperfect as you may be, to be a messenger of God’s grace and mercy and love; and maybe, if you can stop running away long enough, to hear that same message for yourself.

Sermon — January 14, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’
Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’” (John 1:46)

The last few years have seen a steady stream of celebrity Christian conversions. This fall, the “LA Ink” tattoo artist and Goth icon Kat Von D announced that she was turning away from her interest in the occult and had been baptized in a small church in Indiana. On New Year’s Eve, the child star Shia LaBeouf was confirmed into the Catholic Church at a Franciscan friary, and announced that he’s discerning a call to be ordained as a deacon. And of course many people have been baffled as the spiritual journey of the rapper Ye, a.k.a. Kanye West, has taken a strange detour into what seems to be a combination of genuine Christian faith and white supremacism.

But my favorite celebrity Christian conversion has to be the story of Father Deacon Mercurios, who was ordained a deacon by the Archpriest Saba, Bishop of the Georgian Orthodox Diocese of North America, and now serves at the Holy Monastery of Saint Iakovos in Oklahoma. You’ve probably never heard of Father Mercurios, a name he took when he was ordained. You might have heard of Zac Hanson, which is his birth name, and even if you haven’t heard of Zac Hanson, I can almost guarantee that you’ve heard the chorus of the song that launched him and his brothers to late-’90s boy-band fame: “MMMBop! Ba duba dop ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du dop…”

Of course, celebrities and quests for spiritual experience are like peanut butter and jelly. But often these celebrity journeys take them into more individual and internal practices of spirituality. There’s something almost funny about the idea of a celebrity joining an ordinary local church.

Imagine if Matt Damon decided to move back to Cambridge and decided to join St. John’s. He couldn’t roll on down to Charlestown on a Sunday morning and walk into church without being mobbed by paparazzi. He couldn’t chat at Coffee Hour or go volunteer in the Garden on a Monday without making it into the tabloids. Fame isolates celebrities from most of the ordinary experiences of community; and yet Christianity is a communal religion, and God’s call to us is always an invitation into community.

That’s certainly the case when God calls Samuel. On the surface, this is a very individual call. Samuel literally hears the voice of God calling him in the night, while he lies before the Ark in the Temple. But Samuel can’t understand this call alone. He goes, again and again, to his mentor Eli, before they realize together that it’s God who’s calling Samuel, not the priest. God is calling Samuel, the individual, but the call can only be answered in community, through relationship. And once they’ve finally understood the nature of the call, and Samuel can receive the full message, it turns out that God is not only calling Samuel in community; God is calling Samuel for community. Eli’s sons, who are priests working in the Temple, are committing some horrible crimes against the people, and God gives this message of judgment and destruction to Samuel as a warning to give to Eli, on behalf of the community. So yes, Samuel’s call is an individual call from God, the kind of call you or I or any celebrity could hear. But it can only be understood in relationship, and it can only be answered by serving the community.

The same is true when Jesus calls the disciples. They are called individually, but they answer in pairs. And what they’re being called into is a new community with Christ. When we sometimes say that we “follow Jesus” in 2023, it can only be a metaphor. Jesus no longer exists in geographic space. But when Jesus tells Philip, “Follow me,” it’s quite a literal thing. (John 1:43) The disciples leave their homes to join a wandering band. They leave their communities to become a part of a new community. Their faith in Christ is not an idea, some kind of cognitive theological belief. It’s not even an action, like being baptized or serving the poor. It’s an experience of community, of presence, that can only be understood by following Jesus wherever it is he’s going. When Nathanael asks for some justification or explanation—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—Philip can only say, “Come and see.” (John 1:46) And it turns out that the community he’ll see is even wider than he could’ve imagined—it’s not just the disciples, Jesus says, but all the angels of God they’ll see with the Son of Man. (John 1:51) And after Jesus is gone, the community remains, and grows, and spreads throughout the world, greeting each new disciple with the same exact invitation: “Come and see.”

Within a few decades, it was clear to Paul how central this kind of community was. Paul writes all sorts of weird and wonderful things in his letters, but in 1 Corinthians especially you hear, again and again, this image of the “Body of Christ,” with each one of us as one of its organs or limbs or digits. Each member of the body, Paul says, serves a different function, has different strengths and weaknesses, different spiritual gifts. But what each member of the body does affects all the others. When one member of the Church is behaving badly, it’s as if one of your hands or one of your feet had gone off course. But when their gifts are all united and working together, they achieve a harmony that’s an order of magnitude greater than the sum of the parts. And by the way: Paul himself had a famously dramatic individual conversion, a blinding light shining from the sky and a voice speaking from the heavens. But he can only understand it with the help of another disciple, and he answers it by devoting his life to the nascent Christian community he had been trying to destroy. Are you seeing the pattern here?

I don’t think it’s a surprise that two of our celebrity converts feel called to the diaconate, the order of ministry that’s all about serving the community, all about bridging the gap between the church and the world. It seems to me that a lot of people in our culture are yearning for community: that the search for meaning is really a search for meaning in community. It’s hard to have a spiritual life in isolation that doesn’t go off the rails. Just ask Kanye West. Samuel and Nathanael and Paul knew that it’s hard to understand what God is saying to you on your own. It’s hard to do anything alone, actually. Maybe you can pretend to be self-sufficient, for a few years, if you’re young and healthy; but even then, just ask all the people who could go to the gym alone, but seek out CrossFit instead. This is why we read the Bible in community, why we pray in community. And this is why we try to serve our community as a community. And to be honest, that’s what’s most interesting to me in these stories of celebrity conversion—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Zac Hanson and Shia LaBeouf have felt God calling them to the diaconate in particular, to the order of ministry that is focused specifically on service and community, on bridging the gap between the church and the world so that the love we find and feel in this place might spill out into the world outside it.

There’s so much about spiritual life that can’t be looked up on a website or read in a book. There is so much we can’t understand on our own. There are so many questions about religion that can only be answered with the Apostle Philip’s words: “Come and see.” Because while personal prayer and meditation are wonderful things, real spiritual growth happens in community, and it happens for the good of the community.

I realize that I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re hearing these words, you already know some of that. But that also means that you have good news to share. Because you have come here, and you have seen, and presumably you’ve seen something good. And I wonder whether there are any Nathanaels in your life who need you to be Philip for them, any Samuels who need you to be Eli. In other words, I wonder whether you know anyone who’s searching for some kind of meaning or community but thinks they can’t find it in the church, whose response to the words “we’ve found something here” is the equivalent to Nathanael’s dismissive question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I wonder whether there’s anyone you know who’s hearing God’s voice calling them but thinks it’s something else.

And I wonder what it would mean to answer those questions like Philip does: “Come and see.” What’s that Centering Prayer thing about anyway? Come and see. How can you call yourself a Christian with all the awful things the Church has done, and still does? Come and see. What are you doing on this weekend? There can only be one answer that explains the hours we all spend in this church, and guess what: It’s “Come and see.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.